To miss out on joy is to miss out on the reason for your existence. Lewis B. Smedes More Quotes by Lewis B. Smedes More Quotes From Lewis B. Smedes I am personally thankful that we live together in a large moral house even if we do not drink at the same fountain of faith. The world we experience together is one world, God's world, and our world, and the problems we share are common human problems. So we can talk together, try to understand each other, and help each other. Lewis B. Smedes our-world community house If we say that monsters [people who do terrible evil] are beyond forgiving, we give them a power they should never have...they are given the power to keep their evil alive in the hearts of those who suffered most. We give them power to condemn their victims to live forever with the hurting memory of their painful pasts. We give the monsters the last word. Lewis B. Smedes forgiveness hurt memories The first and often only person to be healed by forgiveness is the person who does the forgiveness... When we genuinely forgive, we set a prisoner free and then discover that the prisoner we set free was us. Lewis B. Smedes forgiving doe firsts I have discovered that most people who tell me that they cannot forgive a person who wronged them are handicapped by a mistaken understanding of what forgiving is. Lewis B. Smedes forgiveness understanding people Gandhi was right: if we all live by 'an eye for an eye' the whole world will be blind. The only way out is forgiveness. Lewis B. Smedes forgiveness eye world A wise judge may let mercy temper justice but may not let mercy undo it. Lewis B. Smedes forgiveness judging wise The secret of grace is that it can be all right at the center even when it is all wrong on the edges. Lewis B. Smedes edges grace secret Can you stop your memory on a dime, put it in reverse, and spin it in another direction the way you can reverse direction on a tape recorder? We cannot forget on command. So we just have to let the forgetting happen as it will; we shouldn't rush it, and we certainly should not doubt the genuineness of our forgiving if we happen to remember. The really important thing is that we have the power to forgive what we still do remember. Lewis B. Smedes forgiving doubt memories 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. Lewis B. Smedes partner friend you 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. Lewis B. Smedes lie know doubt believe 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. Lewis B. Smedes us wrong person who Nothing enables us to forgive like knowing in our hearts that we have been forgiven. Lewis B. Smedes forgive us nothing like Seeing reality for what it is is what we call discernment. The work of discernment is very hard. Lewis B. Smedes hard seeing work reality The right to personal privacy is precious. Without it, we are all potential victims for a prying secret police. Lewis B. Smedes precious personal privacy police The Holy Spirit, thank God, often enables people to forgive even though they are not sure how they did it. Lewis B. Smedes thank-god spirit god people Our sense of fairness tells us that people should pay for the wrong they do. Lewis B. Smedes us wrong fairness people God is not a doormat, nor should anyone else be a doormat. Lewis B. Smedes nor else should god Any lazy or biased fool can have opinions; making judgments is the hard work of responsible and compassionate people. Lewis B. Smedes fool hard-work work people 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. Lewis B. Smedes repair injury victim justice Sometimes I like to list the strongest arguments I can find to support a point of view I think is wrong. When I have them before me, I am up against a real opponent rather than a hypothetical one that is an easy target for me to hit. Lewis B. Smedes i-am me support sometimes
