William P. Young Quotes

You are a beautiful mess, you are the melody.

Once you have hierarchy you need rules to protect and administer it, and then you need law and the enforcement of the rules, and you end up with some kind of chain of command or system of order that destroys relationship rather than promotes it. Hierarchy imposes laws and rules and you end up missing the wonder of relationship that we intended for you.

You may have to declare your forgiveness a hundred times the first day and the second day, but the third day will be less and each day after, until one day you will realize that you have forgiven completely. And then one day you will pray for his wholeness and give him over to me so that my love will burn from his life every vestige of corruption.

Love is much stronger than your fault could ever be.

Image and appearance tell you little. The inside is bigger than the outside when you have the eyes to see.

Why would the God of the universe want to be submitted to me?' Because we want you to join us in our circle of relationship. I don't want slaves to my will; I want brothers and sisters who will share life with me.

There is always risk in relationships, but bottom line? The world has no meaning apart from relationships. Some are just messier than others, some are seasonal, others are difficult, and a few are easy, but every one of them is important.

"Pain has a way of clipping our wings and keeping us from being able to fly"... "And if left unresolved you can almost forget that you were ever created to fly in the first place."

Don't forget that in the midst of all your pain and heartache, you are surrounded by beauty, the wonder of creation, art, your music and culture, the sounds of laughter and love, of whispered hopes and celebrations, of new life and transformation, of reconciliation and forgiveness.

Let me say for now that we knew once the Creation was broken, true fathering would be much more lacking than mothering. Don't misunderstand me, both are needed- but an emphasis on fathering is necessary because of the enormity of its absence

religion is about having the right answers, and some of their answers are right... but i am about the process that takes you to the living answer... it will change you from the inside. there are a lot of smart people who are able to say a lot of right things from their brain because they have been told what the right answers are, but they don't know me at all.

I make a distinction between true and real. I think that the story is true, it’s just not real. That’s what a parable is. It takes things that we all know are real, and it takes life events that actually happens, and it weaves them into a fiction that allows truth to actually be embedded.

Disconnect your identity from what you produce, and that’s a hard thing for us because we think of our significance, worth and value based on what we do instead of who we are.

The arrival of the unforeseen reveals the depths of one's heart.

The intricacy and the inherent beautiful fragility of the human soul is such that it is uniquely damaged and only God knows how to heal it, and it's going to take time.

I think one of the greatest losses to humanity was the domination of women. I think every religious system has found ways to be kind to them in a kind of subordinate way. Very patronizing, very colonial. But if you start looking at the fabric of society, even religious systems, they would fall apart if it wasn't for the embedded ability of the women who are involved.

God's voice had been reduced to paper, and even that paper had to be moderated and deciphered by the proper authorities and intellect.

Nothing in life is ritual.

It is not the nature of love to force a relationship, but it is the nature of love to open the way.

Part of my journey is to say that the soul of the human being must be a massively intricate, wonderful creation that God has a respect for in ways that we do not and that leaves a huge amount of space to go explore.

Forgiveness in no way requires that you trust the one you forgive.

I really do believe that God is love, one of deep affection and grace and forgiveness and inspiration.

I was raised in a tribal situation, among cannibal people.

Each relationship between two persons is absolutely unique. That is why you cannot love two people the same. It simply is not possible. You love each person differently because of who they are and the uniqueness that they draw out of you.

Jesus is not the 'founder of Christianity.

Mack was getting frustrated. He spoke louder, 'But, don't I have a right to...' To complete a sentence without being interrupted? Not in reality. But as long as you think you do, you will surely get ticked off when someone cuts you off, even if it is God.

Because you continue to inhabit and believe your metaphors, you cannot see what is true.

"So, why do I have so much fear in my life?" "Because you don't believe. You don't know that we love you. The person who lives by his fears will not find freedom in my love. I am not talking about rational fears regarding legitimate dangers, but imagined fears, and especially the projection of those into the future. To the degree that those fears have a place in your life, you neither believe that I am good not know deep in your heart that I love you. You sing about it, you talk about it, but you don't know it."

I often find that getting head issues out of the way first makes the heart stuff easier to work on later.

Perhaps there is supranatural: reason beyond the normal definitions of fact or data-based logic; something that only makes sense if you can see a bigger picture of reality. Maybe that is where faith fits in.

when I live in you, then together we can live through everything that happens to you.

The ability to choose is at the essential core of our grandeur. Even evil exists because God respects our ability to choose.

You need boundaries... Even in our material creations, boundaries mark the most beautiful of places, between the ocean and the shore, between the mountains and the plains, where the canyon meets the river.

So many believe that it is love that grows, but it is the knowing that grows and love simply expands to contain it.

You cannot produce trust just like you cannot 'do' humility. It either is or is not.

I'm not an actual author but an accidental one.

In some sense every parent does love their children. But some parents are too broken to love them well& others are barely able to love them at all.

I think that most creative fiction involves the transformational process, whether it is Dickens or Dostoyevsky and the writer in some sense is expressing their own journey through such a wilderness.

Even though you can't finally grasp me, guess what? I still want to be known.

Today's minor irritations may become tomorrow's treasured memories. We often don't know what we are missing, until it's missing.

I am a verb. I am that I amNouns exist because there is a created universe and physical reality, but if the universe is only a mass of nouns, it is dead. Unless 'I am', there are no verbs, and verbs are what makes the universe alive

You don't play a game or color a picture with a child to show your superiority. Rather, you choose to limit yourself so as to facilitate and honor that relationship.

Submission is not about authority and it is not obedience; it is all about relationships of love and respect.

Does that mean," asked Mack, "that all roads will lead to you?" "Not at all," smiled Jesus..."Most roads don't lead anywhere. What it does mean is that I will travel any road to find you.

I think my books give people a language to have a conversation about God that's not religious. There isn't enough new literature that brings the conversation of God into a modern context. I love the Bible, but in the West we've analyzed it until it fits into a structure of control. We need more new stories. We need different ways of looking at things, and I think it's coming.

The Gospel is a declaration of something totally finished apart from our agreement or vote. Inside that declaration is an ongoing and relentless invitation to deepening relationship but any lack of belief or participation on our part has no power to negate the accomplished truth of that declaration.

If anything matters, then everything matters.

So no, I’m not too big on religion...and not very fond of politics or economics either...And why should I be? They are the man-created trinity of terrors that ravages the earth and deceives those I care about. What mental turmoil and anxiety does any human face that is not related to one of those three?