There is nothing you need to do differently to be lovable — no emotional debt you have to pay, no change you have to make. Know this like you know your own voice, your own pulse.
KEEP MOVING.
— Maggie Smith, Keep Moving, p. 195
Photo: Monet’s Garden, Giverny, France, June 22, 2026
The glorious message of Scripture is that we do not have to be perfect for our Maker to love us. All through the great stories, heavenly love is lavished on visibly imperfect people. Scripture asks us to look at Jacob as he really is, to look at ourselves as we really are, and then realize that this is who God loves. God did not love Jacob because he was a cheat, but because he was Jacob. God loves us in our complex isness, and when we get stuck on the image of the totally virtuous and morally perfect person we will never be, we are unable to accept this unqualified love, or to love other people in their rich complexity.
If God can love Jacob – or any single one of us – as we really are, then it is possible for us to turn in love to those who hurt or confuse us. Those we know and those we do not know. And that makes me take a new look at love.
— Madeleine L’Engle, quoted by Carole F. Chase in Glimpses of Grace, p. 194-195
Photo: Étretat, France, June 23, 2026
It takes one to forgive and two to reconcile. Although God freely forgives all of us without condition, we can choose to enter fully into the equation in order for reconciliation with God to happen. And this reconciliation takes place as we turn back to God. God lifts us up into the life of God and we participate joyfully in the new life we have in Christ. We can interpret the cross of Jesus as at-one-ment that deconstructs notions of a violent God bent on retributive justice. We see that the justice of God is love and that love forgives, transforms, and seeks to create new and harmonious relationships. Through the forgiveness of God, a way is opened up for the transformation of all humanity (of creation, to be exact). Through the cross of Jesus, we are forgiven without condition, accepted as we are. Through repentance we are reconciled with God and transformed into those who live in the power of divine love.
Divine justice, therefore, is the act of loving and forgiving, a bottomless, endless, profoundly absurd forgiveness that reaches out in love to all humankind. Our response-ability is to receive it, to enter into the forgiveness of God, reconciled and restored. If, that is, we have eyes to see and ears to hear.
— Sharon L. Baker, Executing God, p. 161
Photo: The Bay of Mont Saint-Michel, France, June 20, 2026
I suspect we sometimes insist that “God is my co-pilot” so we don’t have to fly the plane. “Aqui mando yo” (I call the shots here) is what the stern father or strict husband says tirelessly. Clearly, we need to sidestep what Mirabai Starr calls the “Abusive Father God” and, indeed, replace it with the ceaselessly delighting and sustaining One. The prophet Hosea would say that God wounds us, then heals us. God strikes us, Hosea maintains, then binds our wounds. When God is the cause of everything, it allows for the abusive father who beats our ass, then wipes our tears. A reset is in order. For even when we find ourselves less than delightful, God does not delight in us less.
— Gregory Boyle, Cherished Belonging, p. 17-18
Photo: Monet’s Garden, Giverny, France, June 22, 2026
I am deeply convicted that God’s heart for us is and always has been to live with us. God made us for and out of joy. As my best friend Nora said the day my daughter was baptized: being naked in the Garden was the original plan. This is a key that unlocks so much bad theology, but even more important, knowing that God made us for joy unclenches the chokehold that cynicism and despair have on us.
If God made us – all of us, with tummies and wrinkles and libido and hearts that break and burst with life – for joy, then imagine how joyful life with God could be. If we fully accept this godly delight, who might we become? Who are we already if we let ourselves meet ourselves without malice or intent to harm? What freedom is already here? And what might be even more beautiful than it already is?
— Rev. Lizzie McManus-Dail, God Didn’t Make Us to Hate Us, p. xv
Photo: Water lily from Monet’s Garden, France, June 22, 2026
We should not be surprised or scandalized by the sinful and the tragic. Do what you can to be peace and to do justice, but never expect or demand perfection on this earth. It usually leads to a false moral outrage, a negative identity, intolerance, paranoia, and self-serving crusades against “the contaminating element,” instead of “becoming a new creation” ourselves (Gal. 6:15).
— Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs, p. 179
Photo: Mont Saint-Michel, France, June 20, 2026
I firmly believe that God wants us to leave sin behind, but not because he is some malicious legalist holding every human to an impossible moral standard or because he flies off the handle in anger anytime we do something wrong. God hates sin because sin hurts us. And God hates to see us get hurt.
— Zach W. Lambert, Better Ways to Read the Bible, p. 92
Photo: Parc Botanique de Haut Bretagne, France, June 18, 2026
First, the church needs to stand as a counter-witness to all dehumanizing and nauseating propaganda. Jesus spoke powerfully and directly to this calling as his central message in the Sermon on the Mount: we are taught to love our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us. The vocation of every Christian and of the church as a whole is to stand always against the dehumanization of any person or group. Even when we rightly understand a group or person to be a legitimate threat or to be engaging in active harm, we are tasked with never losing sight of their humanity, their possession of the imago Dei, and the unconditional and undying love that God has for them. Beyond that, the church has been taught to embrace an “upside down” view of the social order wherein those that our community deems least worthy of honor and dignity – the oppressed, poor, and marginalized – are understood to be the very people whom we are most honored to count as members of our body.
— Paul Hoard and Billie Hoard, Eucontamination, p. 192-193
Photo: Cloister, Mont Saint-Michel, France, June 18, 2026.
Peter’s “strange sight” challenges him to face his prejudices. And not just his, but the prejudices of the entire church. Little has changed since Acts 10. We still consider people unclean and unworthy of association. Peter’s “strange sight” calls the church, then and now, to the hard work of facing and dismantling what Paul calls the “wall of hostility” that exists between peoples. If we want to “discern the spirits,” to sort out if a prompting or calling is coming from God, let’s pay attention to Peter. When your enchantment causes you to embrace people you have treated as unclean, that looks a whole lot like the work of the Holy Spirit.
— Richard Beck, Hunting Magic Eels, p. 222-223
Photo: Parc Botanique de Haut Bretagne, France, June 19, 2026
There are a lot of things I cannot be certain of, but I am certain that God is not fragile. Nor is God in the business of creating subjugated people with no liberty to question or to wonder. Arguing not only with God but also with God’s sacred text is a path toward our liberation, a way of pushing back against the forces of injustice that plague us.
Humans are thinking and feeling creatures, passionate at times, and the Spirit of God invites all of that – all the critical thinking, all the deep engagement, all the reasoning together – into the relationship we have together. This intimacy, this authenticity, goes to the very heart of what it is to know and be known by Spirit.
If you can bare your angst, your frustrations, your disagreements, and your dread to someone, yet they are unshaken, what sort of healing and liberation might be found with this person? How much more so should this be true with the divine? To argue with God is to belong to God; it is to embrace a love that surpasses all understanding – and be transformed by it.
— Kat Armas, Sacred Belonging, p. 62
Photo: Giverny, France, June 16, 2026