Fate does not bend for us-we must bend to it.

Sometimes the most whole people are those who come from the most broken circumstances.

Though adversity is the fertile soil in which the human spirit best grows, we loathe it still. I do not see how it can be otherwise, for no rational being seeks out pain and misfortune. Still, I cannot help but wonder if it is not somehow wrong to enjoy the fruit but curse the tree.

I have learned a great truth of life. We do not succeed in spite of our challenges and difficulties, but rather, precisely because of them.

Usually life's greatest gifts come wrapped in adversity.

All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain.

The early church worked secretly and illegally, and it triumphed. We must learn again to work in the same manner. Until the Communist era, I never understood why so many persons in the New Testament are called by nicknames...We continue to use secret names in our work in captive nations.

Peacemaking is also not appeasement. Always giving in, acting like a doormat, and allowing others to always run over you is not what Jesus had in mind. He refused to back down on many issues, standing his ground in the face of evil opposition.

But it's in that disappointment, in that confusion, in that pain—the pain that comes from things not going how I wanted them to—that I find the same thing happening, again and again. I come to the end of myself, to the end of my power, the end of my strength, the end of my understanding, only to find, in that place of powerlessness, a strength and peace that weren't there before.

Failure, we see again and again, isn't final, judgment has a point, and consequences are for correction.

He says the best way out is always through. / And I can agree to that, or in so far / As that I can see no way out but through

Door in the Dark: In going from room to room in the dark, I reached out blindly to save my face, But neglected, however lightly, to lace My fingers and close my arms in an arc. A slim door got in past my guard, And hit me a blow in the head so hard I had my native simile jarred. So people and things don't pair any more With what they used to pair with before.