reconciliation

How can you love those who have stolen from you, assaulted or abused you, or tried to blow you up and completely destroy you? How can you forgive those who have kidnapped, tortured and killed someone you love? Yet this is where reconciliation has to begin.

Forgiveness is the virtue of the courageous, the response of the forgiven, the mercy of the just.

And when Jesus declared, 'It is finished,' He meant it. God__ punishment for our sin was paid for, permanently settled, finished_ 100 percent. If you have responded in faith to God__ free pardon through Jesus, then God will never punish you for your sin. It__ finished. No more. If you screw up today or tomorrow (which you will), it__ already been paid for through Jesus. 'There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,' Paul said (Rom. 8: 1). None. God will not and cannot condemn you after He has already condemned Jesus for you. It__ impossible. God will never be angry with you since His anger was poured out on Jesus. All of it. One hundred percent.Charis: God's Scandalous Grace for Us (p. 169).

It is then he realises that certain things loom larger than forgiveness and reconciliation: memory, for one, and history, bloody history.

We're on a planet. At the same time. In the Universe ... Let's do something Great Together!

Truth can be told in an instant, forgiveness can be offered spontaneously, but reconciliation is the work of lifetimes and generations.

I am sure that if we can find reconciliation with our past _ whether parents, partners or friends _ we should try and do that. It won't be perfect, it will be a compromise . . . but it might mean acceptance and, the big word, forgiveness.

I knew that to really minister to Rwanda's needs meant working toward reconciliation in the prisons, in the churches, and in the cities and villages throughout the country. It meant feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, caring for the young, but it also meant healing the wounded and forgiving the unforgivable.I knew I had to be committed to preaching a transforming message to the people of Rwanda. Jesus did not die for people to be religious. He died so that we might believe in Him and be transformed. I'm engaged in a purpose and strategy that Jesus came to Earth for. My life is set for that divine purpose in Jesus Christ. I was called to that--proclaiming the message of transformation through Jesus Christ.

God wills our liberation, our exodus from Egypt. God wills our reconciliation, our return from exile. God wills our enlightenment, our seeing. God wills our forgiveness, our release from sin and guilt. God wills that we see ourselves as God__ beloved. God wills our resurrection, our passage from death to life. God wills for us food and drink that satisfy our hunger and thirst. God wills, comprehensively, our well-being__ot just my well-being as an individual but the well-being of all of us and of the whole of creation. In short, God wills our salvation, our healing, here on earth. The Christian life is about participating in the salvation of God.

Do everything in mindfulness so you can really be there, so you can love.

Prayer, desperate prayer, seems so simple, but it__ a step rarely taken by those in family conflict.

In life, we make the best decisions we can with the information we have on hand.

Many people today agree that we need to reduce violence in oursociety. If we are truly serious about this, we must deal with theroots of violence, particularly those that exist within each of us. Weneed to embrace 'inner disarmament,' reducing our own emotions ofsuspicion, hatred and hostility toward our brothers and sisters.

In all societies, both women and men are powerfully conditioned to repress the daily realities of (sexual harassment and workplace glass ceilings) and to collude with the rest of society in keeping these dimensions of shared experiences hidden.

Sadly, our society still perpetuates the false ideal that a real man should be all masculine, and a real woman all feminine. Neither is possible, nor desirable.

Neither group working alone can create gender balance in society. The sexes must work together for this balance to be realized, collaborating in courageous new forms of experiential and transformative modalities.

Why not laugh again, and let your joy be my monument?

We must content ourselves with the mystery, the absurdity, the contradictions, the hostility, but also the generosity that our environment offers us. It's not much, but it's always better than the deadly, defeatist certainty of the paranoid.