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9991fce
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Fasting from any nourishment, activity, involvement or pursuit--for any season--sets the stage for God to appear. Fasting is not a tool to pry wisdom out of God's hands or to force needed insight about a decision. Fasting is not a tool for gaining discipline or developing piety (whatever that might be). Instead, fasting is the bulimic act of ridding ourselves of our fullness to attune our senses to the mysteries that swirl in and around us...
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senses
mysteries
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Dan B. Allender |
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9fd093c
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Too often we think sharing our weaknesses will cause us to lose respect. We think making our weaknesses know will cause us to lose the honour to be able to proclaim the Word of God in our congregations or our businesses. I know longer believe that is true. Not today, in our post modern culture. What I do believe is the more you tell the truth about yourself - appropriately, winsomely, age-appropriately, within a context - the more effective..
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Dan B. Allender |
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41f1384
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Genuine trust involves allowing another to matter and have an impact in our lives. For that reason, many who hate and do battle with God trust Him more deeply than those whose complacent faith permits an abstract and motionless stance before Him. Those who trust God most are those whose faith permits them to risk wrestling with Him over the deepest questions of life. Good hearts are captured in a divine wrestling match; fearful, doubting he..
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Dan B. Allender |
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ad69481
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But the part of ourselves we hate the most is our longing to be wanted and enjoyed.
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Dan B. Allender |
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64ad0b6
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The damage done through abuse is awful and heinous, but minor compared to the dynamics that distort the victim's relationship with God and rob her of the joy of loving and being loved by others.
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Dan B. Allender |
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c5e2a4b
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So take seriously the story that God has given you to live. It's time to read your own life, because your story is the one that could set us all ablaze.
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Dan B. Allender |
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2b10237
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I know without a question you love me and you know I love you, but I am unwilling to let your awkwardness with personal conversations keep us at a distance. Now let's be clear. I'll call when I want to, for as long as I want to, and I will ask anything I want about how you are feeling, what you think of as you face death, what your relationship is with the Lord, and anything else I want to know. You can do as you choose. Hang up on me. Refu..
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Dan B. Allender |
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04c3987
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One of our greatest failures in our busy, driven culture is that we don't celebrate the temporary untying of a complex narrative...What is your style of celebrating an ending? Do you only throw large parties after someone graduates, gets married, or dies? If so, then all the other endings in your story are lost in the wake of another day's busyness. Perhaps one of the reasons you and I don't party well, is that we don't know what to do with..
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false-self
healing
true-self
community
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Dan B. Allender |
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9943267
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In those moments of unnaming when we have lost ourselves, we must remember to return to our past redemptions to find God's mark of glory on our abandonment, betrayal, and shame. We wrongly believe that we will be happy if we can escape the past. But without our past we are hollow and plastic beings who have only common names and conventional stories. When we enter into our story at the point we lost our name, we are most likely to hear the ..
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grief
lament
healing
true-self
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Dan B. Allender |
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2a924c5
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Courage is fear that has said its prayers."5"
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Dan B. Allender |
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e87a1bc
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We're in the presence of a good story when the flaw that shatters shalom is also the doorway to redemption... Whether it be our own flaw or the sin of others, God uses the raw material of sin to create the edifice of his redeemed glory. The point cannot be overemphasized: your plight is also your redemption. The Bible assumes that its stories are also our story... We are Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Their stories are a paradigm of our own. Ea..
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shalom
true-self
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Dan B. Allender |
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6afce35
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The triggering event and resulting shame is worse than being rejected because rejection assumes a path by which to return to acceptability. The fear involved in shame is of permanent abandonment, or exile. Those who see our reprehensible core will be so disgusted and sickened that we will be a leper and an outcast forever.
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Dan B. Allender |
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8df19e1
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Hope refuses to believe that the inevitable is so. What has always been and can't change is an illusion; if anything is true, it is that change is inevitable, not that the inevitable will not change. But evil caustically replies, Nonsense. It is what it is. You will only be more discouraged and frustrated until you accept reality.
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Dan B. Allender |
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f907ee1
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The reluctant leader doesn't merely give accolades to others. It is her true joy to see others awaken to their potential and exceed their greatest dreams. It is the hope of every good teacher to have students who take their work further than the teacher was able to do. To be surpassed is the ideal. To be replaced is the goal, not a sign of failure.
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Dan B. Allender |
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f0ecdf6
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We are what we choose. And we choose whatever our deepest passion compels us to be and to do. To understand the truth of this simple principle, we must examine choice's power to shape our character.
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Dan B. Allender |
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2a95216
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We each see ourselves as being a certain kind of person with a specific set of values, beliefs, and dreams. In practice, however, we often are not what we want to be but instead end up choosing what others expect us to be. This is called our ought self. Avoid it.
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Dan B. Allender |
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e8518b5
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Our ideal self is revealed in what we value (passion), how we understand the world (belief), and what we do to reach our ideal (behavior). Our passion, belief, and behavior fit together so intimately that I can say this with confidence: * What we do is what we really value.
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Dan B. Allender |
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70e5d62
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Tragedy always moves our story forward in a way shalom could never accomplish.
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shalom
healing
true-self
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Dan B. Allender |
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0941e96
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So we grow up in a sea of stories told in a way that fits what we want others to know about us. The stories told in most families are a kind of propaganda. The tragedy is that often these stories are simply a form of dis-information... But our families name us without knowing the consequences. So our life is a journey to discover our true name, though; sadly many of us never choose to begin that search.
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true-self
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Dan B. Allender |
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48fed48
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God is not bound by time, nor is our story. We desperately want our situation to be solved. We want resolution. But, God unfolds the plot in His own time. It is in our months or years of waiting that our story comes to maturity. It is over a lifetime of stories that he turns our desire toward Him.
