Struck: One Christian's Reflections on Encountering Death
Russ Ramsey
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Often the best gifts we can give each other cost nothing.”
“I also needed what God has brought. I needed to lose control. I needed a broken heart. I needed to be dipped in the crucible of suffering. Why? I may never fully know. But the God who brings his children low does not do it for spite. He does it to awaken desire, like a pang of hunger in the newly risen phoenix that makes it unfurl its wings to fly. He does it to give us new eyes so that we might see the world in a new light. He does it to stop us from continuing down the path we’re on and to set us on a new one. He grants us weakness so that we might not trust too much in our own strength. “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
“With all due respect to my surgeon, in a perfect world he would be out of a job.”
“We want the people around us to show us a satisfactory measure of genuine empathy, but no one has any idea what that looks like. This puts everyone in the precarious position of guaranteed failure. I know that no one knows how to deal with stuff like this. There are no experts here.”
“Walking through suffering is a work that is bound by limitation. Often it isn't that the afflicted are unwilling to let others in. It is just that there comes a certain point in a person's suffering where there is no apparent port of entry.”
“To walk in faith is to confess that we do not know what awaits us, and the faith I have embraced does not promise an easy road.”
“Tim Keller wrote, “Human beings are hope-shaped creatures. The way you live now is completely controlled by what you believe about the future.”
“This woman did not know me, but she knew this stretch of trail. She didn't know if I was kind or mean, gentle or abrasive, honest or a liar. She didn't need to know what I had accomplished in life or what I had wasted. She just knew that if I was there in her hospital on my birthday, I was probably feeling a little lost. On that basis alone, i mattered to her.”
“There is something holy about taking up the task of stewarding a life, especially our own. If we come to this work at all, we must come with humble expectations and a willingness to be led. We submit to the process, trusting that the science is sound, even when what we’re called to do hurts.”
“The world we inhabit is one where children feel sorrow long before they have the words to express it.”
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Book Keywords:
healing, friendship, love, medicine, relationships, gifts, empathy, surgery, kindness, community, faith, service, suffering, illness, humility, pain, sorrow
