Sermon quotes on avoidance
James Baldwin
Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.
James Baldwin
I imagine that one of the reasons that people cling to their hate and prejudice so stubbornly, is that they sense that once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with their own pain.
Saul Bellow
A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”
To Jerusalem and Back
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God’s will.
Taken from Eric Metaxes, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
Henry Cloud
Even with the desire for a better life, we can be reluctant to do the work of boundaries because it will be a war. The battle falls into two categories: outside resistance we get from others and the resistance we get from ourselves.
Boundaries: When to Say Yes, How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life
Charles Dickens
“My sister having so much to do, was going to church vicariously, that is to say, Joe and I were going.”
Great Expectations
Dowager Countess Violet Crawley (Maggie Smith)
“There’s nothing simpler than avoiding people you don’t like. Avoiding one’s friends, that’s the real test.”
Downton Abbey
Tony Dungy
Avoidance doesn’t solve anything; it merely serves as a temporary salve.
Uncommon: Finding Your Path to Significance, Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 2011, p.160.
Daniel Goleman
Emotional intelligence does not mean merely “being nice”. At strategic moment it may demand not “being nice”, but rather, for example, bluntly confronting someone with an uncomfortable but consequential truth they’ve been avoiding.
Working with Emotional Intelligence
Lori Gottlieb
Pushing aside emotions only makes them stronger.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
Carl Jung
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.
Carl Jung
Neurosis is the natural by-product of pain avoidance.
Carl Jung
Neurosis is the natural by-product of pain avoidance.
M. Scott Peck
The avoidance of pain is the beginning of all unhealthy behavior.
James K.A. Smith
One’s own heart can be foreign territory, a terra incognita, and this lack of at-home-ness with oneself generates our propensity to run. We still can’t find what we’re looking for because we don’t know what we want. If we never seem to arrive, growing tired of every place that promised to be the end of the road, it’s because the terrain of our interior life is a wilderness of wants. When we leave home looking for happiness, we’re in search of the self we never knew.
Source Unknown
Running away from a problem only increases the distance from the solution. The easiest way to escape from the problem is to solve it.
Andy Stanley
People who blame things rarely change things. Blame is an unassailable change-avoidance strategy.
Marjorie Thompson
While the truth that we cannot escape God’s all-seeing eye may weigh us down at times, it is finally the only remedy for our uneasiness. If we wish to hide from the penetrating gaze of holy love, it is because we know it falls on what is unholy and unloving within us. Only under God’s steady gaze of love are we able to find the healing and restoration we so desperately need.
Soulfeast
Bill Watterson
“It’s not denial. I’m just selective about the reality I accept.
Calvin and Hobbes
Bill Watterson
A day can really slip by when you’re deliberately avoiding what you’re supposed to do.”
There’s Treasure Everywhere
Tennessee Williams
“Laws of silence don’t work….
When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don’t work, it’s just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn’t put it out. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant….”
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof