The Scriptures tell us, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” but most of us never really learn to love ourselves, thinking we can make up for this deficit if we practice loving others. We have to practice what love is by making room for who we are—the good and the bad. Otherwise, the love we offer others will always lack the depth of its potential.

Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring two pence how often it has been told before), you will, n

Gregory Boyle ministers to gang members in Los Angeles and captures the difference between a life lived for self and one lived for others: “Compassion is always, at its most authentic, about a shift from the cramped world of self-preoccupation into a more expansive place of fellowship.” It’s one of the inescapable truisms of life: You have to lose

I know what you might be thinking: What about that reference to the cross? How is that taking good care of myself? I don’t believe the point of the metaphor has to do with physical suffering; it has to do with the fact that consistently letting God be in control of our lives is hard and often painful. We will be religious. We will go to church. We

Shift from self-centered thinking to other-centered thinking. The Bible says, “My friends, stop thinking like children. Think like mature people.”

THE secret of my identity is hidden in the love and mercy of God. But whatever is in God is really identical with Him, for His infinite simplicity admits no division and no distinction. Therefore I cannot hope to find myself anywhere except in Him. Ultimately the only way that I can be myself is to become identified with Him in Whom is hidden the r

if we are to be “true to ourselves,” why should I give of myself selflessly for the sake of others?