What we call the virtues are precisely those attributes of character that best suit us to live harmoniously, even joyfully, in society.  Kindness only exists when there is someone to whom we show kindness.  Patience is only manifest when another calls it forth. So it is with mercy, generosity, and self-control.  What we may have thought was our private pathway to salvation, was intended all along as a collaborative enterprise, though we often miss the point.  The confusion is understandable, since our current generation's preference for "spirituality" over "religion" is often a sleight of hand that confuses true discipleship with self-absorption.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 112-113

We humans have a lamentable tendency to spend more time theorizing the reasons behind human suffering, than working to alleviate human suffering, and in imagining a heaven above, than creating a heaven in our homes and communities.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 111-112

As long as it is God's nature and character we are striving to emulate, and not His power and glory, we are on safe ground.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 105

God would not have commanded us to forgive each other seventy times seven, if He were not prepared to extend to us the same mathematical generosity.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 100

The work of love in remembering one who is dead is a work of the utmost unselfish love...If one wants to make sure that love is completely unselfish, he eliminates every possibility of repayment.  but precisely this is eliminated in the relationship to one who is dead.  If love nevertheless remains, it is in truth unselfish.

- Soren Kierkegaard

Quoted in Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 98

If the whole mission of Christ and His atonement is to enable change, to render repentance and personal transformation possible, to empower and sanctify, then what are we to say about the billions who have lived in obliviousness to such power and grace?  The question is not how can they be rescued from damnation, but how can the be elevated or ennobled, given their inability to participate in all that His grace makes possible?

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 95

The law of moral agency, of choice and consequence, does not require that we entirely bear the burden of our own choices made in this life because those choices are always made under circumstances that are less than perfect.  Our accountability is thus always partial, incomplete.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 92

What can it mean, that Christ's blood was spilt for our sins, that "by his bruises we are healed"?  Perhaps His perfect love means His identification with human suffering is so complete, that in one fell vision He comprehended the depth and range and terror of all our individual pain.  Perhaps it is the almost irresistible power of His superabundant love manifest in His choice to suffer what He suffered, that transforms the sinner's heart.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 90

The great healing of the universe is centered on the breach in our relationship with our God.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 90

Heaven is not a club we enter.  Heaven is a state we attain...we acquire Heaven in accordance with a growing capacity to receive it...heaven depends on our attaining a particular mode of being, a character and mind and will that are the product of life-long choosing.  Conforming to celestial law, we become celestial persons. "That which is governed by the law is also preserved by law and perfected and sanctified by the same (D&C 88:34-35)" in the language of scripture.  Salvation, in this light, is the imitation of Christ--or, to make the concept clearer, the imitating of Christ.  One is only merciful to the extent one extends mercy.  One is only honest to the extent one practices honesty.  One is only truthful to the extent one speaks truthfully, and so on.  That is why, all good intentions and Christ's grace notwithstanding, whosoever chooses "to abide in sin,...cannot be sanctified by law, neither by mercy."  heaven is a condition and a sanctified nature toward which all godly striving tends; it is not a place to be found by walking through the right door with a heavenly hall pass.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 88-89

...all this talk about punishment and rewards, about justice and merit an deserts, can be wrongheaded and misleading.  We are not in some contest to rack up points.  We will not someday wait with bated breath to see what prize or pain is meted out by a great dispenser of trophies.  We cannot so trivialize life that we make of it a coliseum where we wage moral combat like spiritual gladiators, for a presiding Authority on high to save or damn according to our performance.  Where would be the purpose in all of that?  He might take the measure of our souls at any moment and deal with us accordingly, saving Himself, not to mention us, a great deal of trouble.

