Unoffendable Quotes

If I had a large amount of money I should certainly found a hospital for those whose grip upon the world is so tenuous that they can be severely offended by words and phrases and yet remain all unoffended by the injustice, violence and oppression that howls daily about our ears.

Were you lying?" "I never lie," he said piously. "About what?" "The sand, the snake." For a young man who never lied, he seemed surprisingly unoffended by the question.

The only thing more pleasing than seeing Ronan singled out was seeing him singled out and forced to repeatedly sing an Irish jig. “Piss up a rope,” Ronan said. Gansey, unoffended, waited. Ronan shook his head, but then, with a wicked smile, he began to sing, “Squash one, squash two, s—” “Not that one,” both Adam and Gansey said. “I’m not listening to that for three hours,” Adam said. Gansey pointed at Ronan until he began to breathily whistle a jaunty reel.

Anger is extraordinarily easy. It’s our default setting. Love is very difficult. Love is a miracle.

Choosing to be unoffendable, or relinquishing my right to anger, does not mean accepting injustice. It means actively seeking justice, and loving mercy, while walking humbly with God. And that means remembering I’m not Him. What a relief.

Oh yes, the heart is deceptive. And that calls for humility above all else, because my heart isn’t deceptive because it fools other people. It’s deceptive because it fools me.

Yes, the world is broken. But don’t be offended by it. Instead, thank God that He’s intervened in it, and He’s going to restore it to everything it was meant to be. His kingdom is breaking through, bit by bit. Recognize it, and wonder at it.

Choosing to be unoffendable out of love for others is ministry.

Whether or not you currently feel that God is around doesn’t alter reality. Whether or not you feel He loves you, or even that you are worthy of His love, doesn’t change reality either.

Confession is an act of violence against the unoffending.

Jesus encountered one moral mess after another, and He was never taken aback by anyone’s morality. Ever.

Few want to hear this, but it’s true, and it can be enormously helpful in life: if you’re constantly being hurt, offended, or angered, you should honestly evaluate your inflamed ego.

Thank you, Dain," she said. "I should like that very much. I've never seen a proper wrestling match before." "I daresay it will be a novel experience all round," he said, gravely eyeing her up and down. "I can't wait to see Sherburne's face when I arrive with my lady wife in tow." "There, you see?" she said, unoffended. "I told you there were other benefits to having a wife. I can come in very handy when you wish to shock your friends.

Grace isn’t for the deserving. Forgiving means surrendering your claim to resentment and letting go of anger.

It is a sound interpretive rule...that anything that cannot be accomplished except with the aid of threats or the actual exercise of violence against unoffending persons cannot be beneficial to one and all.

War is not exceptional; peace is. Worry is not exceptional; trust is. Decay is not exceptional; restoration is. Anger is not exceptional; gratitude is. Selfishness is not exceptional; sacrifice is. Defensiveness is not exceptional; love is. And judgmentalism is not exceptional . . . But grace is.

Everybody’s an idiot but me. I’m awesome.”—@branthansen)

I was determined to be polite, unoffendable, persistent, boring, friendly: in other words, to lie.

We should forfeit our right to be offended. That means forfeiting our right to hold on to anger. When we do this, we’ll be making a sacrifice that’s very pleasing to God. It strikes at our very pride. It forces us not only to think about humility, but to actually be humble.

Whenever there’s an injury to a relationship, a hurt, a broken heart, or even a broken thing, and you are willing to forgive, you are saying, “I got this. I’m going to pick up the bill for this.” This is, of course, precisely what God has done for us.

Quit trying to parent the whole world. Quit offering advice when exactly zero people asked for it. Quit being shocked when people don’t share your morality. Quit serving as judge and jury, in your own mind, of that person who just cut you off in traffic. Quit thinking you need to “discern” what others’ motives are. And quit rehearsing in your mind what that other person did to you.

We hold on to worry because we don’t trust God. We hold on to anger because we don’t trust God. We feel threatened because we’re insecure, and we’re insecure because—surprise!—we don’t trust God.

