“Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you! See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands; your walls are ever before me.” —Isaiah 49:15-16″

All the wrong turns in the past, the detours, mistakes, moral lapses, everything that is irrevocably ugly or painful, melts and dissolves in the warm glow of accepted tenderness.

As theologian Kevin O’Shea writes, “One rejoices in being unfrightened to be open to the healing presence, no matter what one might be or what one might have done.

The voices in my head this morning are hounding me with the recurring moments I’ve turned away from You.  Judas-kissed Your cheek in the garden of betrayal, and the countless times I’ve warmed myself by a traitor’s fire and declared like Peter “I do not know Him!”

But then Your accepting voice scatters them all with a mercy fierce and ultimately kind, and I remember that I am loved.” — Brennan Manning

Dear Abba: Morning and Evening Prayer Brennan Manning with John Blase