Quotes from James Bryan Smith

You should not let a single person in the world, whatever sin that person may have committed, come before your eyes and depart without having found mercy with you. And should that person not ask for mercy from you, then you must ask it of him. And were that person to come to you a thousand times, continue to love them so as to lead them back to the right path. Always have compassion, for all of us have sinned. —Saint Francis of Assisi

It takes a long time to ruin a life. It all starts with the stories we live by.

I've failed many times to avoid those kinds of temptations. But that's not what the devil was really interested in. What he was trying to do is make me feel apart from God. Now I know that what Satan would like most to take from us is our true knowledge of who we are—which is children of God.5

God gives blessings to all without regard to their behavior. Terrible things happen to wonderful people. Wonderful things happen to awful people. We cannot look around the world we live in and build a case that sinners are punished and righteous people are blessed. Reality simply does not bear this out.

We like control. This [punishing-blessing god] narrative allows us to live in the illusion that we can control our world, which is very appealing in our chaotic existence. This, though, is a form of superstition

To trust someone is to believe that he or she has your best interests in mind, that the person will protect you from harm and is reliable.

is true. We change not by mustering up willpower but by changing the way we think, which will also involve changing our actions and our social environment. We change indirectly. We do what we can

What would it be like to be Christ? I mean, did He ever play ball? Did He ever knock a window out of somebody's house and did He ever have to explain to His dad that He had to borrow twelve dollars?

The line in this song that slayed me the first time I heard it, and slays me every time I hear it, is 'I cannot explain the way that You came to love me, except to say that nothing is beyond You.

one hidden act of kindness is worth more than all the burial mounds of rhetoric, all the mumbling and fumbling and tardiness of Christians so preoccupied with cultivating their prayer lives that they cannot hear the anguished cry of the child in the barrio.

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years. — Mark Twain

Rather we must seek out9 the good things peculiar to the good, and give the widest berth to the evils peculiar to evil men.

The most important aspects of our lives cannot be rushed. We cannot love, think, eat, laugh, or pray in a hurry...When we are in a hurry--which comes from overextension--we find ourselves unable to live with awareness and kindness.

Christianity doesn't answer all my questions or make me comfortable and happy. What it does do is give me a context for living.

spiritual life is not a life of laws and precepts but a life of participation, affection and love, a life mingled and mixing with God.

It seems that I always am and always have been an outsider. I've never really fit in. I was always too religious for my rowdy friends—they thought I was unbelievably hung up—and too rowdy for my religious friends—they were always praying for me.

False Narrative: The Kingdom of God is Future No serious biblical scholar would deny that Jesus' proclaimed the kingdom of God. However, many scholars conclude that Jesus was not talking about our present world but rather an epoch in history that has not yet begun.

Christ in me" means Christ bearing me along from within, Christ the motive power that carries me on, Christ giving my whole life a wonderful poise and lift, and turning every burden into wings . . . not as something you have to bear but as something by which you are borne.

The Beatitudes, far from being a new set of virtues that further divide the religious haves and have nots, are words of hope and healing to those who have been marginalized.

God loves us not because we are lovable, but because He is love.

But children do not need to be in control. They have very little authority or power, and live each day in dependence and trust, receiving everything as a gift. And this, I believe, is what Jesus is advocating.

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pain; it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. — C. S. Lewis

That is why one of Rich's most powerful songs, and one he enjoyed singing in concert more than any other, is "Greed.

he had let go of the need to earn God's love