I believe with Diadochos, that if at the hour of death my confidence in God's mercy is perfect, I will pass the frontier without trouble and pass the dreadful array of my sins with compunction and confidence and leave them all behind forever.

What every man looks for in life is his own salvation and the salvation of the men he lives with. By salvation I mean first of all the full discovery of who he himself really is. Then I mean something of the fulfillment of his own God-given powers, in the love of others and of God. I mean also the discovery that he cannot find himself in himself alone, but that he must find himself in and through others.

It is only when we have lost all love of our selves for our own sakes that our past sins cease to give us any cause for suffering or for the anguish of shame. For the saints, when they remember their sins, do not remember the sins but the mercy of God, and therefore even past evil is turned by them into a present cause of joy and serves to glorify God.

In it she told me, "Thanks a lot! I'm ruined - gloriously ruined." I nodded with sudden understanding. "that's it - that describes what has happened to me." I was ruined for life as I had known it before, but gloriously ruined!

He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.

The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.

we are not received by Jesus into a school of ethics but into a kingdom of redemption.

You either stand for Jesus or you stand for all that He died to repudiate.

But what if God wasn't behind us, but in front of us, in front of our dreams...making a way for them not because we deserve it...but because He just delights in us?

So you made some bad choices. Some of God's best players were His imperfect, broken prodigals. In fact, iffy players are God's best picks. He specializes in short-tempered, reckless, flawed people to accomplish his plans.

Maybe that was the key-just because she'd made a mistake with her life didn't mean that God did, and it hopefully didn't change the way God saw her.

God's not going to answer all my questions...and maybe He doesn't need to. Maybe it's enough that He saved us...and He's still saving us.