Quotes About Acceptance

Yes, it's hard to start seeing your mother as she is, hard to push aside all the resentment and anger that you may feel and see her as another woman. Hard, but worth every bit of the effort.

Anything you want to be, you can come be that with us. Rain or shine, no problem

If you don't deal with the past, the past deals with you.

Even free spirits had to the face the music sometime.

I shrugged into my favorite sweatshirt--you know the kind--where the cuffs are worn and torn and all signs of elasticity have long since disappeared. Whether I wanted to admit it or not, the sweatshirt symbolized the person I'd become--well-worn, a bit beat-up, and hanging by a thread.

The more I let go of the life I'd

The more I let go of the life I'd planned, the more I began to love the life I had.

Love is love. It is God-given, and a sacrament. It is not for any man to judge.

For while all forgiveness is the balm of our compassionate Mother, self-forgiveness is needed most of all. Embrace

You cannot save another person from his or her spiritual lessons, no matter how much you may want to or how hard you try.

Remember always this great commandment that Jesus left for us in Matthew 7:1–2: "Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged.

God always has a reason, Abby. It's just so hard sometimes for us to accept it." She smiled sadly. "Fear gets in the way, doesn't it? Fear of that great unknown, fear that God will require something that we cannot, or don't want, to do. But we can, Abby. God never asks anything of us that He doesn't give us sufficient strength to do. And He never, ever asks it unless it's for our greater good.

Better to face bravely what God gives, to forget the past and forge on—

Life is easier than you'd think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable, and bear the intolerable.

Life is easier to take than you think; all that is necessary is to accept the impossible, do without the indispensable and bear the intolerable.

When I see teenagers out in public with their families, holding back, refusing to walk with mom and dad, ashamed to be seen as part of a family, I have to admit that I have acted that way myself, at times, with regard to my Christian inheritance. A hapless and mortally embarrassed adolescent lurked behind the sophisticated mask I wrote in my twenties: faith was something for little kids and grandmas, not me.

Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are. The irony and wonder of all of this is that it is the desert's grimness, its stillness and isolation, that brings us back to love.

When it comes to the nitty-gritty, what ties these threads of biblical narrative together into a revelation of God's love is that God has commanded us to refrain from grumbling about the dailiness of life. Instead we are meant to accept it as a reality that humbles us even as it gives cause for praise. The rhythm of sunrise and sunset marks a passage of time that marks each day rich with the possibility of salvation.

From him I have learned that prayer is not asking for what you think you want but asking to be changed in ways you can't imagine. To be more grateful, more able to see the good in what you have been given instead of always grieving for what might have been.

conversion is no more spectacular than learning to love the people we live with and work among.

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.

Perfection....it functions as a form of myopia, a preoccupation with self-image that can stunt emotional growth.

For some reason we human beings seem to learn best how to love when we're a bit broken, when our plans fall apart, when our myths of our self-sufficiency and goodness and safety are shattered.

The polarization that characterizes so much of American life is risky business in a church congregation, but especially so in a monastic community. The person you're quick to label and dismiss as a racist, a homophobe, a queer, an anti-Semite, a misogynist, a bigoted conservative or bleeding-heart liberal is also a person you're committed to live, work, pray, and dine with for the rest of your life.