Along with the trust issues, one of the hardest parts to deal with is the feeling of not being believed or supported, especially by your own grandparents and extended family. When I have been through so much pain and hurt and have to live with the scars every day, I get angry knowing that others think it is all made up or they brush it off because my cousin was a teenager. I was ten when I was first sexually abused by my cousin, and a majority of my relatives have taken the perpetrator's side. I have cried many times about everything and how my relatives gave no support or love to me as a kid when this all came out. Not one relative ever came up to that innocent little girl I was and said "I am sorry for what you went through" or "I am here for you." Instead they said hurtful things: "Oh he was young." "That is what kids do." "It is not like he was some older man you didn't know." Why does age make a difference? It is a sick way of thinking. Sexual abuse is sexual abuse. What is wrong with this picture? It brings tears to my eyes the way my relatives have reacted to this and cannot accept the truth. Denial is where they would rather stay.

What about you and me, Adina?” Duff said, sidling up to her by the railing. “I know I screwed up. But do you think we could start over?”Adina thought about everything that had happened. Part of her wanted to kiss Duff McAvoy, the tortured British trust-fund-runaway-turned-pirate-of-necessity who loved rock ‘n’ roll and mouthy-but-vulnerable bass-playing girls from New Hampshire. But he didn’t exist. Not really. He was a creature of TV and her imagination, a guy she’d invented as much as he’d invented himself. And this was what she suddenly understood about her mother: how with each man, each husband, she was really trying to fill in the sketchy parts of herself and become somebody she could finally love. It was hard to live in the messiness and easier to believe in the dream. And in that moment, Adina knew she was not her mother after all. She would make mistakes, but they wouldn’t be the same mistakes. Starting now.“Sorry,” she said, heading for the bow, where a spot of sun looked inviting. ”Oh, also, about that blog? Just so you know, my dads know a lot of gay lawyers. Bitches will take your ass down if you try to publish that. Peace out.

. . . the only legitimate reason that kingship is not attractive to us is because in this age and this world the only kings available are finite and sinful. Listen to C. S. Lewis describe why he believes in democracy:A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. . . I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. . . . The real reason for democracy is . . . Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.1If there could be a king who is not limited in his wisdom and power and goodness and love for his subjects, then monarchy would be the best of all governments. If such a ruler could ever rise in the world—with no weakness, no folly, no sin—then no wise and humble person would ever want democracy again.The question is not whether God broke into the universe as a king. He did. The question is: What kind of king is he? What difference would his kingship make for you?

For that half-hour in the hospital delivery room I was intimate with immensity, for that half-minute before birth I held her hands and for that duration we three were undivided, I felt the blood of her pulse as we gripped hands, felt her blood beat in the rhythm that reached into the baby as she slipped into the doctor's hands, and for a few days we touched that immensity, we saw through her eyes to an immense intimacy, saw through to where she had come from, I felt important being next to her, and the feeling lasted when we entered our car for the drive home, thinking to myself that we weren't to be trusted with our baby, the feeling lasting while I measured us against the landscape, the February rain, the pewter sky, and then the rain freezing to the roadway, the warmth of the interior of the car with its unbreakable transparent sky dome and doors, until the car spun on the ice in the lane and twirled so that I could take an hour to describe how I threw up my hands in anguish as the baby slipped from her arms and whipped into the face of her mother reflected in the glass door, and she caught the baby back into her arms as the car glided to a stop in its usual place at the end of the drive, and nothing but silence and a few drops of blood at a nostril suggested that we would now be intimate with the immensities of death ("Interim")

Brianna’s looking for Drake,” Edilio said, thinking out loud.“You sent her out against Drake?” Albert demanded.“Sent her? Who sends Brianna out to get into a fight? She goes on her own. Anyway, it’s not like you’ve left us with anyone else.”Albert had the decency not to say anything to that.“You know, you guys put me in charge. I didn’t ask to be in charge. I didn’t want to be in charge. Sam was in charge and all you guys ever did was give him grief,” Edilio said. “You two, especially.” He pointed at Albert and Astrid. “So, okay, Astrid takes over. And then Astrid finds out it’s not so much fun being in charge. So it’s like, okay, let’s get the dumb wetback to do the job.”“No one ever—,” Astrid protested.“And me, like a fool, I’m thinking, okay, that must mean people trust me. They asked me to be in charge, be the mayor. Come to find out, I’m not making decisions; Albert’s making decisions. Albert’s deciding we need to find more water and sending our two best fighters off into the countryside. Now I’m supposed to fix everything? It’s like you go, ‘Fight a war,’ but you sent my army off on a wild goose chase.

