Dykstra Quotes

Please don't give me words; give me a hug. Don't tell me that I'm holding up so well; break down with me and admit our shared wretchedness. Don't feign some bright mountaintop; walk with me through the dark valley where neither of us can utter a word.

In order to love who you are, you cannot hate the experiences that shaped you.

In order to love who you are, you cannot hate the experiences that shaped you." –ANDREA DYKSTRA

One thinks the worst even while clinging to hopes for the best.

We live in a society that shuns guilt, hardly knows it. It is drummed into us: "Don't feel guilty." No one wants to pay the price of reconciliation, of atonement, of forgiveness.

I harbor ill feelings toward a society, and a clergy, that allows marriage partners to split over the smallest incompatibility, where divorce comes in a multitude of flavors, like Baskin Robbins ice cream, where men and women can blame one another and everything except themselves for matrimony's mess. They look for externals over which they have no control and, fingering them, take no responsibility.

In order to love who you are, you cannot hate the experiences that shaped you.

My mind asked, "What's different this time?" My heart replied, "I am.

...our memory is enhanced by the emotion attending the event. The more intense the feelings the more accessible to the memory is the event. Few of us live lives so emotionally charged that we can truly, accurately retrieve all of it. ...Often only our crisis events are preserved with strong emotions. For our own survival we can't forget them, and then we too easily forget the good stuff.

No pain, no gain." You can hear the phrase in the world of physical exercise and conditioning. Muscles that feel no pain are probably getting neither stronger, nor more flexible. It presents an analogy for the exercise of the heart. Those who run the risk of genuine love alone must worry about emotional pain. The more friends; the more good-byes - and the more wakes to attend, the more graves to visit, the more deaths to share. Those who truly live life to the fullest will bear the full cup of suffering. Only those who are willing to pay the price in pain and anguish find life full to the brim. Happy people also suffer; they are no more lucky than the rest. They create their own happiness. That's the rule of thumb. Some thumbs, however, don't seem to rule very well. Slogans and catch-words, for all their conventional wisdom, fail to carry the whole weight of truth; they leave too much room for false inferences. "No pain, no gain" may leave one with nothing but pain - an intolerable amount of it. There is simply no guarantee that pain will bring gain, that hardship will yield happiness, that suffering will make one a better person. It may; but it's not inevitable.

She believed in a just return for every effort.

A truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms when his hands are empty.

Our identity is somehow found in not usually knowing who we are, in not always knowing what we are doing. Our identity is sometimes found, as Jesus himself professed, in its occasional loss.

There, Clover found the "gardens and great trees and old cottages...so beautiful" that seeing them exhausted her. It was as if, she joked with her husband, "this English world is a huge stage-play got up only to amuse Americans. It is obviously unreal, eccentric, and taken out of novels.

Sadly, in our technological, impersonal, and avaricious consumer society, people merely hold on to jobs. They put in their time, leave at the five o'clock bell, pick up their pay checks, and leave the whole business behind them. Work, for so many, becomes a necessary evil. They go at it grudgingly, at best resignedly. It is hard to fault them; the stressful conditions and uncertainty under which so many workers labor force them into an adversarial relationship with their occupations and employers.

Hence for him, every patient has the potential to become a “living human document” to the minister or seminary student.

poem by her friend Thomas Bailey Aldrich, the longtime editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Its lines read like a brace against failure: “Build as thou will—unspoiled by praise or blame / Build as thou will; and as thy light is given / Then if at last the airy structure fall / Divide & vanish—Take thyself no shame—/ They fail, and they alone, who have not striven.

The Midwife KAREN R. HANSON1 (1996) My ministry as a [hospital] chaplain [in] a Level One trauma center is intense and challenging. Our department responds to all critical cases that come into the Emergency Department, as well as critical incidents and deaths that occur throughout the hospital. [This] work requires a solid sense of identity and purpose. For me, the image of minister, or chaplain, as spiritual

who have a lightness of touch, an informality based on amusement at their own ineptitude, bring the simplest of gifts to others—the releasing power of laughter.”31

In order to love who you are, you cannot hat the experiences that shaped you.

