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John
https://www.goodreads.com/johnmcgraw
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(page 254 of 400)
"The recursive intrusive thinking is enough to make the reader paranoid." — Aug 26, 2025 06:45AM
"The recursive intrusive thinking is enough to make the reader paranoid." — Aug 26, 2025 06:45AM
“Any injustice demands something of us. But the only thing more healing than forcing someone to pay is when a person chooses to pay by their own conviction.
I have always wondered why Christ had to die. If we needed saving, if wrath was to be had, couldn't God just snap his fingers or send a great wind or blink and have everything wrong made right again? Why is it nothing but the blood? Nothing else? This will always be strange to me.
But if it's true, the law is cosmic and eternal. Maybe it's written into everything, and even God themself is not too bold to undo the way things were meant to be. Maybe they needed to show us what the most tragic and noble reparation could look like, the sacrifice of life itself, so we might learn the courage to choose to make repairs when our moments come.”
― This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
I have always wondered why Christ had to die. If we needed saving, if wrath was to be had, couldn't God just snap his fingers or send a great wind or blink and have everything wrong made right again? Why is it nothing but the blood? Nothing else? This will always be strange to me.
But if it's true, the law is cosmic and eternal. Maybe it's written into everything, and even God themself is not too bold to undo the way things were meant to be. Maybe they needed to show us what the most tragic and noble reparation could look like, the sacrifice of life itself, so we might learn the courage to choose to make repairs when our moments come.”
― This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“I belong to a God capable of holding the ugliest parts of my anger.”
― This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
― This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“Ten days later, when the Spokane International was running again, Grainier rode it up into Creston, B.C., and back south again the evening of the same day through the valley that had been his home. The blaze had climbed to the ridges either side of the valley and stalled halfway down the other side of the mountains, according to the reports Grainier had listened to intently. It had gutted the valley along its entire length like a campfire in a ditch. All his life Robert Grainier would remember vividly the burned valley at sundown, the most dream-like business he'd ever witnessed waking-the brilliant pastels of the last light overhead, some clouds high and white, catching daylight from beyond the valley, others ribbed and gray and pink, the lowest of them rubbing the peaks of Bussard and Queen mountains; and beneath this wondrous sky the black valley, utterly still, the train moving through it making a great noise but unable to wake this dead world.”
― Train Dreams
― Train Dreams
“I used to think that Christian contemplation was reserved for white men who leave copies of C.S. Lewis's letters strewn about and know a great deal about coffee and beard oils. If this is you, there is room for you here. But I am interested in reclaiming a contemplation that is not exclusive to whiteness, intellectualism, ableism, or mere hobby. And as a Black woman, I am disinterested in any call to spirituality that divorces my mind from my body, voice, or people. To suggest a form of faith that tells me to sit down alone and be quiet? It does not rest easy on the bones. It is a shadow of true contemplative life, and it would do violence to my Black-woman soul.”
― This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
― This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us
“We confess that we have grown numb to the beauty of this world. We have not protected what is good and true and enchanting. We have forgotten how to marvel at the mundane with the same gravity as we would behold the mountain or valley. We have not looked up to witness the miracle of our architecture. And in our self-hatred, we have failed to delight in and honor the faces we pass each day, including our own. Forgive us our inattention, and in your mercy remind us that we are so much more than our pain. Guide our gaze toward the beautiful. Amen.”
― Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human
― Black Liturgies: Prayers, Poems, and Meditations for Staying Human
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