182/365

The sun radiated white bright and white hot. The long days of the last week wore us down a bit and at the very first misunderstanding, our words came out swift and short and searing. My first choice would be to run and hide but that's not a choice this day. And of course, it has to be a day like this when I find myself smack in the middle of a book on transforming grace...

     "I need to be broken apart and put back into a different shape by that merging of things human and divine, which is really screwing up and receiving grace and love and forgiveness rather than receiving what I really deserve. I need the very thing that I will do everything I can to avoid needing.

     The sting of grace is not unlike the sting of being loved well, because when we are loved well, it is inextricably linked to all the times we have not been loved well, all the times we ourselves have not loved others well, and all the things we've done or not done that feel like evidence against our unworthiness. Love and grace are such deceivingly soft words- but they both sting like hell and then go and change the shape of our hearts and make us into something that we couldn't create ourselves to be."

- Accidental Saints by Nadia Bolz-Weber