Tom White

Trials, tribulation, anguish, anxiety are permitted by the very One Who gives peace. (Fulton Sheen)

As to your notion of an allegory, there is none. Charlotte’s Web is a tale of the animals in my barn, not of the people in my life. When you read it, just relax. Any attempt to find allegorical meanings is bound to end disastrously, for no meanings are in there. I ought to know.

E. B. White

Letter to John Detmold

10th February 1953

heightened receptivity is not a gift that arrives without invoice. In his private journals, he wrote of the survivor , not in the narrow historical sense but as a psychological type, the one who remains standing, who goes on registering, who cannot switch off the intake.

AI can help you produce more, faster—but it can't tell you if what you wrote is any good.

“You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow.”

— Robert M. Pirsig

The first lesson for stewards of pain, then, is this: your pain doesn’t belong to you. It’s not you. It’s something life has handed to you, an experience, an opportunity, the consequence of bad choices made by other people or perhaps by you, and the result of living in a fallen, tragic world. It’s something that happened. Pain is yours for a while,... See more

our God is not simply a God who rescues us,

but a God who redeems us.

He takes what is broken in us

and restores it to life.

Because in Christ, nothing entrusted to God—

no suffering, no act of love, no faithful effort

will remain in the tomb.

You cannot think yourself into a new person