Quote of the Day

  Professor and bestselling author Jerry Sittser, after suffering the loss of his wife, mother, and youngest daughter in a car accident at the hands of a drunk driver, shares his thoughts on how we face our losses...  

  " We do not always have the freedom to choose the roles we must play in life, but we can choose how we are going to play the roles we have been given. Choice is therefore the key. We can run from the darkness, or we can enter into the darkness and face the pain of loss. We can indulge ourselves in self-pity, or we can empathize with others and embrace their pain as our own. We can run from sorrow and drown it in addictions, or we can learn to live with sorrow. We can nurse the wounds of having been cheated in life, or we can be grateful and joyful, even though there seems to be little reason for it. We can return evil for evil, or we can overcome evil with good. It is this power to choose that adds dignity to our humanity and gives us the ability to transcend our circumstances, thus releasing us from living as mere victims. These choices are never easy. Though we can and must make them, we will make them more often than not only after much agony and struggle.

 ...It is therefore not true that we become less through loss - unless we allow the loss to make us less, grinding our soul down until there is nothing left but an external self entirely under the control of circumstances. Loss can make us more. In the darkness we can still find the light. In death we can also find life. It depends on the choices we make."

                    - Jerry Sittser in A Grace Disguised *

* This book is available wherever books are sold and is copyrighted 2004.