Quotes About Healing

for the resulting chasms of ungrace there is only one remedy: the frail rope-bridge of forgiveness

Breaking the cycle of ungrace means taking the initiative.

Forgiveness has its own extraordinary power which reaches beyond law and beyond justice.

Forgiveness is achingly difficult, and long after you've forgiven, the wound—my dastardly deeds—lives on in memory.

One of the most important things we can do for a suffering person is to restore a sense of meaning or significance to the experience.

Alcoholics Anonymous discovered long ago that the path toward cure involves more than a quick-fix solution based on increased knowledge. In fact, it involves a change that seems more theological than educational. Somehow the "victim" of addictive behavior must regain an underlying sense of human dignity and choice, a profound reawakening that usually requires much time, attention, and love.

the sound of a man forgiving.

forgiveness, and only forgiveness, can begin the thaw in the guilty party.

Despite a hundred sermons on forgiveness, we do not forgive easily, nor find ourselves easily forgiven.

Forgiveness—undeserved, unearned—can cut the cords and let the oppressive burden of guilt roll away.

Forgiveness, we discover, is always harder than the sermons make it out to be

Forgiveness breaks the cycle of blame and loosens the stranglehold of guilt. It accomplishes these two things through a remarkable linkage, placing the forgiver on the same side as the party who did the wrong.

He who cannot forgive another breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself. GEORGE HERBERT

Law merely indicated the sickness; grace brought about the cure.

forgiveness is an act of faith.

involvement with others was the most effective in quelling her pain.

Though wrong does not disappear when I forgive, it loses its grip on me and is taken over by God, who knows what to do. Such a decision involves risk, of course: the risk that God may not deal with the person as I would want.

Lewis Smedes points out, "The first and often the only person to be healed by forgiveness is the person who does the forgiveness. . . . When we genuinely forgive, we set a prisoner free and then discover that the prisoner we set free was us.

He had not come primarily to heal the world's cells, but to heal its souls.

The only thing harder than forgiveness is the alternative.

As Christ's body on earth we are compelled to move, as he did, toward those who hurt. That has been God's consistent movement in all history.

by embracing grief and standing beside the hurting person, we can indeed aid another's search for meaning.

Where is God when it hurts? I have often asked. The answer is another question, Where is the church when it hurts?

Dr. Paul Tournier expresses this pattern in the language of psychiatry: "God blots out conscious guilt, but He brings to consciousness repressed guilt.