Experiments in Honesty Quotes

“So let us say yes. Every day. Let us have our simplistic, fear-born notions about this God—this infinite Love—dismantled. Let us be dismantled. Let us find our growing in kindness enough religion for a lifetime, and let’s save much kindness for ourselves. Let us start tearing holes in the roof if we find the traditional church too full of people on their own two feet for us to fit through the door. Let us not carry shame and fear one more day. Neither let us contribute to others carrying theirs. Let us know and believe the crazy idea that it’s as we are poured out that we are full. Let us find ourselves awakened and saying to each other, somewhat surprised and confused, “Oh yeah! This is the Son of God. This is Love. This is everything.”
― Steve Daugherty, Experiments in Honesty: Meditations on Love, Fear and the Honest to God Naked Truth

“Refusing to let the craziness spiral on for even a moment more, cutting off the volleying darkness of revenge and cruelty and condescension because they realize good can only come when one chooses not so much to win but to forgive—this is a taste of Christ’s Way. These folks who astonish us by circumventing something like Newton’s third law by not pushing back with the same force, the same level of consciousness, aimed at them. They respond under a different Law, and the energy of harm is absorbed. It can’t always be done. And sometimes it can be done and isn’t. Alas, even this inconstancy is absorbed. We’re invited to gather these sorts of folk together with the rest of us. Ideally, we can call it a church. Those who show us the power of such Love, such ability to absorb rather than reflect evil back; Christ lives the loudest through such people. Deep down, you and I are all such people. And we are forgiven and embraced even when we refuse to be such people, forget we are such people, or can’t find a way to remain such people.”
― Steve Daugherty, Experiments in Honesty: Meditations on Love, Fear and the Honest to God Naked Truth

“And of all things we people of faith could be known as “disciples” for, and of all the things we are known for, is there anything more dignifying of our uniqueness than to be told we have to Love each other, despite our differences?”
― Steve Daugherty, Experiments in Honesty: Meditations on Love, Fear and the Honest to God Naked Truth

“It’s helpful to think most of my withheld forgiveness and grace toward others can legitimately be catalogued as idolatry. What else is it when I expect you to cure me of my anxiety and work miracles so that I might have my happiness back? Is there anything as unloving, or as crazy, as holding you to a standard I know you can’t reach and then blaming you for my sense of disappointment afterward?”
― Steve Daugherty, Experiments in Honesty: Meditations on Love, Fear and the Honest to God Naked Truth

“Today, you and I are 99 percent wrong about everyone we hold opinions about. That figure may be low, but I know I’m close. In our growing sense of Compassion, such as we would like leveled at ourselves, let us respect the human beings around us enough to see what lies beneath that which our stubborn, blind minds and made-up thoughts insist they already have pegged. See. Then re-see. Then re-re-see. Again and again and again, until you know their real name and feel their story like you hope they’ll feel yours. Then we will know Love and Compassion and the reason so many stories in the Bible are of Jesus healing eyes.”
― Steve Daugherty, Experiments in Honesty: Meditations on Love, Fear and the Honest to God Naked Truth

“Compassion is an astoundingly, frustratingly affirming force. It Loves the other enough to find beauty and meaning in what the rest of us lazily judge as good or bad. Ahava Love, the brand that has the other’s interests more in view than its own preferences being perfectly tended to, searches and finds the thing to celebrate.”
― Steve Daugherty, Experiments in Honesty: Meditations on Love, Fear and the Honest to God Naked Truth

“You and I could make a long list of families and friendships that have broken down because faith was understood as the thing that makes you tell people to change. We’ve conflicted politically, environmentally, morally, relationally, philosophically, theologically, etc., and never once noticed the last four letters of those words. We suffer an inability to embrace difference and to remain unthreatened by the disparate paths of fellow human beings. We childishly think if it’s not all one thing, something evil is afoot. But don’t you and I wish in our own ways that we could find a place and a people where being loved, being known, and being honest were three strands of the same cord.”
― Steve Daugherty, Experiments in Honesty: Meditations on Love, Fear and the Honest to God Naked Truth

“Convert yourself, Love others, and watch the world heal. This is a high, confident view of the power of Love and the conviction that what’s true, rather than what’s forcibly pretended, will save us.”
― Steve Daugherty, Experiments in Honesty: Meditations on Love, Fear and the Honest to God Naked Truth

“Maybe our pain is a tool for understanding what we’re hearing, rather than an excuse not to be hearing at all. Maybe rather than trying to get fixed, or to fix others, we should come to believe that our struggle is the means by which we understand one another, not the obstacle to first overcome before we are available to one another.”
― Steve Daugherty, Experiments in Honesty: Meditations on Love, Fear and the Honest to God Naked Truth

“The paradox of attempting selfless living is that it drives the focus unendingly on self: self-abdication, self-discipline, self-condemnation, all require self-measurement and subsequent self-adjustment. Self, self, self, self. That is, the so-called selfless folks are often the most self-obsessed people I’ve ever met. In trying not to be as loathsome as a swarm of mosquitoes crashing a prayer walk, I focused even more on my performance and in many respects became even less attuned, less loving, to the world around me. It takes a lot of energy to disappear something that won’t leave.”
― Steve Daugherty, Experiments in Honesty: Meditations on Love, Fear and the Honest to God Naked Truth