Wise Words

Sometimes the words we share linger on the page so we can read and think about them time and again.

From our first meeting together on 10/5/02, one mother (unnamed) made the comment: “I am living in a different book now.”

“We are parents—Hope’s parents…Wes and Andy’s parents. The heart never forgets what being a parent feels like.” (Written in an email on July 26, 2006 from Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China shortly after becoming Hope’s parents)~Beverly Burton

9/30/06 After several years of writing to prompts from which we found much help, one mother said: “All our husbands could use a prompt.”~Kelly Sechrist

10/1/06 “It’s good to hear each other’s voices on the page.”~Carol Henderson

4/22/07 About the difference in her life before and after Rebecca’s death, “I did have everything I wanted; now I have everything that’s happened.”~Peggy Clover

4/24/10 After a prompt about life jackets, “Some of our kids were locked in place, but they still slipped away.”~Julie Hester

11/8/03 From a chapter called “Healing” in Practicing Our Faith, edited by Dorothy Bass, Beth Baldwin shared this description:

“...healing comes primarily through a mutual bearing of emotional burdens and a deep bonding within the group…..The experience of the group recapitulates the insight that the most profound words of healing are spoken by unlettered saints of suffering……No ordained ministers belong to this group, yet Schmidt believes that these fellow sufferers become, in truth, priests for one another.”

“Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak
Whispers the o’er-fraught heart, and bids it break.”
–Malcolm in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth

“We usually think of time as a river, a river like the Nile, with strong, swift current bearing us further and further away from what we have been and towards the time when we will be not at all . . . But perhaps we should think of time as a deep, still pool rather than a fast-flowing river . . . Instead of looking back at time we could look down into it . . . and now again different features of the past—different sights and sounds and voices and dreams—would rise to the surface: rise and subside, and the deep pool would hold them all, so that nothing was lost and nothing ever went away.” ~by a scholar of ancient Egypt (from The Long Goodbye, A Memoir, by Meghan O’Rourke)

“I feel the same way about solitude as some people feel about the blessing of the church. It’s the light of grace for me. I never close my door behind me without the awareness that I am carrying out an act of mercy toward myself.” Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg

“Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.” Annie Dillard

Wise words from our children:

2/21/01 “You’d be surprised how different the view is on the way out than on the way in.”~Katie Sleap