LEWIS B. SMEDES

My father was only thirty-one when he died of a heart attack, much too young for a father to die and leave his young wife with five rambunctious little kids to take care of. I was the youngest. Only a couple of months old when he died.

Any lazy or biased fool can have opinions; making judgments is the hard work of responsible and compassionate people.

God does not give us salvation because we believe. Our believing is only the normal way of receiving the salvation he freely gives.

Our society is pluralistic. We who accept the privilege of membership in that society agree to respect the people's right to live by their own religious precepts.

The Holy Spirit, thank God, often enables people to forgive even though they are not sure how they did it.

Our history is an inevitable component of our being. One thing only can release us from the grip of our history. That one thing is forgiveness.

Restorative justice is not a replacement of retributive justice, but a complement. It seeks the rehabilitation of the wrongdoer and the repair of the victim's injury.

You will know that forgiveness has begun when you recall those who hurt you and feel the power to wish them well.

When we have been badly injured and clearly wronged, we make an instant caricature of the person who did it to us. We define him totally by the one wrong he did.

The blood of Christ covers all of our sins, but each of us must do personal business with God in order to experience his forgiveness.

I believe that we should, on biblical grounds, tell all parents of mentally disabled children that God loves their children, regrets terribly that they are disabled, and will, when they die, carry them gently into a heavenly life where every person is forever whole.

Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future.

Some people still have causes they will not desert, even though the cause seems lost.

Nothing is more private than a woman's body; it is her physical, emotional, and moral citadel. She cannot be free at all if she is not free to decide for herself, in private, what to do with her body.

Forgiving is love's toughest work, and love's biggest risk.

Some people have loved ones they will not forsake, even though they are a pain in the neck.

Common sense suggests that if no one ever judged other people, there would be no real human community.

To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.

The right to personal privacy is precious. Without it, we are all potential victims for a prying secret police.

Seeing reality for what it is is what we call discernment. The work of discernment is very hard.

God is not a doormat, nor should anyone else be a doormat.

As I read the New Testament, I find only one path to salvation - the path of an informed faith in Jesus Christ.

What is a disloyal act? A person is disloyal if he treats you as a stranger when, in fact, he belongs to you as a friend or partner. Each of us is bound to some special others by the invisible fibers of loyalty.

No doubt, corporate CEOs who lie to their shareholders and politicians who lie to their public know and believe intellectually that lying is immoral. Why then do they lie? They lie to others because they first lie to themselves.

Modern Americans suffer from a fear of judging. Passing judgment on the behavior of fellow human beings is considered an act of medieval, undemocratic intolerance.