William P. Young
I really do believe that God is love, one of deep affection and grace and forgiveness and inspiration.Collection: Easter
I was raised in a tribal situation, among cannibal people.
I think people are tired of religion and how it divides and damages people. You can name it whatever you want, Islam or Christianity, but if you have a system in which God is distant and angry all the time, and you're trying to please him through the right disciplines, it isn't going to work for everyone.
I'm an accidental writer.
You cannot heal yourself. You cannot heal anybody else. We're designed to do this in community because we were created inside community for community by community.
Part of my journey is to say that the soul of the human being must be a massively intricate, wonderful creation that God has a respect for in ways that we do not and that leaves a huge amount of space to go explore.
Jesus is not the 'founder of Christianity.'
I had a very angry father and was disconnected from my family.
Forgiveness is not about forgetting. It is about letting go of another person's throat.Collection: Forgiveness
...if anything matters then everything matters. Because you are important, everything you do is important. Every time you forgive, the universe changes; every time you reach out and touch a heart or a life, the world changes; with every kindness and service, seen or unseen, my purposes are accomplished and nothing will be the same again.Collection: Kindness
Most birds were created to fly. Being grounded for them is a limitation within their ability to fly, not the other way around. You, on the other hand, were created to be loved. So for you to live as if you were unloved is a limitation, not the other way around. Living unloved is like clipping a bird’s wings and removing its ability to fly. Not something I want for you. Pain has a way of clipping our wings and keeping us from being able to fly. And if left unresolved for very long, you can almost forget that you were ever created to fly in the first place.Collection: Pain
Don't ever discount the wonder of your tears. They can be healing waters and a stream of joy. Sometimes they are the best words the heart can speak.Collection: Healing
Trust is the fruit of a relationship in which you know you are loved.Collection: Relationship
There is always risk in relationships, but bottom line? The world has no meaning apart from relationships. Some are just messier than others, some are seasonal, others are difficult, and a few are easy, but every one of them is important.Collection: Risk
Just because I work incredible good out of unspeakable tragedies doesn't mean I orchestrate the tragedies. Don't ever assume that my using something means I caused it or that I need it to accomplish my purposes. That will only lead you to false notions about me. Grace doesn't depend on suffering to exist, but where there is suffering you will find grace in many facets and colors.Collection: Mean
Paradigms power perception and perceptions power emotions. Most emotions are responses to perception - what you think is true about a given situation. If your perception is false, then your emotional response to it will be false too. So check your perceptions, and beyond that check the truthfulness of your paradigms - what you believe. Just because you believe something firmly doesn't make it true. Be willing to reexamine what you believe.Collection: Believe
Grace doesn't depend on suffering to exist, but where there is suffering you will find grace in many facets and colors.Collection: Color
Pain has a way of clipping our wings and keeping us from being able to fly.Collection: Pain
Somehow the pain, the losses, the hurt, the bad, God is able to transform these into something they could have never been, icons and monuments of grace and love. It is the deep mystery how wounds and scars can become precious, or a ravaging and terrifying cross the essential symbol of relentless affection.” “Is it worth it?” whispered Tony. “Wrong question, son. There is no ‘it.’ The question is and has always been, ‘Are you worth it?’ and the answer is and always, ‘Yes!’Collection: Hurt
It grants you the power to judge others and feel superior to them. You believe you are living to a higher standard than those you judge. Enforcing rules, especially in more subtle expressions like responsibility and expectation, is a vain attempt to create certainly out of uncertainty. And contrary to what you might think, I have a great fondness for uncertainty. Rules cannot bring freedom; they only have the power to accuse.Collection: Believe
Love always leaves a significant mark.Collection: Significant
The God of Evangelical Christianity is a Monster.Collection: Monsters
when I live in you, then together we can live through everything that happens to you.Collection: Together We Can
Jesus is not the 'founder of Christianity.Collection: Jesus
religion is about having the right answers, and some of their answers are right... but i am about the process that takes you to the living answer... it will change you from the inside. there are a lot of smart people who are able to say a lot of right things from their brain because they have been told what the right answers are, but they don't know me at all.Collection: Smart
You are free to love without an agendaCollection: Agendas
