You have come into a hard world. I know of only one easy place in it, and that is the grave.

We do not die wholly at our deaths: we have moldered away gradually long before. Faculty after faculty, interest after interest, attachment after attachment disappear: we are torn from ourselves while living.

Well, I think the main message is there is more to your story. There is more than what happens between the crib and the grave, and that is what I am really trying to speak to, this idea that all of life is this life and that there is nothing more than what we see and experience right here on this earth.

The message of "falling" - failure, death, crucifixion, whatever you want to say - is not really that. Some sort of falling is really found in all the world's religions, just in different languages.

God doesn't promise to keep the storm away, but He says He'll be with me through it. My faith won't protect me from the loss, but it will carry me and keep me from despair.~page 195

Dodge, be honest. It's not close to over. You've been nursing this wound for nearly ten years, working it off over there in Afghanistan, trying to forget the girl you've loved since you were ten. There's no way this is over. There is so much bitterness sitting in your heart you can't even see it. But maybe that's why God brought you back - for her. And to set you free from all that darkness.

Forgive my grief for one removedThy creature whom I found so fairI trust he lives in Thee and thereI find him worthier to be loved.

How can you love art, beauty, poetry, and hate life? That's like saying you love the ocean but hate water.

...After hardship, God will bring ease.

You struggle. You fight and you claw inside that head of yours. You wrestle with God, with the idea that he actually cares for you, with the place your children have brought you, and a thousand other things. There's something about your struggle others need to know. That they'll benefit from." "I don't understand.

The pain in my body could not match the pain her cry surfaced in my heart. They cleaned her, weighed her, wrapped her, and whisked her away. And it was then that I realized the much-greater pain is not in giving birth but in releasing your own child.

I am not a has-been. I am a will be.