Being offended is a tiring business. Letting things go gives you energy.

Your life will become less stressful when you give up your right to anger and offense. And by the way, if you don’t, you’re doomed. So there’s that too.

rules don’t change anyone’s heart, ever. Grace does.

Love people where they are, and love them boldly.

In the moment, everyone’s anger always seems righteous. Anger is a feeling, after all, and it sweeps over us and tells us we’re being denied something we should have. It provides its own justification. But an emotion is just an emotion. It’s not critical thinking. Anger doesn’t pause. We have to stop, and we have to question it.

So how about taking this idea to all of our experience: You really can’t believe politicians would lie? You can’t believe a preacher would cheat on his wife? You can’t believe someone would try to steal from you? You can’t believe a neighbor would set off fireworks at 2:00 a.m.? You can’t believe a world leader would tyrannize his own people? Are we going to live in perpetual shock at the nature of man?

When we recognize our unsurprising fallenness and keep our eyes joyfully open for the glorious exceptions, we’re much less offendable. Why? Because that’s the thing about gratitude and anger: they can’t coexist. It’s one or the other. One drains the very life from you. The other fills your life with wonder. Choose wisely.

God knows others’ private motives. We don’t. God knows our private motives. We don’t. We think we can judge others’ motives. We’re wrong.

Forfeiting our right to anger makes us deny ourselves, and makes us others-centered. When we start living this way, it changes everything.

The Bible gives us ample commands to act, and never, ever, says to do it out of anger. Instead, we’re to be motivated by something very different: love, and obedience born of love.

Loving people means divesting ourselves of our status. We’re not being naive in doing it. We’ve surrendered it for good reason, believing that there is something better in exchange. We decide to be unoffendable because that’s how love operates; it gives up its “status” entirely.

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst.

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

We are capable of imagining threats and staying in a kind of constant, low-grade fight-or-flight mode. We’re capable of feeling threatened all the time, by things that haven’t even happened and may not ever happen.

Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles.

Choosing not to take offense is not about simply ignoring wrongs. If someone, say, cuts in front of you in line, you can address the situation. You don’t have to simply accept it. But you can act without contempt, anger, and bitterness.

When we surrender our perceived “rights,” when we let go of our attempts to manipulate, we find—surprise!—joy.

Instead of changing our beliefs to match reality, we often just rearrange reality, in our heads, to match what we want.

Trust is the act of giving up control over the things that are not up to us anyway.

Loving others means divesting ourselves of our status. We're not being naive in doing it. We've surrendered it for good reason, believing that there is something better in exchange.

So think about this: When Peter insists that he is even willing to die for Jesus, Jesus tells him, “No, you’ll betray Me. You’ll deny Me—three times. But don’t let your heart be troubled. Believe in me. I’m going to prepare a special place for you—and I’m coming back to get you!

Choosing to be unoffendable not only helps me sleep at night rather than worrying about my latest online “Stand for Truth”; it helps me remember that Jesus didn’t even ask me to take a stand for truth on everything. He told His followers to go and make disciples. Make other followers.

We're told in Psalms 46:10, to "be still," or to "cease striving," and know that He is God. Some people are familiar with this verse but not the larger context, which is that of someone looking over the remains of a battlefield. The original Hebrew is suggestive of stopping the fight, letting go, and relaxing. God wants us to drop our arms. No more defensiveness. No more taking things personally. He'll handle it. Really. Trust Him. Rest.

Choosing to be unoffendable means choosing to be humble. Not only that, the practice teaches humility. Once you’ve decided you can’t control other people; once you’ve reconciled yourself to the fact that the world, and its people, are broken; once you’ve realized your own moral failure before God; once you’ve abandoned the idea that your significance comes from anything other than God, you’re growing in humility, and that’s exactly where God wants us all.

If you call yourself a Christian, and you want things to be fair, and you want God’s rewards given out only to the deserving and the upstanding and the religious, well, honestly, Jesus has got to be a complete embarrassment to you.

