A biography for Lewis B. Smedeshasn’t been written yet.
“You will know that forgiveness has begun when you recall those who hurt you and feel the power to wish them well.”
“Nobody sees reality whole; we all need others to show us the parts of it that they see better than we do. Nobody sees reality with total accuracy; we all need others to correct our own vision.”
“What is a disloyal act? A person is disloyal if he treats you as a stranger when, in fact, he belongs to you as a friend or partner. Each of us is bound to some special others by the invisible fibers of loyalty.”
“The problem with revenge is that it never evens the score. It ties both the injured and the injurer to an escalator of pain. Both are stuck on the escalator as long as parity is demanded, and the escalator never stops.”
“When we forgive evil we do not excuse it, we do not tolerate it, we do not smother it. We look the evil full in the face, call it what it is, let its horror shock and stun and enrage us, and only then do we forgive it.”
“Restorative justice is not a replacement of retributive justice, but a complement. It seeks the rehabilitation of the wrongdoer and the repair of the victim's injury.”
“Sometimes I like to list the strongest arguments I can find to support a point of view I think is wrong. When I have them before me, I am up against a real opponent rather than a hypothetical one that is an easy target for me to hit.”
“Seeing reality for what it is is what we call discernment. The work of discernment is very hard.”
“The blood of Christ covers all of our sins, but each of us must do personal business with God in order to experience his forgiveness.”
“It takes one person to forgive, it takes two people to be reunited.”
“Nothing enables us to forgive like knowing in our hearts that we have been forgiven.”
“Forgiving does not erase the bitter past. A healed memory is not a deleted memory. Instead, forgiving what we cannot forget creates a new way to remember. We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future.”
“We are anxious in the face of our unchangeable past; we long to recreate segments of our private histories, but we are stuck with them.”
“As I read the New Testament, I find only one path to salvation - the path of an informed faith in Jesus Christ.”
“The right to personal privacy is precious. Without it, we are all potential victims for a prying secret police.”
“Any lazy or biased fool can have opinions; making judgments is the hard work of responsible and compassionate people.”
“My father was only thirty-one when he died of a heart attack, much too young for a father to die and leave his young wife with five rambunctious little kids to take care of. I was the youngest. Only a couple of months old when he died.”
“God is not a doormat, nor should anyone else be a doormat.”
“Common sense suggests that if no one ever judged other people, there would be no real human community.”
“Nothing is more private than a woman's body; it is her physical, emotional, and moral citadel. She cannot be free at all if she is not free to decide for herself, in private, what to do with her body.”