“As you know so well, the passage of time never really heals the tragic memory of such a great loss, but we carry on, because we have to, because our loved one would want us to, and because there is still light to guide us in the world from the love they gave us.”

“If Christians are all loving and full of God's grace (like some of us really are), do they truly love their neighbor? Would they catch a grenade for one of us (like some of us would for them because we truly have love in our hearts)?”

“I realized then how much alike we were. Both of us looked backwards to a beloved time that was lost to us, a time where everything had been beautiful. Both of us looked forward to some time and place that would be better. And both of us were here, now, in a grim, unhappy time where little was as we wanted it to be. We lived in our memories and in our hopes, enduring the present because we had no other choice, and because we loved the people who lived here with us.”

“My Dad says that we're the meanest to the ones we love because we know they'll still love us.”

“We are children, perhaps, at the very moment when we know that it is as children that God loves us - not because we have deserved his love and not in spite of our undeserving; not because we try and not because we recognize the futility of our trying; but simply because he has chosen to love us. We are children because he is our father; and all of our efforts, fruitful and fruitless, to do good, to speak truth, to understand, are the efforts of children who, for all their precocity, are children still in that before we loved him, he loved us, as children, through Jesus Christ our lord.”

“The Lord pleads with insistence, love, and persuasion that we repent, because He wants to heal us.”