Why isn’t righteous anger ever listed among the things that a Spirit-filled life will bring us? If it’s righteous, why is it not akin to the “fruit of the Spirit,” like love, joy, peace, and gentleness? Why is anger in Scripture so consistently lumped in the other lists, with things like, say, slander and malice, with no exclusions for the “righteous” variety? (See, for example, Colossians 3:8.)

Good design keeps the user happy, the manufacturer in the black and the aesthete unoffended.

I suspect our sense of entitlement to anger is directly proportional to our perception of our own relative innocence.

Though murdered kings, like all dead men, lie quiet and unoffending in the ground, they rot and spread contagion in men's minds.

If you care about what others think of you, then you will always be their slave.

I’m already a believer, but the kingdom of God is so shockingly opposite the way the rest of the world works that I need constant reminding of what it looks like and how good it is.

We can play pretend and try to set up an aquarium-type existence, devoid of interaction with anything or anyone who might challenge or upset us, but that's not the world Jesus came to save.

Our anger is valuable to us. That’s why we want to hold it, to savor it. It means something. It means we’ve been wronged, we’re in the right, and we’re the victims in an unfair exchange. We want to even out the scales, and one way to do it, at least psychologically, is to stay offended.

Once my imagination persuaded me that the dying man gave me a reproachful look out of his shadowy eyes, and it seemed to me that I could rather he had stabbed me than done that. He muttered and mumbled like a dreamer in his sleep, about his wife and his child; and I thought about a new despair, "This thing that I have done does not end with him; it falls upon them too and they never did me any harm... The man was not in uniform, and was not armed. He was a stranger in the country; that was all we ever found out about him. The thought of him got to preying upon me every night; I could not get rid of it. I could not drive it away, the taking of that unoffending life seemed such a wanton thing. And it seemed an epitome of war; that all war must be just that -- the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity; strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help if you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it. My campaign was spoiled. It seemed to me I was not rightly equipped for this awful business; that war was intended for men, and I for a child's nurse.

Perhaps you’ve noticed: Jesus encountered one moral mess after another, and He was never taken aback by anyone’s morality. Ever. I can’t find any stories (maybe you can find one?) where Jesus sees an immoral person and says anything like, “Wow! Okay. Well, that really is disgusting. That’s just too much.

Since anger has value, giving it up requires a sacrifice. And, as we’ve explored, it’s one that’s simply not optional for the follower of Jesus. The cross simultaneously stands as a constant reminder of His willingness to “pay the bill,” and as an indictment on us when we are unwilling to do the same for others.

Clever enough when it suits you, aren’t you?” “I have my moments. That cat’s out,” he continued as he took his own jacket from the hook. “Take no pity on him should he come scratching at the door. Bub knew what he was when he insisted on moving out here with me.” “Did you remember to feed him?” “I’m not a complete moron.” Unoffended, he wrapped a scarf around his neck. “He has food enough, and if he didn’t, he’d go begging at your kitchen door. He’d do that anyway, just to shame me.

Grace isn’t for the deserving.

we should not borrow trouble from tomorrow.

Oh yes, the heart is deceptive. And that calls for humility above all else, because my heart isn’t deceptive because it fools other people. It’s deceptive because it fools me

When He says to get rid of anger, to serve others, and to die to ourselves, it’s in our best interests to obey. He knows how we can thrive.

deciding “I’m not going to let people offend me” will make for a far more restful life.

In this culture, “nothing” sticks out like crazy, like, say, a city . . . on a hill . . . or something.

When you’re living in the reality of the forgiveness you’ve been extended, you just don’t get angry with others easily.

Taking offense is so often a lot of work. It can wear you out; but for some, it really becomes a lifestyle.

Still, it’s up to us. My kids are older now, but I want them to know that. They’re free. God knows what’s best for us. He offers peace. He offers rest. But He lets us choose.

The wilderness is cracked and browned But through the water pale and thin Still shine the unoffending feet And there above the painter set   15 The Father and the Paraclete. .

