“Honesty impels me to admit that transformed nonconformity, which is always costly and never altogether comfortable, may mean walking through the valley of the shadow of suffering, losing a job, or having a six-year-old daughter ask, ‘Daddy, why do you have to go to jail so much?’ But we are gravely mistaken to think that Christianity protects us from the pain and agony of mortal existence. Christianity has always insisted that the cross we bear precedes the crown we wear. To be a Christian, one must take up his cross, with all its difficulties and agonizing and tragedy-packed content, and carry it until that very cross leaves its mark upon us and redeems us to that more excellent way that comes only through suffering.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength to Love. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1963/2010, page 19.
Gary Chorpenning's Notebooks 
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