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healing
waiting
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Dan B. Allender |
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8e2ddf6
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A denouement is not a complete or fully resolved ending but a satisfying closure to a story. [in French translates 'an untying, a relaxing of a knot of complexity'] Denouement is the rest that comes when all the disparate plot lines of a story, gnarled and taut, have been untied and an order has come about that brings a new moment of shalom.
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shalom
healing
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Dan B. Allender |
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66ddb2c
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If we enter our story in heartache, we will hear the whisper of the name that will one day be ours.
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grief
lament
healing
true-self
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Dan B. Allender |
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0221783
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Because of the way God has made us, it is impossible finally and completely to deaden the soul. The soul will resurrect, in spite of the cruelty used to destroy it. It will pop up and then be slain again, return and be shoved down through contempt. The power to destroy the soul is not in the hands of Satan, another human being, or even oneself. Nevertheless, when we manage to deaden our soul, even temporarily, we open the door to terrible c..
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Dan B. Allender |
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8226186
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It is not presumptuous to ask, 'What is it that you see in me that brings you delight?
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Dan B. Allender |
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341b529
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Hope is not mere optimism; rather, it is moving forward in anticipation of redemption in spite of the improbability of rescue.
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Dan B. Allender |
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09790d6
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Being free means "being free for the other," because the other has bound me to him. Only in relationship with the other am I free. DIETRICH BONHOEFFER"
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Dan B. Allender |
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9548d84
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In every story, in every life, there are moments of death that take away our name and rename us as strangers, orphans or widows. At the moment of being unnamed, we are thrown into our story. We lose the name Friend and are given the name Reject.
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true-self
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Dan B. Allender |
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34de4ed
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The shattering [of shalom] moves us from a place of shalom to a place that is harsh and unrelenting. The shattering brings us a keen awareness that we are alone and in danger. We are on our own.
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shalom
healing
true-self
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Dan B. Allender |
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9e53c6a
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Our story will gain momentum and depth only to the degree that we honestly embrace both loss and fear.
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healing
true-self
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Dan B. Allender |
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abc0e71
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Desire lies at the heart of who God made us to be, who we are at our core. Desire is both our greatest frailty and the mark of our highest beauty. Our desire completes us as we become One with our Lover, and it separates us from Him and brings death as it wars against His will.
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shalom
healing
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Dan B. Allender |
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8a229f9
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you can be assured that the inciting events call for you to sacrifice your comfort and ease in order for your story to move forward. It's easy to ignore such inciting events...It's easy to flee your story.
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healing
true-self
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Dan B. Allender |
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984a6c5
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But if we honestly name the passionate desires of our heart, and if we risk seeing those desires come to be, the plot of our life story will begin to move with greater intentionality. Yet the only way we can keep walking on that path is to allow our self moments to rest and celebrate the temporary climax of a story in denouement.
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healing
true-self
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Dan B. Allender |
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2f96873
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A new story begins the moment an old one ends. But a denouement is a respite that calls us to stop the journey for a brief interlude - to eat, drink, sing, dance and tell our story to others.
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healing
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Dan B. Allender |
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8aeee82
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Disillusionment takes us to the question: what does it profit a man if he gains this world and loses himself? And disillusionment exposes that while we were supposedly serving the kingdom, we somehow became the king, and when we thought we were following Jesus, we inexplicably made him a servant of our dreams. The only real tragedy is the leader who never allows disillusionment to wear him to a nub and expose the godlessness of his busyness..
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Dan B. Allender |
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00cfdad
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Sane, reasonable, play-it-safe people are not sufficiently engaged in life to generate great stories. Instead, they sit back and wait for a leader-storyteller to come along and get them caught up in a life worth living.
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Dan B. Allender |
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fb07bc3
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Time has become a precious commodity and the ultimate scarcity for millions of Americans. A 1996 Wall Street Journal survey found 40% of Americans saying that lack of time was a bigger problem for them than lack of money."6"
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Dan B. Allender |
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c02c099
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How do we hold the paradox of giving up our life in order to find it? I believe Chesterton is saying that the more we open our heart to both heartache and hope, the more we can look death in the face and say, "Where is your sting?" (1 Cor. 15:55). We must love all that bears the mark of life: the sound of an owl finch and its call that sounds like the meowing of a kitten. We must love Bach, Ethiopian berbere, and the smell of freshly baked ..
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Dan B. Allender |
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6109dcd
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To admit we are foolish, weak, and in need of repentance gives the vindictive and self-righteous camp plenty of ammunition to turn against us and to turn others against our leadership. But the alternatives to living in and living out truth are far worse: we either hide from truth or we choose to spin our sin and our story.
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Dan B. Allender |
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0b2ffb5
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Repentance is an internal shift
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Dan B. Allender |
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0b41f7f
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A simple person must be encouraged to see the Christian life as a war, not only with the world, the devil, and the flesh, but with God Himself.
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Dan B. Allender |
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14be3ad
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God is continually, literally, second-by-second covering our sin under His Son's blood and forgiving us our sins. God cannot love us unless He forgives us and cannot forgive us without a commitment to love us.
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Dan B. Allender |
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fc7439e
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God's passion is to rig the world so that we are compelled to deal with whatever blocks us from being like His glorious Son.
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Dan B. Allender |
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c166277
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The only parameter that is to guide our Sabbath is delight. Will this be merely a break or a joy? Will this lead my heart to wonder or routine? Will I be more grateful or just happy that I got something done?
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Dan B. Allender |
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bfdf4e8
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Speed is the ultimate defense, the antidote to stopping and really looking. If we really saw what we were doing and who we had become, we feel we might not survive the stopping and the accompanying self-appraisal. So we don't stop, and the faster we go, the harder it becomes to stop.
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Dan B. Allender |