During my eighteen years I came to bat almost 10,000 times. I struck out about 1,700 times and walked maybe 1,800 times. You figure a ballplayer will average about 500 at-bats a season. That means I played seven years without ever hitting the ball. —MICKEY MANTLE I

if you are in Christ, you always qualify for a blessing! Cursing is not coming your way. God is never mad at you. He is never disappointed in you. He is never frustrated and wanting you to get off your arse and get to work!     Jesus did the work for you to get blessed. He said, “IT IS FINISHED!

to become stars. He’d played outfield with Lenny Dykstra and Darryl Strawberry. He’d subbed for Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco. He’d lockered beside Rickey Henderson. In his slivers of five years in the big leagues he played for four famous managers: Sparky Andersen, Tom Kelly, Davey Johnson, and Tony La Russa. But by the end of 1989 his career stat line (301 at bats, .219 batting average, .246 on-base percentage, .296 slugging percentage, and 11 walks against 80 strikeouts) told an eloquent tale of suffering. You didn’t need to know Billy Beane at all—you only needed to read his stats—to sense that he left every on-deck circle in trouble. That he had developed neither discipline nor composure. That he had never learned to lay off a bad pitch. That he was easily fooled. That, fooled so often, he came to expect that he would be fooled. That he hit with fear. That his fear masqueraded as aggression. That the aggression enabled him to exit the batter’s box as quickly as possible. One season in the big leagues he came to the plate seventy-nine times and failed

I have found that a central conflict of womanhood is the wish to be thought beautiful and simultaneously to go unnoticed.

By contrast, the first step of those in the “second culture” is to affirm their own realities as worthy of equal respect.

Those within the web who have not yet spoken must speak for themselves. Gender, feminist, and black studies all verify the knowledge of the underprivileged, the outcast, the underclass, and the silenced. If knowledge depends upon power, then power must be given to the silenced.

The ultimate goal of shepherding, like that of communicating and organizing, is to relate the gospel to the need and condition of men. Each is called on according to the nature of the need, not according to the subjective preferences of the one we call pastor. 2

The New Testament intuition was this: That which is central and crucial about the person, or the total spirit, is always larger and deeper than the negativities that may adhere to him. Whatever demons may be, they are not all of him.

The other conviction or intuition of the New Testament about healing is seen positively—that real healing is of the “spirit,” when spirit is understood to mean very much the same thing that we mean today when we speak of a whole person.

We accept that our lives are so littered with land mines (unintended pregnancy, violence, abandonment, inadequate medical care, economic insecurity, the list goes on) that when we survive one we count ourselves lucky, because we know that things could have gone, indeed do go, another way for many many many women.

Coincidence is a word we created in order to explain holes in reality.

Me at eighteen. Young, willful, curious, dizzy with excitement, on the brink of life, standing with everything, every possibility and every person before me. Me, overflowing with the confidence and bravado of youth, with the arrogance of ignorance. Me, not knowing enough to be wary of the world around me.

The periods of violent behavior by the husband,’ the doctors observed, ‘served to release him momentarily from his anxiety about his ineffectiveness as a man, while giving his wife apparent masochistic gratification and helping probably to deal with the guilt arising from the intense hostility expressed in her controlling, castrating behavior.

A 1972 Gallup poll found that 68 percent of Republicans (known for being proponents of individual rights) thought the decision to abort was best made by a woman with her doctor.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that it occurred to Republicans that they could lock in the religious vote by attaching themselves to the anti-choice movement. They abandoned the argument that abortion was an individual right and reframed the debate as one of the protection of fetal rights. The culture already treated women like vessels whose life purpose was the creation and carriage of babies. By prioritizing the welfare of fetuses, Republicans had turned women into second-class citizens and expendable ones at that.

Computer science is no more related to the computer than astronomy is related to the telescope.

Isn’t it odd how much more one sees in a photograph than in real life? —VIRGINIA WOOLF