Women understand that there are two distinct economies: There is physical attraction, and then there is the “ideal.” When a woman looks at a man, she can physically dislike the idea of his height, his coloring, his shape. But after she has liked him and loved him, she would not want him to look any other way: For many women, the body appears to grow beautiful and erotic as they grow to like the person in it. The actual body, the smell, the feel, the voice and movement, becomes charged with heat through the desirable person who animates it. Even Gertrude Stein said of Picasso, “There was nothing especially attractive about him at first sight…but his radiance, an inner fire one sensed in him, gave him a sort of magnetism I was unable to resist.” By the same token, a woman can admire a man as a work of art but lose sexual interest if he turns out to be an idiot.What becomes of the man who acquires a beautiful woman, with her “beauty” his sole target? He sabotages himself. He has gained no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she has been chosen. He has succeeded in buying a mutually suspicious set of insecurities. He does gain something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive.

Let there be no mistake in your mind as to the special character of the man who has come to Christ, and is a true Christian. He is not an angel, he is not a half-angelic being, in whom is no weakness, or blemish, or infirmity - he is nothing of the kind. He is nothing more than a sinner who has found out his sinfulness, and has learned the blessed secret of living by faith in Christ. What was the glorious company of the apostles and prophets? What was the noble army of martyrs? What were Isaiah, Daniel, Peter, James, John, Paul, Polycarp, Chrysostom, Augustine, Luther, Ridley, Latimer, Bunyan, Baxter, Whitefield, Venn, Chalmers, Bickersteth, M’Cheyne? What were they all, but sinners who knew and felt their sins, and trusted only in Christ? What were they, but men who accepted the invitation I bring you this day, and came to Christ by faith? By this faith they lived; in this faith they died. In themselves and their doings they saw nothing worth mentioning; but in Christ they saw all that their souls required. The invitation of Christ is now before you. If you never listened to it before, listen to it today. Broad, full, free, wide, simple, tender, kind, that invitation will leave you without excuse if you refuse to accept it. There are some invitations, perhaps, which it is wiser and better to decline. There is one which ought always to be accepted: that one is before you today. Jesus Christ is saying, “Come! Come unto Me.

When weary with the long day’s care,And earthly change from pain to pain,And lost, and ready to despair,Thy kind voice calls me back againO my true friend, I am not loneWhile thou canst speak with such a tone!So hopeless is the world without,The world within I doubly prize;Thy world where guile and hate and doubtAnd cold suspicion never rise;Where thou and I and LibertyHave undisputed sovereignty.What matters it that all aroundDanger and grief and darkness lie,If but within our bosom’s boundWe hold a bright unsullied sky,Warm with ten thousand mingled raysOf suns that know no winter days?Reason indeed may oft complainFor Nature’s sad reality,And tell the suffering heart how vainIts cherished dreams must always be;And Truth may rudely trample downThe flowers of Fancy newly blown.But thou art ever there to bringThe hovering visions back and breatheNew glories o’er the blighted springAnd call a lovelier life from death,And whisper with a voice divineOf real worlds as bright as thine.I trust not to thy phantom bliss,Yet still in evening’s quiet hourWith never-failing thankfulness Iwelcome thee, benignant power,Sure solacer of human caresAnd brighter hope when hope despairs.

Now we were standing around holding hands and not much was going on. I began to think of words I had known, just for fun, to fill up the blank space in my head. Couch, I thought. Cuisinart, I thought.The words felt different right now than they had before. They meant a little less, held a little less, but seemed somehow fuller: I had never really noticed how much sound there was in a word. The way it filled your mouth up with emptiness, a sort of loosened emptiness that you could tongue, an emptiness you could suck on like a stone. Stomach, I thought. Variety, I thought. Expectation. Intimation. Infiltration. Infiltration: I tongued that one further. I knew it had a hostile aspect, like someone breaking into your house or posing as someone you should trust. But it also had a lovely sound, a kind of tapered point and a gently ruffled edge, and as I repeated it over and over in my mouth it took on a really great flavor and I thought of water filtering in and out of a piece of fabric, back and forth, moving between, soaking it and washing out, soaking in and taking with it pale tremors of color, memory, resistance, all that stuff, until I felt like one of those pieces of cloth on the television commercials that got washed with the name-brand cleanser and is now not only white, but silky and mountain-scented.

In that moment, I realized that no matter what words I chose and no matter how much time I spent in telling, I would never be able to express my full experience...There are some experiences that only you can enter, that only you can truly hold. They are too vast to be imparted. You cannot even hold them wholly in your arms: they spill over into the dark beyond you, brimming, shooting out in ropes of light that make you ache with loneliness and yet yoke you to the world at the same time, because the vast things that have happened to you, however terrible, were always born out of the world, and so perhaps they offer you a place even as they push you out of another, even as they weigh you down with a self that can never fully be conveyed. Though most of us will try. We make bonds, we grow trust, we tell stories; we strive to articulate what it took to become who we are. Sometimes if we're very fortunate, our listeners can catch authentic glimpses of what we mean to say, like sparks in a dark room, but never the whole of it at once, not even with the best of friends or closest lover, because the whole of it at once is beyond speaking. It lives nowhere, absolutely nowhere, except inside your skin. That's where it flares, enormous, hazardous, utterly yours.