John Stott, writing in The Incomparable Christ.

“Behind the quest for justice and human rights, for improved conditions in factory, mine and prison, and for people’s health of body, mind, soul and community, there lies the value of every human person, for whom Jesus both lived and died.”

Amen.

God is the maker of Donald Trump, of Louis Farrakhan, of every far-right militia member, of every far-left Antifa protester, of every person who defends a statue, and every person who tears one down.

And yet while humans condemn our opponents, trash them, and grow increasingly outraged, he simply says to them, “I love you. Come to me.” He will not demean or revile them.

And yet we do.

Garret Keizer, an essayist for Harper’s, writes in his book, Help.

“Everyone believes in sin….What everyone does not believe in, as nearly as I can tell, is forgiveness.”

J.I. Packer in Praying the Lord’s Prayer, which is an excerpt from Growing in Christ.

“When I say, ‘hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come,’ I should be adding in my mind the words, ‘in and through me,’ and so giving myself to God afresh to be, so far as I can be, the means of answering my own prayer.”

From A Grief Observed:

“Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer.

I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.”

From The Power and The Glory, boy, does tribalistic, political America and the church and myself need this.

Greene:

“When you visualized a man or woman carefully, you could always begin to feel pity – that was a quality God’s image carried with it.

When you saw the lines at the corners of the eyes, the shape of the mouth, how the hair grew, it was impossible to hate.

Hate was just a failure of imagination.”

Brennan Manning in The Ragamuffin Gospel.

“The danger with our good works, spiritual investments, and all the rest of it is that we can construct a picture of ourselves in which we situate our self-worth. Complacency then replaces sheer delight in God’s unconditional love.

….. Genuine self-acceptance is not derived from the power of positive thinking, mind games, or pop psychology.

It is an act of faith in the God of grace.”

Frederick Buechner, in his sermon “The Great Dance” takes a stab at one of the many ways people distinguish the two.

“Happiness comes when things are going our way, which makes it only a forerunner to the unhappiness that inevitably follows when things stop going our way, as in the end they will stop for all of us.

Joy, on the other hand, does not come because something is happening or not happening.”

Amen. But I think most of us, myself included, unconsciously pick happiness seven days a week — including Sunday.

That’s because we’re, from birth, so wed to “things going our way” that it’s a supernatural act of grace for us to look at life through a different lens. To be okay when things don’t go our way. Which we try for, but which we mostly fail at (or at least I do).

Frederick Buechner, in A Crazy, Holy Grace.

“Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention.

They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next.”