Quotes about Challenges

Kathleen Norris, on the publication of her 78th book. 'All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don't get plumber's block, and doctors don't get doctor's block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?

Living with people at close range over many years, as both monastics and small-town people do, is much more difficult than wearing a hair shirt. More difficult, too, I would add, than holding to the pleasant but unrealistic ideal of human perfectibility that seems to permeate much New Age thinking.

Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.

How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.

If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure 9 will go in the ditch and you have only one to battle with.

Plan for the very worst, then pray for the very best. Savor the days when the sun shines, but have your raincoat and boots ready for the storms that will always blow in from the bay.

Sometimes the roads we choose in life are just messy.

To find purpose in our problems, to see past the ugliness, rather than step back, we should get closer. Only then will we notice the beauty.

We cannot slay our incapacity and rise above it, but that is precisely what we wanted. Incapacity exists. No one should deny it, find fault with it or shout it down.

Everything you've ever wanted is on the other side of fear.

In the midst of the emotional and spiritual upset that occurs when a church hurts or disappoints us, we tend to lose sight of the fact that the local church is merely a collection of people on a challenging journey - a group of people that are involved in a long-term transformation process.