Reflect, Resonate, Reevaluate, Respond

Tragically, we use contempt daily without being aware of what we are doing. How does contempt spread its poison in our everyday encounters? […] Ignoring our emotions is turning our back on reality; listening to our emotions ushers us into reality. And reality is where we meet God.
~ Dan Allender, 1952-, Psychologist and Author/Speaker

~~~~~~~~~~ Psalms 123-124 ~~~~~~~~~~

Jesus covers us through the cross and his blood, but never without pointing out and exposing the depths of what our hearts are truly like. Our covering is not about hiding. Jesus has the integrity to name every wound you have suffered and every wound you have caused. [A]nd our covering is not hiding.
~ Dan Allender

My devotion to niceness has won me a lot of acceptance and praise, but it has also inhibited my courage, fed my self-righteousness, encouraged my inauthenticity, and produced in me a flimsy sweetness that easily gives way to disdain.
~ Sharon Hodde Miller, Pastor, Author, Teacher

Attention is the beginning of devotion.
~ Mary Oliver, 1935-2019, Poet

Self-contempt intertwines itself masterfully with the data of our story. I see this time and again with clients. I help them name harm they have known from a parent and they begin to experience deep grief. And yet within seconds, their posture tightens and their tears dry up in a flash. Almost without fail, memories of their own failures as a parent or a friend, sibling or spouse have immediately come to their mind. The initial experience of rest and relief vanishes before our eyes, stolen away before it has a chance to settle in. The inherent message seems to be that it is hypocritical to name other’s failure when you too have failed; that this was a fool’s pathway to begin with and nothing lasting will come of those self-indulgent tears. The work of contempt is swift and brutal.
~ Andrew Ide, Fellow, Allender Center

Self-righteousness exclaims, “I will not be saved in God’s way; I will make a new road to heaven; I will not bow before God’s grace; I will not accept the atonement which God has wrought out in the person of Jesus; I will be my own redeemer.”
~ Charles Spurgeon, Sermon 502: A Jealous God, 1863

Reflect, Resonate, Reevaluate, Respond

Dangers bring fears, and fears more dangers bring.
~ Richard Baxter, 1615-1691, English Puritan leader

You can have no influence over those for whom you have underlying contempt.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Psalm 123 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The absence of tumult, more than its presence, is an enemy of the soul. God meets you in your weakness, not in your strength. He comforts those who mourn, not those who live above desperation. He reveals Himself more often in darkness than in the happy moments of life.
~ Dan B. Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

The everlasting covenant which God has made with Jesus, and through Jesus with all His beloved people, individually, is a strong ground of consolation amidst the tremblings of human hope, the fluctuations of creature things, and the instability of all that earth calls good.
~ Octavius Winslow, 1808-1878, Non-conformist Minister

The line between good and evil does not lie between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ between the West and the rest, between Left and Right, between rich and poor. That fateful line runs down the middle of each of us, every human society, every individual. This is not to say that all humans, and all societies, are equally good or bad; far from it. Merely that we are all infected and that all easy attempts to see the problem in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’ are fatally flawed.
~ N. T. Wright, professor of Early Christianity at the University of St. Andrews

God had one son on earth without sin, but never one without suffering.
~ Augustine, 354-430, Theologian, Philosopher