It takes childlike humility to embrace the love of God, to realize how "unfair" it is, and then quickly add, "but I'll take it!

just because you haven’t had the opportunity to follow through on what you’d like to do, you’re not morally superior to someone who has had that opportunity.

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? (Jer. 17:9 ESV)

No more defensiveness. No more taking things personally. He’ll handle it. Really. Trust Him. Rest. Quit thinking it’s up to you to police people, and that God needs you to “take a stand.” God “needs” nothing.

Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He shall direct your paths. Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD and depart from evil. (Prov. 3:5–7 NKJV)

Polyphiloprogenitive The sapient sutlers of the Lord Drift across the window-panes. In the beginning was the Word. In the beginning was the Word. Superfetation of to en, And at the mensual turn of time Produced enervate Origen. A painter of the Umbrian school Designed upon a gesso ground The nimbus of the Baptized God. The wilderness is cracked and browned But through the water pale and thin Still shine the unoffending feet And there above the painter set The Father and the Paraclete. . . . . . . The sable presbyters approach The avenue of penitence; The young are red and pustular Clutching piaculative pence. Under the penitential gates Sustained by staring Seraphim Where the souls of the devout Burn invisible and dim. Along the garden-wall the bees With hairy bellies pass between The staminate and pistilate, Blest office of the epicene. Sweeney shifts from ham to ham Stirring the water in his bath. The masters of the subtle schools Are controversial, polymath.

Seek justice; love mercy. You don’t have to be angry to do that. People say we have to get angry to fight injustice, but I’ve noticed that the best police officers don’t do their jobs in anger. The best soldiers don’t function out of anger. Anger does not enhance judgment.

When we recognize our unsurprising fallenness and keep our eyes joyfully open for the glorious exceptions, we’re much less offendable. Why? Because that’s the thing about gratitude and anger: they can’t coexist. It’s one or the other. One drains the very life from you. The other fills your life with wonder. Choose wisely.

Forfeiting our right to anger makes us deny ourselves, and makes us others-centered. When we start living this way, it changes everything. Actually, it’s not even “forfeiting” a right, because the right doesn’t exist. We’re told to forgive, and that means anger has to go, whether we’ve decided our own anger is “righteous” or not.

C.S. Lewis wrote: One man may be so placed that his anger sheds the blood of thousands, and another so placed that however angry he gets he will only be laughed at. But the little mark on the soul may be much the same in both. Each has done something to himself which, unless he repents, will make it harder for him to keep out of the rage next time he is tempted, and will make the rage worse when he does fall into it. Each of them, if he seriously turns to God, can have that twist in the central man straightened out again: each is, in the long run, doomed if he will not. The bigness or smallness of the thing, seen from the outside, is not what really matters.

So let’s review: Choosing to be unoffendable means choosing to be humble. Not only that, the practice teaches humility. Once you’ve decided you can’t control other people; once you’ve reconciled yourself to the fact that the world, and its people, are broken; once you’ve realized your own moral failure before God; once you’ve abandoned the idea that your significance comes from anything other than God, you’re growing in humility, and that’s exactly where God wants us all. It’s contrary to seemingly everything in our culture, but the more we divest ourselves of ourselves, the better our lives get. Jesus told us as much. He said if we’d give up our lives, for His sake, we’d find real life.

Now I understand that Jesus was talking to a weary, religion-soaked people. They’d been given so much to do and so many rules to follow. So many rabbis had expounded so much the right ways to do things, and Jesus was saying, “My way is easy to understand. Kids understand it. It’s you adults and ‘experts’ who like to make things complex. My teachings are simple at heart.

He glowered at me, even as he carried on walking around the counter, not stopping until his hand was on my ass. That was how he greeted me every day. Like we hadn’t just woken up in bed together. Like he hadn’t just eaten me out before making me scream down the house as he fucked me before I had to make breakfast. His ‘hello’ was a hand on my butt. It surprised me by how unoffended I was by it.

Gansey said abruptly. "In we go. Ronan, don't forget to set the directional markers as we go. We're counting on you. Don't just stare at me. Nod like you understand. Good. You know what? Give them to Jane." "What?" Ronan sounded betrayed. Blue accepted the markers - round, plastic discs with arrows drawn on them. She hadn't realized how nervous she was until she had them in her hands; it felt good to have something concrete to do. "I want you to whistle or hum or sing, Ronan, and keep track of time," Gansey said. "You have got to be shitting me," Ronan replied. "Me." Gansey peered down the tunnel. "I know you know a lot of the songs all the way through, and can do them the same sped and length every time. Because you had to memorize all of those tunes for the Irish music competitions." Blue and Adam exchanged a delighted look. The only thing more pleasing than seeing Ronan singled out was seeing him singled out and forced to repeatedly sing an Irish jig. "Piss up a rope," Ronan said. Gansey, unoffended, waited. Ronan shook his head, but then, with a wicked smile, he began to sing, "Squash one, squash two, s-" "Not that one," both Adam and Gansey said. "I'm not listening to that for three hours," Adam said. Gansey pointed at Ronan until he began to breathily whistle a jaunty reel. And they went in deeper.

Yes, we get angry. Can’t avoid it. But I now know that anger can’t live here. I can’t keep it. I can’t try it on, can’t see how it looks. I have to take it to the Cracks of Doom, like, now, and drop that thing, much as I want to wear it awhile. (Note: I’m really going to try not to use four thousand Lord of the Rings analogies in this book. I may fail.) I’m not entitled to anger, because I’m me. I can’t handle anger. I don’t have the strength of character to do it. Only God does. We can trust Him with it. Jesus gets angry, but His character is beyond question, so He is entitled. We all think that we deserve to carry anger, but it will destroy us unless we let it go. We have to deny ourselves, die to ourselves, and surrender ourselves. Whatever it takes. Anger is like the One Ring. But the Lord of the Rings analogy breaks down here: There’s not a single, hyperdestructive One Ring to be thrown into the cracks of Mordor. There’s, like, six billion. Drop yours.

Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!  “Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth into battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it —   For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimmage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!   We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.   (After a pause.) “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits.”  …

Honest question: If I am a good Christian, and have faith and stuff, will God protect my children? Honest answer: He might. Or He might not. Honest follow-up question: So what good is He? I think the answer is that He’s still good. But our safety, and the safety of our kids, isn’t part of the deal. This is incredibly hard to accept on the American evangelical church scene, because we love families, and we love loving families, and we nearly associate godliness itself with cherishing family beyond any other earthly thing. That someone would challenge this bond, the primacy of the family bond, is offensive. And yet . . . Jesus did it. And it was even more offensive, then, in a culture that wasn’t nearly so individualistic as ours. Everything was based on family: your reputation, your status—everything. And yet He challenges the idea that our attachment to family is so important, so noble, that it is synonymous with our love for Him. Which leads to some other spare thoughts, like this: we can make idols out of our families. Again, in a “Focus on the Family” subculture, it’s hard to imagine how this could be. Families are good. But idols aren’t made of bad things. They used to be fashioned out of trees or stone, and those aren’t bad, either. Idols aren’t bad things; they’re good things, made Ultimate. We make things Ultimate when we see the true God as a route to these things, or a guarantor of them. It sounds like heresy, but it’s not: the very safety of our family can become an idol. God wants us to want Him for Him, not merely for what He can provide. Here’s another thought: As wonderful as “mother love” is, we have to make sure it doesn’t become twisted. And it can. It can become a be-all, end-all, and the very focus of a woman’s existence. C. S. Lewis writes that it’s especially dangerous because it seems so very, very righteous. Who can possibly challenge a mother’s love? God can, and does, when it becomes an Ultimate. And it’s more likely to become a disordered Ultimate than many other things, simply because it does seem so very righteous. Lewis says this happens with patriotism too.

