110+ John Shelby Spong Quotes On Death, Bible And Resurrection

John Shelby Spong was an American Clergyman and Bishop of the Episcopal Church. He was known for his liberal views on topics such as homosexuality and the inerrancy of scripture. His writing and teaching on these topics have been influential in the modern church. Following is our collection on famous quotes by John Shelby Spong on life, love, death.

Top 10 John Shelby Spong Quotes

1. I do assert that one prepares for eternity not by being religious and keeping the rules, but by living fully, loving wastefully, and daring to be all that each of us has the capacity to be.
2. The church is like a swimming pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.
3. I think that anything that begins to give people a sense of their own worth and dignity is God.
4. The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.
5. Was Judas Iscariot a figure of history? I do not think so. There is no mention of him in any source before the 8th decade.
6. All religion seems to need to prove that it's the only truth. And that's where it turns demonic. Because that's when you get religious wars and persecutions and burning heretics at the stake.
7. I don't want a God that would go around killing people's little girls. Neither do I want a God who would kill his own son.
8. You can't have a world where 50 percent of the people are dieting and 50 percent of the people are starving if you want stability.
9. I think we have to recover our spiritual nature. The way we have interpreted Christianity does not do that.
10. There's no way a human being can escape his or her human-ness to be able to imagine God. We can talk about how we've experienced God, not what or who God is.

John Shelby Spong Short Quotes

• Hysterical fundamentalism is not the way into the future; it is the last gasp of the past.
• I've never met anybody who was helped by being told how wretched, miserable and sinful they are.
• So much organized religion, in my opinion, ends up being life-denying.
• Mother Nature is not sweet.
• The way that I see Christianity is that its role is to enhance the life of every person.
• It's just not easy enough to say that I pray and God will accomplish.
• It appears to be in the nature of religion itself to be prejudiced against those who are different.
• I believe that God is very real.
• I am a child of the 21st century.
• I see Christianity in very humanistic terms.

John Shelby Spong Quotes About Life

Christianity is, I believe, about expanded life, heightened consciousness and achieving a new humanity. It is not about closed minds, supernatural interventions, a fallen creation, guilt, original sin or divine rescue. — John Shelby Spong

I don't see Jesus as rescuing the fallen; I see Jesus as expanding the potential of life. The primary reason the old idea of rescuing the fallen is no good is that there never was a time when we fell from perfection into sin. — John Shelby Spong

I learned early in life that you get places by having the right enemies. — John Shelby Spong

I don't think hell exists. I happen to believe in life after death but I don't think it's got a thing to do with reward and punishment. Religion is always in the control business and that's something which people don't really understand. — John Shelby Spong

Whatever diminishes life is evil, and whatever enhances life is good. — John Shelby Spong

The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon, therefore, its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior. — John Shelby Spong

Terrorism is a real despair. These are people for whom life has been so negative that they're willing to die if they can take down some of their enemies. — John Shelby Spong

Moral judgment is not life-giving; love that transcends the boundaries of judgment as Jesus' love did, is. — John Shelby Spong

...death is ultimately a dimension of life through which we journey into timelessness. — John Shelby Spong

I experience God as the power of life, the power of love and the ground of being. I don't say that's what God is; I say that's my experience of God. — John Shelby Spong

John Shelby Spong Quotes About Love

To have a great university library near you with plenty of archives of all the journals that you want to research in the twentieth century is a remarkable asset, and I spend a day, maybe two days a week in that library. I just plain love it. — John Shelby Spong

I think I can tell you how I experience God. I experience God as the power of life calling me to live, I experience God as the power of love calling me to love. That's the God I see in Jesus of Nazareth, that's the God I see in the fourth gospel. — John Shelby Spong

The Jesus experience expanded people into a position where they didn't have to have defensive tribal lives, "God loves my people, my tribe, anddoesn't like yours." The Bible is full of such references. — John Shelby Spong

I ... look at Jesus and see a humanity open to all that God is--open to life, open to love and open to being. — John Shelby Spong

I experience God as the power of love. — John Shelby Spong

I can only give away the love that I have received. — John Shelby Spong

I still hope. I wouldn't be in this position if I didn't. I love the church. I love the Bible. But I think we're in a time where we're desperately in need of a great reformation. — John Shelby Spong

Live life to it's fullest, love wastefully, and be all we can be. — John Shelby Spong

John Shelby Spong Quotes About Death

The primary message of the Christian Church is that we were born in sin and we need to be rescued; we cannot rescue ourselves, so God comes to our rescue, pays the price of our sin and transforms us through the death of Jesus. — John Shelby Spong

