The holiness of the gospel softens the hardness of the heart.

You can't tell how heavy somebody else's load is just from looking. The Lord doesn't give us more than we can carry.

Sirs, so much as your hearts as is empty of Christ and heaven, let it be filled with shame and sorrow, and not with ease (483).

Only hardship softens the hardness of the human heart.

A hardness to change reveals a hardness of heart.

To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!

Life is flinching in the midst of breathing, gasping at the thought of dying. It’s climbing ropeless up sheer rock faces, groping for the next finger-hole of hope. Steady on! Only a thousand feet to go and after that a jungle, a minefield, a rapids. (Can I stop smiling now?)Once, not long ago, I was flung off the cliff of the moment, thrust into an illicit relationship with destiny, an affair not of my making. Was I making love or being raped? The lines were fuzzy.

Reaching too deep into something not meant for you is full of pain. Figure out what you can have and work on that.