How many enemies were headed my way whose battle lines I never saw and whose piercing arrows never flew in my direction because God destroyed them before I ever caught sight of them, or they of me? More than I can count, but never more than God can destroy.

Sometimes to destroy the monsters that we face, we have to come against them in the same way that they have come against us. But if I do so in the power of God, I might have come against them in the same way, but I have come against them with a very kind of different power. And in that sense, nothing is the same.

Mistakes are the enemies that I’ve made of them because I’ve chosen to believe that they are the stuff of my ruin instead of the ingredients of my success.

It is less that you are an adversary and more that you are someone with an opinion that (although frightening to me) might in some way enrich my own. And if I raise myself to being a partner with you on this mutual journey of ours, and if I refuse to bow to the posture of being a frightened adversary as you intersect my journey with a journey different than my own, we can profoundly change what we would have otherwise both died wrestling over.