All My Knotted-Up Life: A Memoir

by Beth Moore

There’s just starting over scratched—and if the hurts clawed deep enough, scarred. But for those who resist insisting on idyllic circumstances and faultless people, new beginnings can be had.

I’ve found that walking by faith is 50 percent hanging in there until you’re far enough down the road to develop hindsight.

Once you’ve broken to pieces, the luxury of imagining yourself unbreakable evaporates. Your outlook changes, not for the better in every way but in most ways, I think.

The trick to dealing with criticism is letting it do its good work but forbidding it to demoralize and destroy or to embitter.

That may be one of the worst parts of being a religious person with a dark past. The temptation to view persistent hardship as punishment is almost too much to resist.

It’s a peculiar thing, isn’t it, how we feel at times we have to lie to tell the truth? Victims of childhood sexual abuse who tell their stories often tell the first version with a mixture of honesty and dishonesty. It’s our job, we feel, to protect people from the truth. Our job to protect people from the burden or disappointment of knowing the real us.