How much more meaningful is a life designed for spiritual formation, rather than spiritual evaluation.  All tests evaluate, and life is no exception.  But the most meaningful and productive tests are those that assess with an eye to improvement, that measure in order to remedy, and that improve and prepare us for the next stage in an upward process of advancement. For these reasons, all talk of heaven that operates in terms of earning rather than becoming is misguided.  Such ideas misconstrue the nature of God, His grace, and the salvation He offers.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 87

We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out.  That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character...What we are worshipping we are becoming.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

quoted in Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 87

Only by choosing the good and experiencing its fruit do we learn to savor and embrace the good.  Similarly, only by choosing the evil and living through its consequences do we learn what evil is and why it deserves to be rejected.  Or as Julian saw, "So pain endures for a time.  Its role is to purge us, make us know ourselves, and it drives us to the Lord."  Ther in lies the "needfulness" of sin, the part it has to play.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 84

We find ourselves in a universe pervaded by laws that define the relationship of action and consequence. Some are manmade: speed and you get a ticket; rob and you go to jail; break curfew and you're grounded.  Some are physical: let go of a rock and it drops; expose potassium to air and it forms hydrogen gas; mix baking soda and vinegar and you get a frothing pot worthy of the witch's concoction in Shakespeare's Macbeth.  And some laws are moral: nurturing hatred cankers the soul; practicing kindness and forbearance develops serenity.

Parents and police officers alert us to the first category.  Physicians and chemists may give us fluency in the second.  But nothing short of trial and error will convert us to the unyielding strictures of the third.  To be adept at the first entails outward behavior.  Mastering the second challenges our mind.  but to live in harmony with the moral law of the universe requires body and soul, heart and mind, the will and the affections of the undivided self.  This is the meaning of Jesus' words that living the highest and holiest law; loving God, requires "all your heart, and...all your soul, and...all your mind."

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 84

Commandments are the expression of those eternal laws that will lead us to  a condition of optimal joyfulness.  They are the beacon lights of greater realities that define the cosmic streams in which we swim.  Operating in harmony with those realities, as a swimmer who works with the current rather than against it, empowers and liberates us to fill the measure of our creation. 

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 83

What is always at stake in any decision we make is what that choice turns us into.  We may suffer the unfortunate consequences of other peoples' choices.  People may honor or abuse us, harm or nourish us. But for the most part, it is our own choices that shape our identity.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 81

Sin is not an arbitrary category that God imposes.  And it is not synonymous with simple error or misjudgement.  This is a truth, like others we are examining, that is best revealed in the searchlight of honest introspection.  We know the difference between regret and remorse.  We regret giving erroneous directions that get the stranger lost.  We feel remorse for the slander deliberately spoken.  We regret an action that leads to harm.  We feel remorse for choosing that action to inflict harm.  Legitimate guilt, the kind we cannot explain away or therapeutically resolve, involves more than bad judgment or human error.  The degree of guilt we experience is proportional to the deliberateness with which we cause hurt.  Herein lies the clue to the meaning of sin, and the way beyond it.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 80

God is invested in our lives and happiness, because He chooses to be a Father to us.  His concern with human sin is with the pain and suffering it produces.  Sympathy and sorrow, not anger and vengeance, are th emotions we must look to in order to plumb the nature of the divine response to sin. 

...Sin is pain, and the intensity of His response to sin is commensurate with the intensity of that pain He knows sin will entail, and in which He has already chosen to share.  For He is the God who weeps.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 79

"A...paradox is evident in the prophet's admonition, that we "feast upon [Christ's] love; for ye may, if your minds are firm, forever."  Why should we need firm minds to feast upon love?  Like all gifts, love can be hard to recieve.  As children we welcome presents and affection with the same ready heart and hand, but we tend to lose knack as we grow older and more self-sufficient.  Love may be a heavy burden because of pride; we want to be self-made men and women, paying our own way, and are ashamed of our need.  Perhaps we are made to see our own littleness, by the great chasm that opens up between our merit and the gift.  Or perhaps we are genuinely ill ast ease, as one who knows at what great cost the gift has come.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 74-75

Our task is to school our appetites, not suppress them, to make them work in concert with a will that disciplines the spirit as much as the flesh.  For desire has both spiritual and bodily expression, and our life is a journey to purify both.  Along the way, we discipline and honor the body, even as we aspire to perfect the soul, finding in the end that the body and spirit, fitly framed together, do indeed provide the deepest joy.

Terryl & Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps, pg. 72