relationships and community on Uniqueness

Only you can be you. God designed each of us so there would be no duplication in the world. No one has the exact same mix of factors that make you unique. That means no one else on earth will ever be ...

I am created to do something or to be something for which no one else is created; I have a place in God’s counsels, in God’s world, which no one else has; . . . God knows me and calls me by my name.

Da Vinci painted one Mona Lisa. Beethoven composed one Fifth Symphony. And God made one version of you. He custom designed you for a one-of-a-kind assignment. Mine like a gold digger the unique-to-you...

In an interview with MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle, Megan Garber asks what makes in-person conversation unique, compared to all the other ways we communicate these days: Conversations, as they tend...

Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity     and passing over transgression     for the remnant of his inheritance? He does not retain his anger forever,     because he delights in steadfast love. He...

Christianity is one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.

On July 4, 1965, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached a sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia titled “The American Dream.” He said, the whole concept of the imago Dei, . . . is the...

He who is different from me does not impoverish me - he enriches me. Our unity is constituted in something higher than ourselves - in Man... For no man seeks to hear his own echo, or to find his refle...

Everybody is somebody, but nobody wants to be themselves.

Nothing unites people as sharing the same affliction.

Marriage has a unique place because it speaks of an absolute faithfulness, a covenant between radically different persons, male and female; and so it echoes the absolute covenant of God with his chose...

The South African politician Nic Diederichs—a prominent leader during the apartheid era—once made a rather provocative observation: God, he said, dislikes deadly uniformity. I hate to admit that I lik...

You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.

My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours... it is precisely through ...

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

God’s vision for his people is not for the elimination of ethnicity to form a colorblind uniformity of sanctified blandness. Instead God sees the creation of a community of different cultures united b...

The pyschologist Carl Rogers, a person who would know quite well the interior lives of others, has this to say of our inmost thoughts: I have most invariably found that the very feeling which has see...

What could begin to deny self, if there were not something in man different from self?

One of the most influential myths nourished by the culture of authenticity is that we will be “saved” or made complete when we meet the right-shaped soul, that perfectly complementary person who can f...

Differences simply act as a yarn of curiosity unraveling until we get to the other side.

We all want to feel like we come together as equals, with each of us bringing something unique and vital to the table. That’s how friendship works: we join forces, knowing each of us has something to ...

There is nothing in this world so empty as getting what you want.

The human being is defined through otherness. It is a being whose identity emerges only in relation to other beings, God, the animals and the rest of creation.

Relational congruence is the ability to be fundamentally the same person with the same values in every relationship, in every circumstance and especially amidst crisis. It is the internal capacity to ...

This is the beautiful community that Herman Bavinck gets at when he writes, The image of God is much too rich for it to be fully realized in a single human being, however richly gifted that human bein...

We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer, together exist and forever will recreate one another.

Impostors draw their identity not only from achievements but from interpersonal relationships. They want to stand well with people of prominence because that enhances a person’s résumé and sense of se...

Aloneness can lead to loneliness. God's preventative for loneliness is intimacy - meaningful, open, sharing relationships with one another. In Christ we have the capacity for the fulfilling sense ...

The concept of humanity’s being divisible into different races has no scientific validity. This has always been the case, even before the advent of rapid global travel enabled the further mixing of pe...

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.