WHEN I DESCRIBED THE TUMOR IN MY ESOPHAGUS as a “blind, emotionless alien,” I suppose that even I couldn’t help awarding it some of the qualities of a living thing. This at least I know to be a mistake: an instance of the pathetic fallacy (angry cloud, proud mountain, presumptuous little Beaujolais) by which we ascribe animate qualities to inanimate phenomena. To exist, a cancer needs a living organism, but it cannot ever become a living organism. Its whole malice—there I go again—lies in the fact that the “best” it can do is to die with its host. Either that or its host will find the measures with which to extirpate and outlive it. But, as I knew before I became ill, there are some people for whom this explanation is unsatisfying. To them, a rodent carcinoma really is a dedicated, conscious agent—a slow–acting suicide–murderer—on a consecrated mission from heaven. You haven’t lived, if I can put it like this, until you have read contributions such as this on the websites of the faithful: Who else feels Christopher Hitchens getting terminal throat cancer [sic] was God’s revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme him? Atheists like to ignore FACTS. They like to act like everything is a “coincidence.” Really? It’s just a “coincidence” [that] out of any part of his body, Christopher Hitchens got cancer in the one part of his body he used for blasphemy? Yeah, keep believing that, Atheists. He’s going to writhe in agony and pain and wither away to nothing and then die a horrible agonizing death, and THEN comes the real fun, when he’s sent to HELLFIRE forever to be tortured and set afire. There are numerous passages in holy scripture and religious tradition that for centuries made this kind of gloating into a mainstream belief. Long before it concerned me particularly I had understood the obvious objections. First, which mere primate is so damn sure that he can know the mind of god? Second, would this anonymous author want his views to be read by my unoffending children, who are also being given a hard time in their way, and by the same god? Third, why not a thunderbolt for yours truly, or something similarly awe–inspiring? The vengeful deity has a sadly depleted arsenal if all he can think of is exactly the cancer that my age and former “lifestyle” would suggest that I got. Fourth, why cancer at all? Almost all men get cancer of the prostate if they live long enough: It’s an undignified thing but quite evenly distributed among saints and sinners, believers and unbelievers. If you maintain that god awards the appropriate cancers, you must also account for the numbers of infants who contract leukemia. Devout persons have died young and in pain. Betrand Russell and Voltaire, by contrast, remained spry until the end, as many psychopathic criminals and tyrants have also done. These visitations, then, seem awfully random. My so far uncancerous throat, let me rush to assure my Christian correspondent above, is not at all the only organ with which I have blasphemed. And even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it’s hello darkness my old friend. In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half–aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be “me.” (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.)

There’s a story in Luke, where an apparently “good,” religious, and rich young man approaches Jesus, wondering what he must do to inherit eternal life. Ultimately, Jesus places a demand on him—sell everything and give to the poor—and we’re told the young man heard that and walked away, sad. I think for many of us who live in this society that is so riven with anger, even addicted to it, Jesus is giving us a similar demand: “Give up your anger. Because of what I’ve done for you, give it up, and forgive.” Sadly, our response is, “That’s not fair.” And we walk away too. One thing that strikes me about the rich young man story: Jesus doesn’t leave him with room to wriggle. The man will either do what Jesus says, or walk away. There’s no splitting the difference, paying lip service, or trying to split theological hairs. But we love to do this with forgiveness. Jesus tells His followers to forgive as we have been forgiven, yet we find reasons why this doesn’t quite apply in our situation. (Maybe He didn’t anticipate what I was going to have to endure . . . Does He realize what He’s asking?) But we don’t walk away sad, like the rich young man. Instead, we tell ourselves that we can live a Christian lifestyle, and integrate our own decisions about whom to forgive, and when. This is especially dangerous, because when we do that, we’re walking away. But we’re not aware we’ve walked away at all. We’ve just de-radicalized the very nature of following Jesus, because we think we know a better way.

I have, however, been at no pains to separate my own beliefs from those of the peasantry, but have rather let my men and women, dhouls and faeries, go their way unoffended or defended by any argument of mine. The things a man has heard and seen are threads of life, and if he pull them carefully from the confused distaff of memory, any who will can weave them into whatever garments of belief please them best. I too have woven my garment like another, but I shall try to keep warm in it, and shall be well content if it do not unbecome me. Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a little. 1893.

My radio show’s producer, Sherri, is African American. She just got back from a trip where she was a guest speaker at a youth event in a church that was primarily white. Just before the Sunday morning service, she was called into the minister’s study for prayer, and she met a man who was overtly hostile to her. The way he looked at her, dismissively and contemptuously, made her feel hated. She felt utterly unwelcome, lonely, and out of place. After she spoke, the same man approached her, took off his glasses, and started crying. He told her that hers was the most influential talk he’d ever heard, and it had affected him particularly because he is very racist against blacks. She was stunned by his honesty. “We’ve always been this way. My family has always been racist. I’ve learned this from my dad. I’m so sorry. I’ve got to change,” he told her. “I can see Jesus is using you. And he’s using you to change me.” Sherri then asked to meet his dad. She did. And she hugged him. I know Sherri takes racism very, very seriously. But, she says, she also has to forgive racists, because she has to love people in her family. And they are part of her family. She has to love them as Jesus loves her. Sherri’s love is not naive. But that’s exactly why it’s so profound. She’s setting her offense aside, not because it doesn’t matter, not because it isn’t completely understandable, but because of what Jesus has done for her. She’s choosing against offense, not just because God loves these men but also because God loves her and has set aside her very real offenses in order to be with her. There are those of us who pat ourselves on the back for loving our families and friends. “I’m loyal to the end; I’d die for my kids,” we’ll say. Truth is, that’s not really terribly remarkable. Everyone, or practically everyone, feels this way. What is terribly remarkable is when someone is willing to love a person, in the name of Jesus, whom he or she would otherwise despise. It makes no sense otherwise. Why would we ever regard someone as family who would otherwise be an enemy? Why ignore his faults, or cover her wrongs with love? Without Jesus, it simply makes no sense. Sherri’s very refusal, and our very refusal, to take and hold offense is evidence of the existence of God. This is how they’ll know we belong to Him, Jesus says. So let’s love—from this moment forward—because He first loved us.

God continually chooses the least likely to be chosen, the broken and the humble. It’s clearly His modus operandi. I’ve heard this response from people when I talk about this idea: “But how can we possibly get things done without big-time visionaries? Without massive plans to save the world?” Well, the Bible actually singles out a specific, heroic animal species to illustrate how to get things done. If you want to know how to do it, don’t go to the soaring eagle. Don’t go to the impressive, roaring lion, either. God may have a different idea: Go watch the ants, you lazy person. Watch what they do and be wise. Ants have no commander, no leader or ruler, but they store up food in the summer and gather their supplies at harvest. (Prov. 6:6–8 NCV) Yes. Watch how the ants operate. They get it. Sure enough, modern research shows just how remarkable ants are. They all know what to do and when to do it. They know when to rest, when to battle intruders, when to take care of their eggs, all of it. If there are too many ants foraging, just enough ants decide to quit foraging and take on other jobs. They know how to build massive anthills that are marvels of construction engineering. And they do it all without a hierarchy. They manage it all without management. They get it done without any one ant knowing the “big picture.” No ant is a superstar. No ant is irreplaceable. How they operate is still somewhat mysterious to science, but scientists do know that ants just use the information that’s in front of them, and then they respond. That’s it. That’s all the information an ant has. The Bible singles out a species wherein every individual member does whatever needs doing, just by responding to what’s in front of it. An ant can’t worry about the big blueprint. No ant actually has the big picture. If they each do their thing, the thing right in front of them, the big picture takes care of itself.

