“I didn’t mean to,” is usually a dodge.
The most dangerous liars are those who think they are telling the truth.
Don’t forget to wash behind your years; some of the past is best scrubbed off and let go down the drain.
Jealousy acted on is like an AK47 trigger pulled hard and long at a person looking the other way.
A plant with brown leaves and a person who will not help — the end of the cycle.
When bad stuff happens, arm-chair Christian savants kowtow to the “God-must-have willed-it” mantra. Did he? Or did particular people who made particularly bad choices cause it?
It’s best not to blame bad behavior on a good God.
The toxicity of resentment stunts the efficacy of rapprochement.
A formulaic interpretation of psychologically painful events is like an amateurish freshman paper critiquing a novel partly read. It is a thing awkwardly cobbled together late, under the disabling influence of a deadline, a hodgepodge of unsupported quotes, blown transitions and an unproven thesis.
He who broods silently over slights and injuries and then explodes suddenly with judgmental vengeance is like a man throwing hand grenades through the windows of homes in the night.
As the saprotrophs feed on dead and decaying material, so the relationally wounded feed on old sores and decaying resentments. Necrosis necrotizes.
Neither a problem borrower nor a problem lender be.
It is dysfunctionally supererogatory to spread your personal offence or to receive one.
The smoothest, most social, most complimenting, most affirming people are sometimes the most profoundly dangerous. They are holding back their stored judgment and when crossed they fire it all at once.
Disclosure begets disclosure – mostly. But open your heart’s hurt to a closed heart, and you will find yourself bleeding alone along the side of the road.
Some liars are dangerous because they don’t know that they are lying and neither do the people who listen to and believe them.
Some people are wacked, I mean really wacked. This isn’t an insensitive criticism; it’s simply a raw reality. Their twistedness may not even be primarily their fault, but nonetheless, they are still warped into something mean, harmfully selfish, or perhaps even quite dangerous. The absolute wisest, best thing you can do is get far away from such people, even if other friends don’t or won’t. Because of a real danger of harm, it matters that you be vigilant, that you know when to set a protective fence around yourself, that you sometimes sink high poles, nail up tall planks and put up clear signs and fortify against harmful ones. Then you can enjoy the sweet ones you have been given to love and be loved by.
It is difficult to live or work with someone addicted to pleasing others. They always need a fix. They exist for the compliment and the “thank-you.” They are insufferably nice, even falsely so; always available, despite the cost; always at the center of helping, even if it would be appropriate for someone else to help; always acting altruistically important, whether they are or not; always working, whether they need to rest or not. Take away their opportunity to be the super-servant and they’ll abandon their disguise and beat you down quite harshly, only to rise with a smile and ask someone else if they need some help.
The passively hostile smile and fawn, compliment and affirm — until they blow. Then after the explosion, they return quickly to form, bringing their paint trays filled with the ropy thickness of social niceties, their paint rollers dripping with the glowing surfaces of personal patience, and their paint brushes thick with the colors of common decency. With these they paint over anger and judgment and relational wreckage and guilt and shame. It makes harshness seem to not be so, and in this way, life seems to gleam again.
The blood of Jesus is chemotherapy; a regimen of Jesus kills hate cells.
