Quotes about Humanity

So I wrote. I wrote as though God thought my voice mattered. I wrote because I believed a human story was beautiful, no matter how small the human was. I wrote because I didn't make myself, God did. And I wrote like he'd invited me to share my true "self" with the world.

I talk about love, forgiveness, social justice; I rage against American materialism in the name of alturism, but have I even controlled my own heart? The overwhelming majority of time I spend thinking about myself, pleasing myself, reassuring myself, and when I am done there is nothing to spare for the needy. Six billion people live in this world, and I can only muster thoughts for one. Me.

The words alone, lonely, and loneliness are three of the most powerful words in the English language...those words say that we are human; they are like the words hunger and thirst. But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul.

The stuff it takes to be intimate is authenticity, vulnerability, and a belief that other people are about as good and bad as we are.

Jesus had no regard for the lifeboat politics you and I live within every day.

I lay there under the stars and thought of what a great responsibility it is to be human.

For so much of my life I had been defending Christianity because I thought to admit that we had done any wrong was to discredit the religious system as a whole, but it isn't a religious system, it is people following Christ; and the important thing to do, the right thing to do, was to apologize for getting in the way of Jesus.

Perhaps if we stop reducing the text to formulas for personal growth, we can read it as stories of imperfect humans having relations with a perfect God and come to understand the obvious message He is communicating to mankind.

A person could read the Bible, not to become smart, but rather to feel that they are not alone, that somebody understands them and love them enough to speak to them, on purpose, in a way that makes a person feel human.

I get this feeling sometimes that after the world ends, when God destroys all our buildings and our flags, we will wish we had seen everybody as equal, that we had eaten dinner with prostitutes, held them in our arms, opened up spare rooms for them, and loved them and learned from them.

Talking about real life. The thought of not acting pressed on me like a terror. Can we really trust people to love us just as we are? Nobody steps onto a stage and gets a standing ovation for being human. You have to sing or dance or something. I think that's the difference between being loved and making people clap, though. Love can't be earned, it can only be given. And it can only be exchanged by people who are completely true with each other.

I suppose building a healthy family is possible. Maybe what children really need is simple. Maybe they just need somebody to show them it's okay to be human.