I did nothing to deserve God's love; in fact, I was living as an orphan, without hope. Yet God chose to pursue a relationship with me, and through the death of his son Jesus, I was adopted into God's family.

If they had a social gospel in the days of the prodigal son, somebody would have given him a bed and a sandwich and he never would have gone home.

I closed my eyes to hug him tighter and give him that elusive feeling of unconditional love and complete safety. The feeling we seek but, in this life and in this world, perhaps never quite find.

Marry the man who's going to walk with you through the next fifty or sixty years. Open doors, hold your hand, make your coffee, rub lotion on the cracks of your feet, put you up on a pedestal where you belong. Is he marrying your face and your bottle-blond hair, or will he love you when you look like whoever you're going to look like in fifty years?

I accept you and love you and always will.

All her questions, all the fatigue and nausea and swelling and pain, vanished the moment she held her son.

There is no greater power on earth than a mother's love, unless it is a mother's guilt.

I just love motherhood.

I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.

Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that supposed to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing.

We will be judged by how well we love.

I don't care what she is. Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that supposed to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing.