The three step key to happiness when everything is down – Redemption, Reconstruction and Recover

Usually redemption implies rescue – being saved. What were you being saved from?’ he inquired, his voice carefully neutral. ‘Ugliness.

Where are my manners? We haven’t been properly introduced. I’m Surah.

When you say nasty things about people, you should never say the true ones, because you can’t really fully and honestly take those back, you know? I mean, there are highlights. And there are streaks. And then there are skunk stripes.

The story of grace is the Gospel of not just forgiveness, but also of redemption. God uses the weak, the ones who have failed and the ones who had run out of second chances long ago.

Jesus is God’s way of refusing to give up his dream for the world.

Redemption is participatory, not imitative.

If every time we choose a turd, society, at a great expense, simply allows us to redeem it for a pepperoni, then not only will we never learn to make smart choices, we will also surrender the freedom to choose, because a choice without consequences is no choice at all.

Grace abounds in contemporary movies, books, novels, films and music. If God is not in the whirlwind, He may be in a Woody Allen film, or a Bruce Springsteen concert. Most people understand imagery and symbol better than doctrine and dogma. Images touch hearts and awaken imaginations. One theologian suggested that Springsteen’s ‘Tunnel of Love’...

The greatest Comfort in life is Christ On the Move For Our Redemption Timelessly! HS (EL)

Oh, you’ve outdone me twice now, you queen of forgiveness. The ring’s a promise of peace and I’m greedy with hope. It’s a song that we sing in a tongue that we share. And though you say it’s a gift from a king to a king, I say it’s a sign from a queen to...

Devin rubbed his hands over his face. “Jesus, Jason. I didn’t want—” “No, I know,” Jason said, looking up again. “I know you didn’t. I wasn’t supposed to hear that. I get it. But let me just ask you to do one thing for me. Okay? One thing.” “What?” Devin asked softly. “Be honest with...

I knew you”d never be American enough to help me reconstruct my life.

Whose truth do you want to know, Dr. Amin Jaafari? The truth of a Bedouin who thinks he’s free and clear because he’s got an Israeli passport? The truth of a serviceable Arab per excellence who’s honored wherever he goes, who gets invited to fancy parties by people who want to show how tolerant and...

But who is Aslan? Do you know him?””Well-he knows me,” said Edmund. “He is the great Lion, the son of the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea, who saved me and saved Narnia.

The weapons of divine justice are blunted by the confession and sorrow of the offender.

A good act does not wash out the bad, nor a bad act the good. Each should have its own reward.

You can’t let your light die out. Yours is the only light on my dark path. Without it, I will be forever lost.

You listen to me, and listen good!” she shouted, shocking me. “I am not evil because I have a thousand years of demon smut on my soul!” she exclaimed, the tips of her hair trembling and her face flushed. “Every time you disturb reality, nature has to balance it out. The black on your soul...

Now the wren has gone to roost and the sky is turnin’ goldAnd like the sky my soul is also turnin’Turnin’ from the past, at last and all I’ve left behind

I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and...

But when, through the open door of the cross and the name and power of Jesus Christ, I commend myself to the Father’s heart, then God cancels all my past, accepts all my present, swears His holy name for my future and the love of God take me over. Then fear goes out of my...

What if “redemption” means not only freeing yourself from what you’ve done, but also from what’s been done to you?

Redemption isn’t giving a bank robber a job as a teller.

We’re the perfect complement to each other. I help him stay grounded and he helps me fly.

We, according to the Scriptures, plainly believe that Christ hath, by his righteousness, merited for us grace and glory; that we are blessed with all spiritual blessings, in, through, and for him; that he is made unto us righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption; that he hath procure for us, and that God for his sake...

This is the worst thing about poisons and deadly sins – that we enjoy them.

I’m sixteen with what I hope will be a long life ahead, but I’m willing to give it up, to give anything to let her live, to let her make it through the night.

Are we always our mistakes? Does anything we do heal them?

Having been tenant long to a rich Lord, Not thriving, I resolved to be bold, And make a suit unto him, to affordA new small-rented lease, and cancell th’ old.In heaven at his manour I him sought: They told me there, that he was lately gone About some land, which he had dearly boughtLong since...

How I wish, how fervently I ache, to take my mother’s hand, kiss her check,tell her I love her, and watch her smile. For me it was not, nor can ever be. But for you, reach out now. Reach out for your mother’s hand-the hands of those you love. Say I love you.Don’t wait.

Christians do not avail ourselves of Plato’s safety-hatch and say that the real world is not a thing of space, time, and matter, but another world into which we can escape. We say that the present world is the real one, and that it’s in bad shape, but expecting to be repaired.

I was angry at myself for my inclination to vice. I longed for the day when a state of frenzy would lead my mind to sober pasture, just as it had for Saint Augustine. I longed for the day when the love of one woman would be sacred enough to forget all the rest.

Having appeared at the end of the first creation, man [and women] stand at the beginning of the second, since the world is transfigured through [them].

Anyone capable of love is capable of being saved.

If Christ is God, He cannot sin, and if suffering was a sin in and by itself, He could not have suffered and died for us. However, since He took the most horrific death to redeem us, He showed us in fact that suffering and pain have great power.

Why, conqueringMay prove as lordly and complete a thingIn lifting upward, as in crushing low!And as a vanquished soldier yields his swordTo one who lifts him from the bloody earth,Even so, Belovëd, I at last record,Here ends my strife. If thou invite me forth,I rise above abasement at the word.Make thy love larger to enlarge...

My god, they’re everywhere.

Without knowing it the girl was arguing on the side of the world’s expert criminologists, who hold that to destroy an offender cannot benefit society so much as to redeem him.

[On Schopenhauer in Black and White] Schopenhauer’s views of love are flawed. Love can’t be merely an illusion of the mind to aid in procreation, but the path to redemption for an otherwise violently selfish species. Past human greatness has proven that when challenged, love can overpower impulsive instinct, and in essence, the vilest aspects...

Was it you or I who stumbled first? It does not matter. The one of us who finds the strength to get up first, must help the other.

In a world of change and decay not even the man of faith can be completely happy. Instinctively he seeks the unchanging and is bereaved at the passing of dear familiar things. Yet much as we may deplore the lack of stability in all earthly things, in a fallen world such as this the very...

A rock was sticking out of the water, jagged and pointed, covered with moss–a remnant of the Ice Age. It had withstood the rains, the snows, the frost, the heat. It was afraid of no one. It did not need redemption, it had already been redeemed.

What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can’t get there any other way?

I’ll love you until I’m ashes in the dirt beneath the Earth. Then, I’ll love you even more.

We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we see ourselves.

Brad Green, almost overnight, became the poster boy for the common Wall Street tale – proving once again that greed, most definitely, kills. Giving away about 99% of his fortune was also front page news, but Green barely blinked at having to scrape by with only $200 million. The government seized all five of his...

Beauty is transformed over time, and not without destruction.

Forgiveness offered -especially when so undeserved – cuts chains off the human heart that no other power in any universe anywhere can rattle much less break….love did what hatred can not and never will.

Yes, a dark time passed over this land, but now there is something like light.