If we only love those who agree with us, we are in fact not loving others at all; we are only loving the (assumed) "rightness" of our own ideas!

Love must always start free—but its goal is to become unfree. To be unable not to love is the highest form of freedom in love.

We are to see a need and meet it—no questions asked. We are to love even our enemies with an unconditional, nonjudgmental love, and, thereby, offer everlasting life to all who are thirsty. To do this means we must refrain from doing what Jesus never did: namely, positioning ourselves as wiser, morally superior guardians and "fixers" of others. Moral guardianship is what the Pharisees did—not Jesus.

Love passionately bears with others for as long as patience is needed; love doesn't demand others to be like itself, but is so focused on the needs of others that it bends over backwards to become what others need it to be; love is not ambitious, self-centered, or so consumed with itself that it never thinks of the needs or desires that others possess.…

Agape doesn't love somebody because they're worthy. Agape makes them worthy by the strength and power of its love. Agape doesn't love somebody because they're beautiful. Agape loves in such a way that it makes them beautiful.

Take this, all of you, and drink from it: this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me.

To find someone who will love you for no reason, and to shower that person with reasons, that is the ultimate happiness.

There is an instinct in a woman to love most her own child — and an instinct to make any child who needs her love, her own.

If you have a mom, there is nowhere you are likely to go where a prayer has not already been.

Once you become the mommy or daddy in your child's world, it is the only world in which you exist, no matter how much you fancy there is a separate world of your own.

A mom forgives us all our faults, not to mention one or two we don't even have.

Our sacrifice is greater than his, cried Rilla passionately. Our boys give only themselves. We give them.