21 Quotes by Sarah Christmyer

Just because the Fall ripped [goodness and beauty] apart and beauty can be misused doesn’t mean they can’t go together. It’s not true that goodness comes only in plain and ugly packages, or that beauty has to hide a rotten core.

Returning love for harm transforms injury into a thing of lasting beauty. Pouring love onto another’s need does the same thing.

Because of God's immense love for us we can throw ourselves on him in our pain, whatever its source, even in the self-inflicted pain of sin. We can cry, we can yell, we can beg like a child who screams "Mo...m!" at the first sign of trouble, who assumes she can and will help. God can and will help, and he wants to.

There's a reason Psalm 51 is the best known of the Penitential Psalms and one of the best-loved psalms of all. It speaks to the deep pain we feel inside us when we sin, and then it shows us the mercy of God. His is the love of a Father who sees his child's stricken face — washes the tears away — and then reaches inside to create in us "a clean heart;" to breathe "a new and right spirit" within us.

The Psalms are a school of prayer in which we can learn to gather our troubles, fears, inadequacies, and needs and take them to the One who loves us. With confidence, we can cry with the psalmist, "O Lord, make haste to help me!

God doesn’t have visiting hours, neither does he sleep. He’s there whenever we need him.

By borrowing this language from {Old Testament] scripture, Luke shows us that what was from the start a distinguishing feature of God's people—his presence among them in the Ark of the Covenant—was only a hint of the far more marvelous truth. Mary is a "new Ark" through which not only God's glorious presence but also God himself in the flesh comes to live in and with his people!

God always can bring a greater good out of a bad situation, even a terribly evil one

Nothing can separate us from [God’s] love, and he has a way of turning even the blackest situations (think of the Cross!) into occasions of life and glory.