There is nothing that can replace the absence of someone dear to us, and one should not even attempt to do so. One must simply hold out and endure it. At first that sounds very hard, but at the same time it is also a great comfort. For to the extent the emptiness truly remains unfilled one remains connected to the other person through it. It is wrong to say that God fills the emptiness. God in no way fills it but much more leaves it precisely unfilled and thus helps us preserve -- even in pain -- the authentic relationship.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Categorized in : Firsts Sound Pain

If I sit next to a madman as he drives a car into a group of innocent bystanders, I can't, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe, then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

bystanders christian hands

Your life as a Christian should make non believers question their disbelief in God.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

disbelief should christian

Silence in the face of evil is evil itself.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

silence evil faces

Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness and pride of power and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear rather than too much. Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now. Christian should take a stronger stand in favor of the weak rather than considering first the possible right of the strong.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

strong christian peace

The person who’s in love with their vision of community will destroy community. But the person who loves the people around them will create community everywhere they go.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

vision community people

Being a Christan is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God's will.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

discipleship avoiding sin

Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession.... Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

discipline grace jesus

The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists of listening to them. Just as love of God begins with listening to his word, so the beginning of love for our brothers and sisters is learning to listen to them.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

fellowship-with-god brother listening

We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God, who will thwart our plans and frustrate our ways time and again, even daily, by sending people across our path with their demands and requests. We can, then, pass them by, preoccupied with our important daily tasks, just as the priest-perhaps reading the Bible-passed by the man who had fallen among robbers. When we do that, we pass by the visible sign of the Cross raised in our lives to show us that God’s way, and not our own, is what counts.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

daily-tasks reading men

Destruction of the embryo in the mother's womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

issues simple mother

We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

injustice wheels courage

The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

accountability nature children

Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

evil-god speak

The followers of Christ have been called to peace. . . . And they must not only have peace but make it. And to that end they renounce all violence and tumult. In the cause of Christ nothing is to be gained by such methods . . . . His disciples keep the peace by choosing to endure suffering themselves rather than inflict it on others. They maintain fellowship where others would break it off. They renounce hatred and wrong. In so doing they overcome evil with good, and establish the peace of God in the midst of a world of war and hate.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

hate war peace

Comfort the troubled, and trouble the comfortable.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

comfortable trouble comfort

The biggest mistake you can make in your life is to be always afraid of making a mistake.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

making-mistakes life-is mistake

Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

judging-yourself evil love-is

We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

inspiration faith inspiring

In me there is darkness, But with You there is light; I am lonely, but You do not leave me; I am feeble in heart, but with You there is help; I am restless, but with You there is peace. In me there is bitterness, but with You there is patience; I do not understand Your ways, But You know the way for me.” “Lord Jesus Christ, You were poor And in distress, a captive and forsaken as I am. You know all man’s troubles; You abide with me When all men fail me; You remember and seek me; It is Your will that I should know You And turn to You. Lord, I hear Your call and follow; Help me.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

lonely heart jesus

One act of obedience is better than one hundred sermons.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

christian-inspirational godly christianity