The ability to choose is at the essential core of our grandeur. Even evil exists because God respects our ability to choose.Collection: Evil
Healing is as incremental and mysterious as the damage ... what took time, takes time.Collection: Healing
Submission is not about authority and it is not obedience; it is all about relationships of love and respect.Collection: Relationship
You have to take the time to prepare the soil if you want to embrace the seed.Collection: Want
It's always been you know, religion that has been the primary impediment to actual relationship with God, because it creates a mythology about performance -- that you can perform your way into the appeasement of the deity. And you know, when you're born inside the cultural framework that I was, and you're born inside the religious traditions that I was, that becomes your understanding of spirituality: That it's about trying to please God. So, it's really not about God at all; it's about our ability to perform according to whatever the expectations are.Collection: Religious
I don't just want a piece of you and a piece of your life. Even if you were able, which you are not, to give me the biggest piece, that is not what I want. I want all of you and all of every part of you and your day.Collection: Giving
Why would the God of the universe want to be submitted to me?' Because we want you to join us in our circle of relationship. I don't want slaves to my will; I want brothers and sisters who will share life with me.Collection: Brother
Each relationship between two persons is absolutely unique. That is why you cannot love two people the same. It simply is not possible. You love each person differently because of who they are and the uniqueness that they draw out of you.Collection: Love
"Pain has a way of clipping our wings and keeping us from being able to fly"... "And if left unresolved you can almost forget that you were ever created to fly in the first place."Collection: Pain
Evangelicals have like millions of rules. And it's just, uh, we have sort of an accepted, rationalism within which we frame religion. And we think that belief, intellectually, is of the same as relationship. And in our Western family conversation, that's become an incredible impediment toward actual wholeness, where the heart and the head are aligned and relationship -- with not just God but with each other.Collection: Heart
It is remarkable how a seemingly insignificant action or event can change entire lives.Collection: Events
You do understand," she continued, "that unless I had an object to love -- or, more accurately, a someone to love -- if I did not have such a relationship within myself, then I would not be capable of love at all? You would have a god who could not love. Or maybe worse, you would have a god who, when he chose, could love only as a limitation of his nature.Collection: Objects
I give you an ability to respond and your response is to be free to love and serve in every situation, and therefore each moment is different and unique and wonderful.Collection: Unique
If you and I are friends, there is an expectancy that exists within our relationship. When we see each other or are apart, there is an expectancy of being together, of laughing and talking. The expectancy has no concrete definition; it is alive and dynamic and everything that emerges from our being together is a unique gift shared by no one else.Collection: Unique
Truth will set you free. And Truth has a name.Collection: Truth Will Set You Free
The world in many ways would be a much calmer and gentler place if women ruled. There would have been fewer children sacrificed to the gods of greed and power.Collection: Children
It is so easy to get sucked into the if-only game, and playing it is a short and slippery slide into despair.Collection: Games
The intricacy and the inherent beautiful fragility of the human soul is such that it is uniquely damaged and only God knows how to heal it, and it's going to take time.Collection: Beautiful
Because you continue to inhabit and believe your metaphors, you cannot see what is true.Collection: Believe
Through . . . lies you try to run your life and manipulate others. . . . Lies become an inhibitor in your relationship . . . .Collection: Running
Emotions are the colors of the soul.Collection: Color
I have moments that aren't too bad, but there's always something I'm struggling with, or feeling guilty about. I just figured I needed to try harder, but I find it difficult to sustain that motivation.Collection: Motivation
I make a distinction between true and real. I think that the story is true, it’s just not real. That’s what a parable is. It takes things that we all know are real, and it takes life events that actually happens, and it weaves them into a fiction that allows truth to actually be embedded.Collection: Real
Every human being is a universe within themselves. Your mother and father participated with God to create a soul who would never cease to exist. Your parents, as co-creators, supplied the stuff, genetics and more, uniquely combined to form a masterpiece, not flawless but still astounding; and we took from their hands what they brought to us, submitting to their timing and history and added what only we could bring to them -- life. You were conceived, a living wonder who exploded into being.Collection: Mother