But the man who owned the vineyard said to one of those workers, ‘Friend, I am being fair to you. You agreed to work for one coin. So take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the same pay that I gave you. I can do what I want with my own money. Are you jealous because I am good to those people?’ “So those who are last now will someday be first, and those who are first now will someday be last.” (20:1–16 NCV) “Do you begrudge my generosity?” the landowner is saying. The answer, of course, is yes, they do. They begrudge it quite a bit. Even though it has no impact on them whatsoever, it offends them. We hate it when we are trying so hard to earn something, and then someone else gets the same thing without trying as hard. Think about this for a moment, in real, “today” terms. Someone gives you a backbreaking job, and you’re happy for it, but at the end of the day, when you’re getting paid, the guys who came in with five minutes left get the same amount you just got. Seriously? It’s imbalanced, unfair, maddening . . . and it’s also exactly what Jesus just said the kingdom of God is like. Not only is it maddening; it’s maddening to the “good” people! Common sense says you don’t do this. You don’t pay latecomers who came in a few minutes ago the same amount that you paid the hardworking folks you hired first. Jesus tells this story, knowing full well that the conscientious ones listening would find this hardest to take. And, as a matter of fact, as a conscientious one, I find this hard to take. I’m just being honest. This story does not fit my style. I’m all about people getting what they deserve. Oh, it’s offensive, too, when Jesus turns to a guy who’s being executed next to Him, and tells him, “Today, you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). What did the guy do to deserve that? He did nothing. If you call yourself a Christian, and you want things to be fair, and you want God’s rewards given out only to the deserving and the upstanding and the religious, well, honestly, Jesus has got to be a complete embarrassment to you. In fact, to so many upstanding Christians, He is. He has always been offensive, and remains offensive, to those who seek to achieve “righteousness” through what they do. Always. People who’ve grown up in church (like me) are well acquainted with the idea that Jesus is our “cornerstone.” He’s the solid rock of our faith. Got it. Not controversial. It’s well-known. But what’s not so talked about: That stone, Jesus, causes religious people to stumble. And that rock is offensive to “good” people: So what does all this mean? Those who are not Jews were not trying to make themselves right with God, but they were made right with God because of their faith. The people of Israel tried to follow a law to make themselves right with God. But they did not succeed, because they tried to make themselves right by the things they did instead of trusting in God to make them right. They stumbled over the stone that causes people to stumble. (Rom. 9:30–32 NCV) And then Paul says something a couple verses later that angers “good Christians” to this day: Because they did not know the way that God makes people right with him, they tried to make themselves right in their own way. So they did not accept God’s way of making people right. Christ ended the law so that everyone who believes in him may be right with God. (Rom. 10:3–4 NCV) It’s not subtle, what Paul’s writing here. For anyone who believes in Him, Jesus ended the law as a means to righteousness. Yet so many think they can achieve—even have achieved—some kind of “good Christian” status on the basis of the rule-keeping work they’ve done. They suspect they’ll do good things and God will owe them for it, like payment for a job well done. Paul says, in effect, if you think you should get what you earn, you will . . . and you don’t want that.

Ferguson learned the identity of his target and remarked, “I could have lodged half a dozen balls in or about him before he was out of my reach. But it was not pleasant to fire at the back of an unoffending individual who was acquitting himself coolly of his duty, and so I left him alone.” To his decent forbearance, America owes an incalculable debt.

the Divine-Me is God-centred, which also means self-less. It is unconcerned with self-preservation. The Divine-Me is outward looking, forgiving and content. The Divine-Me is secure without the need of achieving; secure because of being made in the image and likeness of God. The Divine-Me has a natural ability to ‘Let Go and Let God’. The Divine-Me is un-offendable.

the thing about gratitude and anger: they can’t coexist. It’s one or the other. One drains the very life from you. The other fills your life with wonder. Choose wisely.

Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil.

Axel, Babette’s Feast.

The mind loves problems. When there is a lack of problems it can chew on, the mind will create new ones, regardless of how this affects us emotionally.

not exceptional; peace is. Worry is not exceptional; trust is. Decay is not exceptional; restoration is. Anger is not exceptional; gratitude is. Selfishness is not exceptional; sacrifice is. Defensiveness is not exceptional; love is. And judgmentalism is not exceptional . . . But grace is.

God sees things we don’t. He must, because He hasn’t vaporized us yet.