The fact is, everything we want or yearn for is won through other people. No man on an island is happy; he is merely existing. The joyous life is the one filled with rich relationships.

Twenty years ago, I wrote a book called 'It Takes a Village.' And a lot of people looked at the title and asked, 'What the heck do you mean by that?' This is what I mean. None of us can raise a family, build a business, heal a community or lift a country totally alone.

There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies.

I wanted my new release 'Get Back Up' to benefit Haiti in their tragedy and I am blessed to use my music to help as your purchase becomes our gift.

Transformation in the world happens when people are healed and start investing in other people.

In community, we discover who we really are and how much transformation we still require. This is why I am irrevocably committed to small groups. Through them, we can accomplish our God-entrusted work to transform human beings.

God has decided, for his own good reasons, that people are not transformed outside of community.

She] personally tended the unhappy and impoverished victims of hunger and disease. I have often seen her washing wounds which others — even men — could hardly bear to look at ... She founded a hospital and gathered there the sufferers from the streets, and gave them all the attention of a nurse... How often she carried home, on her shoulders, the dirty and poor who were plagued with epilepsy! How she washed the pus from sores which others could not even behold.

Are griefs then too loved? Verily all desire joy. Or whereas no man likes to be miserable, is he yet pleased to be merciful? which because it cannot be without passion, for this reason alone are passions loved?

"My burden is light," said the blessed Redeemer, a light burden indeed, which carries him that bears it. I have looked through all nature for a resemblance of this, and seem to find a shadow of it in the wings of a bird, which are indeed borne by the creature, and yet support her flight towards heaven.

I know now that true charity consists in bearing all our neighbours' defects--not being surprised at their weakness, but edified at their smallest virtues.

I know now that true charity consists in bearing all our neighbors'defects--not being surprised at their weakness, but edified at their smallest virtues.