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Quote by Ruth Coker Burks

“I started carrying an old tour book for the Florida Keys in my bag with me at all times. I'd had it since I was a kid, and after my daddy died, I read it to escape back to memories of him taking me there. As I read it to my guys, we'd leave whatever hospital we were in, and go somewhere beautiful, away from trouble and worry. They'd all come home to Arkansas, a place that had birthed them but wouldn't claim them. So we left. . . . We went someplace else, where they were safe and warm. Where there was nothing to be hidden and nothing wrong with admiring the way the sun shone down on the beauty of men. As it it existed for that very reason -- to be admired and loved.”

Quote by Ruth Coker Burks

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Ruth Coker Burks

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“Paul and I had one umbrella between us, and we rushed through the rain to get to the tent. "This is for family only," Billy's mother said. We stood there in the rain for a minute, away from them, huddling under Paul's umbrella.. And I gritted my teeth. "Paul," I said slowly. "Throw that umbrella away. We're gonna stand in the pouring rain, and we're gonna get as wet as God wants us to get." I paused. "And then we're gonna hug every member of that family, so they know what they did to us. SO they can *feel* what they did to us. All of us. Because they are assholes.”

“That is the bitterest of all—to wear the yoke of our own wrong-doing. But if you submitted to that as men submit to maiming or life-long incurable disease?—and made the unalterable wrong a reason for more effort toward a good, that may do something to counterbalance the evil? One who has committed irremediable errors may be scourged by that consciousness into a higher course than is common. There are many examples. Feeling what it is to have spoiled one life may well make us long to save other lives from being spoiled.”

“Indeed, our pain has a purpose. All of it. If we do not believe this, it only means we have not yet turned the corner into trusting in Him more than our pain. This is what Jesus can do with pain, any pain, given to Him. When we surrender our suffering to Him, He makes it into something beautiful, powerful, life changing. But there is something He cannot heal—the pain we refuse to give to Him. And this is pain that destroys.”