The right to a good death is a basic human freedom. The [2006-JAN] Supreme Court's decision to uphold aid in dying allows us to view and act on death as a dignified moral and godly choice for those suffering with terminal illnesses. — John Shelby Spong

I prepare for death by living. — John Shelby Spong

John Shelby Spong Quotes About Bible

The Bible Belt, the religious South, is the section of the country that practiced slavery until the war made them give it up. They practiced segregation. They practiced lynchings. I don't see any great value in that. — John Shelby Spong

The Hebrew scriptures say it's okay to enslave anybody except your fellow Jews. It says you should enslave only your neighbors. I say to people that means Mexicans and Canadians are a bit at risk if we want to be literal about the Bible. — John Shelby Spong

The Bible has lost every major battle it has ever fought. The Bible was quoted to defend slavery and the bible lost. The Bible was quoted to keep women silent, and the Bible lost. And the Bible is being quoted to deny homosexuals their equal rights, and the Bible will lose. — John Shelby Spong

Some people in the church, like Martin Luther King, Jr., came out against segregation. But if you look at the bulk of organized religion, you will discover that it endorsed slavery and quoted the Bible to approve it; the Pope even owned slaves. — John Shelby Spong

Plenty of people out there think of me as the Antichrist or the devil incarnate because I do not affirm the literal patterns of the Bible. But the fact is I can no more abandon the literal patterns than I could fly to the moon. I just go beyond them. — John Shelby Spong

We're either going to be driven to a whole new sense of radical interdependence where we are, in the Bible's words, our neighbor's keeper, or destroy ourselves. — John Shelby Spong

...secular journalists... tend to accept uncritically the oft - repeated Evangelical Protestant and Conservative Roman Catholic definitions that the Bible is anti - gay. If these people were honest, they would have to admit that the Bible is also pro - slavery and anti - women. — John Shelby Spong

The Bible interprets life from its particular perspective; it does not record in a factual way the human journey through history. — John Shelby Spong

I treasure the Bible. I live in it and work on it all the time. But it is not the word of God. It's the tribal story of a particular people, and the best thing about that story is that the story keeps growing and evolving. — John Shelby Spong

I grew up in North Carolina being told that the Bible approves slavery and segregation, that it was the will of God. — John Shelby Spong

John Shelby Spong Quotes About Prayer

The God understood as a father figure, who guided ultimate personal decisions, answered our prayers, and promised rewards and punishment based upon our behavior was not designed to call anyone into maturity. — John Shelby Spong

Prayer is not adult letters written to Santa Claus, and God is not some parent-like figure up in the sky who's going to take care of us. — John Shelby Spong

Some people think prayer stops bullets or rockets or land mines. It doesn't. That's magic, that's not God. Sometimes, you're just in the wrong place at the wrong time. — John Shelby Spong

If you're really thinking prayer can stop rockets or bullets, you have to ask why some people do get hit by rockets or bullets. Are they people who no one prayed for? Are they people who God just didn't like? I don't think so. — John Shelby Spong

Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way. — John Shelby Spong

Some people think prayer is telling God what to do. I don't think that's the case. — John Shelby Spong

John Shelby Spong Quotes About People

There never was a time when we were created perfect and fell into sin and needed to be rescued. We are evolving people; we are not fallen people. We are not a little lower than the angels. We're a little higher than the apes. It's a very different perspective. — John Shelby Spong

If you begin to give people hope that there is a brighter future, there is a new tomorrow, then the people who were yesterday's terrorists become tomorrow's elected officials and they're part of the system. — John Shelby Spong

The Sins of Scripture is an interesting title; most people don't put sins and scripture together in the same title. It jars people. — John Shelby Spong

Oh the Christian church has encouraged enormous immaturity among the peoples who are its primary adherence. — John Shelby Spong

In the private arena, you can do whatever you wish, and people do. These crazy evangelical preachers get on the radio and TV and say incredible things. — John Shelby Spong

I think human beings are almost, by definition, religious people,in the sense that we ask questions of meaning, we anticipate future events, we deal with the issues of mortality from the first time we see a dead bird as a little child. — John Shelby Spong

The task of the church, for example, becomes less that of indoctrinating or relating people to an external divine power and more that of providing opportunities for people to touch the infinite center of all things and to grow into all that they are destined to be. — John Shelby Spong

The priesthood in many ways is the ultimate closet in Western civilization, where gay people particularly have hidden for the past two thousand years. — John Shelby Spong

