GOD LOVES YOU JUST THE WAY YOU ARE, BUT HE REFUSES TO LEAVE YOU THAT WAY.

When you look at all the mistakes you've made, you see a mess. Like the innkeeper, you just want to repaint it and start over. But God sees what you can't. He sees a canvas with unique possibilities. When he goes to work on you, the result is breathtaking.

God loves to decorate too. Actually, God has to decorate. Let Him live long enough in a heart, and that heart will begin to change. He'll move some forgiveness into that corner. He'll add some shelves and fill them up with His Word.

I'm young as morning and fresh as dew. Everybody loves me and so do you.

Late October Carefully the leaves of autumn sprinkle down the tinny sound of little dyings and skies sated of ruddy sunsets of roseate dawns roil ceaselessly in cobweb greys and turn to black for comfort. Only lovers see the fall a signal end to endings a gruffish gesture alerting those who will not be alarmed that we begin to stop in order to begin again.

In order to avoid this bitter end, we would all have to be born again, and born with the knowledge of alternatives. Even then?

Weekdays revolved on a sameness wheel. They turned into themselves so steadily and inevitably that each seemed to be the original of yesterday's rough draft. Saturday, however, always broke the mold and dared to be different.

Whether our new start was going to end in success or failure didn't cross my mind. What I did know, and know consciously, was that it was already exciting.

I hoped the memory of that morning would never leave me. Sunlight was itself still young, and the day had none of the insistence maturity would bring it in a few hours. In my robe and barefoot in the backyard, under cover of going to see about my new beans, I gave myself up to the gentle warmth and thanked God that no matter what evil I had done in my life He had allowed me to live to see this day.

Today is a wonderful day, I have never seen this one before.

The only thing you own is your story. Make sure it's a good one.

Sister, change everything you don't like about your life. But when you come to a thing you can't change, then change the way you think about it. You'll see it new, and maybe a new way to change it.