One of my favorite authors is Brennan Manning. I haven’t read a book of his in a while so the other day I picked up one I haven’t read yet. It’s called “The wisdom of tenderness.” This book talks about the radical power of God’s mercy in our lives.
Some of my favorite quotes from the book:
“None of us has ever seen a motive. Therefore, we don’t know , we can’t do anything more than suspect what inspires the action of another. For this good and valid reason, we’re told not to judge.”
“The point is quite simple: most of the time (because we can’t see motive) we are wrong in our judgments about others. The tragedy is that our attention centers on what people are not, rather than on what the are and who they might become.”
“How I treat a brother from day to day, how I react to the sin-scarred wino on the street, how I respond to interruptions from people I dislike, how I deal with normal people in their normal unbelief on a normal day – all this may reveal my reverence or irreverence for the Abba of Jesus more than the anti-abortion sticker on the bumper of my car.”
“It is effortless for God to forgive God delights in forgiveness, because his forgiveness generates new life in us”
“When we deny our inherent spiritual poverty, when we get too affluently involved with ourselves, danger lurks. We may begin to make demands on God for things that we think we deserve, often leading to anger and frustration.”