The deceased was the tragic hero, the survivors the innocent victims; there was the omnipresence of the deity, strophe and antistrophe of the chorus of mourners led by the preacher. There was grief over the waste of life, the stunned wonder at the ways of God, and the restoration of order in nature at the graveyard.

Now when his child falls and scrapes her knee, a loving father is certainly going to scoop her up in his arms, carry her into the house to treat the wound, and hold her close while she cries. That's what God does for us in our pain. But a wise father will also encourage his child to go back out and try it again, because that's the only way to learn to ride a bike.

Catastrophe is the time to run into God's arms, not away from them.

As Søren Kierkegaard says in the opening pages of The Sickness unto Death (the sickness in question is despair): "Everything essentially Christian must have in its presentation a resemblance to the way a physician speaks at the sickbed.

You cannot understand how intense depression and anxiety can be unless you have been there, and not every chemical imbalance signifies a demon. Sometimes we need to give people permission to take medication if they need it—which, by the way, is a huge no-no in many Christian circles.

Great tragedy has come to us, and we are meeting it with the best that is in our country, with courage and concern for others because this is America. This is who we are.

I'll write long sad tales about people in the legend of my life - This part is my part of the movie, let's hear yours.

Are we fallen angels who didn't want to believe that nothing is nothing and so were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?…

Everybody has losses - it's unavoidable in life. Sharing our pain is very healing.

You can't have this kind of war. There just aren't enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.

My God, what have they done to you? This isn't a man, it's a broken kite.

God lets you go through challenges to give you credibility in a certain area and the ability to help someone else out of a situation that you once were in.