If you're truthful with yourself and others, forgiveness clears the path to righteousness, to grace. All we want is grace. We all want that light in our lives. And we can only get that when we go deep into truth.

Those who have never seen a leopard under favourable conditions in his natural surroundings can have no conception of the grace of movement, and beauty of colouring, of this the most gracefuL and the most beautiful of all animales in our Indian jungles.

This is where Jean's stubbornness and, perhaps, God's stubborn grace came into play. “My definition of grace would be multifaceted, but part of it would certainly be God's passion for brokenness. He does, he really does love brokenness,” Jean told me. “Grace doesn't obsess with ourselves. It obsesses with people and with brokenness. This is a hard place to live, but God is bigger than hard places to live.

I feel grace. Warm and flowing like a river, it pours over me. I am awash in grace and cannot help but raise my face to it as I would the sun. I want to laugh as it rains downs on me, ripples through my limbs, cleanses them of fatigue and self-loathing. I am reborn in this grace, and suddenly, I can do anything.

Why do we act as though our sin disqualifies us from the grace of God? That is the only thing that qualifies us! Anything else is a self-righteous attempt to earn God's grace. You cannot trust God's grace 99 percent. It's all or nothing. The problem, as I pointed out earlier, is that we want partial credit for our salvation. We want to be 1 percent of the equation. But if we try to save ourselves, we forfeit the salvation that comes from Jesus Christ alone, by grace through faith.

When we decided to move West, I worried about how to defend my family and my stock from Indians, but I never worried about inheriting one!”--from Prairie Grace when Georgia's father Thomas realizes gravely ill Gray Wolf has been left at their doorstep

Grace doesn’t give me a free pass to act out how I feel, with no regard to His commands. Rather, His grace gives me consolation in the moment, with a challenge to learn from this situation and become more mature in the future.

When you can cross the highwire without falling off, you are in a state of perfect balance, perfect grace. It is the same with obedience. When you submit, submit totally, you enter that same equilibrium, surrender and grace. This is the meaning of erotic.

“Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful”

“Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time”