Quotes About Acceptance

For the first time in his life, he was receiving the priceless gift of a woman's unconditional love and acceptance. It contradicted all that he knew about love, all that he had taught others. And he found himself needing it like a drowning man needs air to breathe and solid ground under his feet.

How could he embrace the bleak and endless night when he had finally learned to love the sun?

When I stopped trying to block my sadness and let it move me instead, it led me to a bridge with people on the other side." … I learned that sadness does not sink a person; it is the energy a person spends trying to avoid sadness that does that.

but I know that I have an easier time loving humankind than I do loving particular human beings.

The real problem has far less to do with what is really out there than it does with our resistance to finding out what is really out there.

Sometimes I wondered if it even mattered whether our communion cups were filled with consecrated wine or draft beer, as long as we bent over them long enough to recognize each other as kin.

The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self - to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.

I learned that sadness does not sink a person; it is the energy a person spends trying to avoid sadness that does that.

The real problem has far less to do with what is really out there than it does with our resistance to finding out what is really out there. The suffering comes from our reluctance to learn to walk in the dark.

To lie flat on the ground with the breath knocked out of you is to find a solid resting place. This is as low as you can go. You told yourself you would die if it ever came to this, but here you are. You cannot help yourself and yet you live.

To be a priest is to know that things are not as they should be and yet to care for them the way they are.

How many times since then have I rejected Love because it did not present itself the way I expected, in a form acceptable to me?

This may be the real reason many of us fear silence in church—because anyone sitting near us may hear the hissing, rumbling, wheezing sounds of a living human being, which do not match up with the attractive countenances that we work so hard to present to one another.

What if I could learn to trust my feelings instead of asking to be delivered from them? What if I could follow one of my great fears all the way to the edge of the abyss, take a breath, and keep going?

Most of us spend so much time thinking about where we have been or where we are supposed to be going that we have a hard time recognizing where we actually are. When someone asks us where we want to be in our lives, the last thing that occurs to us is to look down at our feet and say, "Here, I guess, since this is where I am.

Here is a law as reliable as gravity: the degree to which we believe our faith is what makes us human is the same degree to which we will question the humanity of those who do not share our faith.

Watching them ride the waves of their own dark emotions, I learned that sadness does not sink a person; it is the energy a person spends trying to avoid sadness that does that.

The problem is that people we cannot stand are loved just as much as we are, by a God with an upsetting sense of community.

Another favorite hymn mourns Israel's lonely exile from the Son of God. Another years for a future in which every knee will bow to Jesus. Another urges Christian soldiers onward, marching as to war. When I imagined singing it with a Muslim or Hindu student sitting next to me, my voice dried up. It was a song for insiders, not outsiders. If I had learned anything from going on all of those class field trips, it was how religious language sounds to outsiders, and how much that matters.

However you define the problematic present-day stranger—the religious stranger, the cultural stranger, the transgendered stranger, the homeless stranger—scripture's wildly impractical solution is to love the stranger as the self.

I have lived through parts of life that no one in her right mind would ever willingly have chosen, finding enough overlooked treasure in them to outweigh my projected wages in the life I had planned. These are just a few of the reasons that I have decided to stop fighting the prospect of getting lost and engage it as a spiritual practice instead.

All was in God's plan, and he had to accept even as he didn't understand.

God's will is a mysterious thing sometimes. But I don't have to understand. It's enough for me to know that whether He reveals why He's done something or not, He is all-knowing.

It doesn't mean we forget what's been done to us. But we remember that we don't have to understand God, just to trust Him and have faith in Him.