“Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus" (1 Thess. 5:18).”

“Commit your work to the Lord, and then your plans will succeed. (Proverbs 16:3).”

“Absent in body but present in spirit.”

“Yet man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward.”

“Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots?”

“Here am I send me.”

“As long as there have been women." Mom told me, "there have been ways to punish them for being women.”

“In their silence they continued both to protect me and to punish me. The memory of that night was now the only tie between us, eclipsing everything else.”

“I'm more haunted by how what I've said and the things I've done have caused harm to myself and others than I am worried that God will punish me for being bad. Because in the end, we aren't punished...”