Sometimes family isn't the situation you're born into but the people who've chosen to love you along the way.

You show your humanity by how you see yourself not as apart from others but from your connection to others.

So too I would say we South Africans will survive and prevail only together, black and white bound together by circumstance and history as we strive to claw our way out of the morass that was apartheid racism. Up and out together, black and white together. Neither group on its own could or would make it. God had bound us, manacled us, together. In a way it was to live out what Martin Luther King, Jr., had said, "Unless we learn to live together as brothers [and sisters]".

To work for the team and for the success of the team. That is more important than one ego.

Yes, Paul led his friends into all sorts of risks for Christ's sake, but they followed him cheerfully, confident of his love for them. Paul's letters glow with warm appreciation and personal affection for his fellows.

Our business is not enemy making but enemy loving. Our business is not dividing the country into blue and red states, but being a people of one accord. Our business is not securing the power to rule, but doing justice, showing mercy, and walking humbly with our God.

Truth is important, but truth at the cost of loving relationships is not Christianity. And relationships that ignore truth will lose integrity sooner or later.

When organized religion organizes around the things Jesus would be pleased with, amazing things can happen.

We can be civil. We can still be friends, and be Democrats and Republicans, and have different views.

Keep up you conjugal love in constant heat and vigor.

Our most important task is to transform our consciousness so that violence is no longer an option for us in our personal lives, that understanding that a world of peace is possible only if we relate to each other as peaceful beings, one individual at a time.

Christian nonviolence must be embodied in a community that is an alternative to the world's violence.