The great danger... in believing yourself especially chosen is that it becomes easy to view those who are not your people as God's especially unchosen. — John Shelby Spong

I would like the church to be a place where the questions of people are honored rather than a place where we have all the answers. The church has to get out of propaganda. The future will involve us in more interfaith dialogue. ... We cannot say we have the only truth. — John Shelby Spong

John Shelby Spong Quotes About World

The demolishment of the power of organized Christianity in the Western world to finally realize the emancipation of women and give them the vote in 1920. Women couldn't even own property in their own names until the last quarter of the 19th century in America. — John Shelby Spong

It's not going to be a straight upward progression, but there's no doubt that consciousness is growing. Prejudices die regularly in the Western world. We don't burn witches anymore. — John Shelby Spong

Malachi, the last book of the Old Testament, says, "From the rising of the sun to its setting, God's name shall be great among the Gentiles." This encompasses the whole world. Suddenly it's not the Jews against the Gentiles, or my tribe against your tribe. — John Shelby Spong

What happened in the Western world was that Plato ceased to be the way people thought. Aristotle was rediscovered, and the modern, educated world moved toward Aristotelian thinking. — John Shelby Spong

We were born in a Jewish world, as part of a Jewish faith tradition. We had to translate ourselves into the neo-Platonic thinking Greek world; that took us about 400 years. Then, finally a man named Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo, recast Christianity in terms of neo-Platonic thought. — John Shelby Spong

You learn that you either are going to have a police state where you don't have any freedom left, or you're going to build a world that doesn't create terrorists - and that means a whole different way of "getting along." — John Shelby Spong

The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity. — John Shelby Spong

The audience that I try to reach are members of what I call the church alumni association. Now they are people who have not found in institutional religion a God big enough to be God for their world. — John Shelby Spong

The church had to find a way to protect Jesus' perfection so that he could do the work of salvation which, in their frame of reference, only God could do, because God had to come into this world from outside this world to rescue the fallen creation. — John Shelby Spong

In fact, in 1724 the Western world learned that women were co-creators of life that's when it was discovered that women had an egg cell. — John Shelby Spong

John Shelby Spong Famous Quotes And Sayings

God is not a Christian, God is not a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist. All of those are human systems which human beings have created to try to help us walk into the mystery of God. I honor my tradition, I walk through my tradition, but I don't think my tradition defines God, I think it only points me to God. — John Shelby Spong

When the dust settles and the pages of history are written, it will not be the angry defenders of intolerance who have made the difference. The reward will go to those who dared to step outside the safety of their privacy in order to expose and rout the prevailing prejudices. — John Shelby Spong

All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what each person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination. — John Shelby Spong

I could not believe that anyone who has read this book would be so foolish as to proclaim that the Bible in every literal word was the divinely inspired, inerrant word of God. Have these people simply not read the text? Are they hopelessly misinformed? Is there a different Bible? Are they blinded by a combination of ego needs and naïveté? — John Shelby Spong

So who is God? No one can finally say. That is not within human competence. All we can ever say is how we believe we have experienced God, doing our best to dispel our human delusions. Let me try to do just that. I experience God as the source of life calling me to live fully and thus to respect life in every form as embodying the holy. — John Shelby Spong

I look at American Christianity and I'm almost in despair. I don't want to be identified with it. The Christian vote in America is an anti-abortion, anti-homosexual vote. I consider that to be anti-female and anti-gay, and I don't want to be identified with a God who is anti-anything. — John Shelby Spong

The Bible is full of dreadful things. There's a Psalm that says "Happy will you be when you take your enemy's children and dash their heads against the stones." Don't read that to me on Sunday morning and say "This is the word of the Lord." It's like that crazy man down in Alabama who wanted to put the Ten Commandments in his courtroom. — John Shelby Spong

If the resurrection of Jesus cannot be believed except by assenting to the fantastic descriptions included in the Gospels, then Christianity is doomed. For that view of resurrection is not believable, and if that is all there is, then Christianity, which depends upon the truth and authenticity of Jesus' resurrection, also is not believable. — John Shelby Spong

The great biblical tradition says that loving God and loving one's neighbor are not two separate actions but two sides of the same action. It was the prophet Amos who bore witness to the fact that divine worship is nothing but human justice being offered to God and human justice is nothing but divine worship being lived out. — John Shelby Spong

The God of the Hebrews is a God that human language, we're not even supposed to speak the holy name. We were told in the Second Commandment we could make no images of this God, and I don't think that means just building idols, I think that means also trying to believe you've captured God in your words, in the Creeds, in the Scriptures. — John Shelby Spong

Papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy are the two ecclesiastical versions of this human idolatry. Both papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy require widespread and unchallenged ignorance to sustain their claims to power. Both are doomed as viable alternatives for the long- range future of anyone. — John Shelby Spong

I live on the other side of Charles Darwin and I can no longer see human light as having been created perfect and falling into sin, I see us rather emerging into higher and higher levels of consciousness and higher and higher levels of complication. — John Shelby Spong

I admire our ancestors, whoever they were. I think the first self-conscious person must have shaken in his boots. Because as he becomes self-conscious, he's no longer part of nature. He sees himself against nature. He looks at the vastness of the universe and it looks hostile. — John Shelby Spong

The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible. — John Shelby Spong

I find it fascinating that Paul [the apostol], writing to the Galatians, responds to the question, "What does it mean to live in Christ?" by saying, "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." — John Shelby Spong

My sense is if the Episcopal Church can't stand challenge within its own ranks, then it is not a church I would want to be a member of anyway. — John Shelby Spong

My hope is that a religious consciousness will begin to rise, one based on enhancing humanity, grasping life in all of its complex wonder, having the courage to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that each of us can be and that it will express itself in our national life in more earth centered, justice enhancing and humane ways. — John Shelby Spong

Jesus' power is the power of human wholeness that ultimately opens, invites and enables human beings to step beyond defense lines where incomplete humanity always hides in order to experience full humanity. — John Shelby Spong

We are in a survival mentality, and that's hard-wired into our humanity, because we are the winners of an evolutionary struggle of millions and millions and millions of years. — John Shelby Spong

I live on the other side of Copernicus and Galileo; I can no longer conceive of God as sort of above the sky, looking down and keeping record books. — John Shelby Spong

Human beings are hardwired by however many millions or billions of years to orient toward their own survival. That's why we're tribal people. That's why we're prejudiced people. That's why we treat women as second-class citizens, that's why we are homophobic, and that's why we make religion a weapon to prove we're superior to other people. — John Shelby Spong

Now, if Mary has an egg cell, then Jesus gets 50 percent of his genetic make up from his mother. And if his mother is a child of Adam, she, too,is fallen so Jesus is not perfect. — John Shelby Spong

I think the story of the Christian faith is how you can become more deeply and fully human, not how you can become religious. And I don't see any indication that being religious makes you more moral. — John Shelby Spong

I don't think much about my physical body going off into the long, green fairways of heaven to play golf. — John Shelby Spong

At its very core the story of Easter has nothing to do with angelic announcements or empty tombs. It has nothing to do with time periods, whether three days, forty days, or fifty days. It has nothing to do with resuscitated bodies that appear and disappear or that finally exit this world in a heavenly ascension. — John Shelby Spong

It's the 21st century, and somebody has to rise from within this faith tradition and retranslate it for the post-modern world... The Earth is not the center of the universe, therefore, God is not a being who lives above the sky, who splits the Red Sea from time to time, or creates a miracle, or whatever. — John Shelby Spong

Pat Robertson said the feminist movement was just a bunch of lesbians who wanted to leave their husbands and kill their children. I quoted him in my book. It's a fantastic statement. — John Shelby Spong

We live in a very pluralistic society today. There are Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, atheists, Roman Catholics, Evangelical Christians, and Christians like me. There are a wide variety of religious expressions in this country. I think they all must be treated with respect and none of them must be given priority in the public arena. — John Shelby Spong

You don't take your newborn baby, put that baby on your lap, and say, "Now listen, kid, you were born in sin, you're not worth anything, and you've got to pray for mercy." That's not going to raise a healthy adult. And that's what we do Sunday after Sunday after Sunday. — John Shelby Spong

What kind of god is it that some human brain can shatter the illusions that have been built up around such a deity? God's a mystery. I'll never be able to tell you what God is. — John Shelby Spong

We didn't educate women, because the leaders then didn't think they were educable. That changed when a shortage of teachers developed, because men didn't get paid enough to teach school. Then men, who held the positions of power, sent women to teachers' colleges. — John Shelby Spong

I think if you're convinced that you're evil, and that God has had to rescue you, then the best you can be is grateful. But nobody ever loves the person they have to be perpetually grateful to. That's just not the way it works in humanity. You need to be set free. You need to be loved just as you are so that you can become all that you can be. That's the direction we have to turn the Christian message; when we do, it becomes universal. — John Shelby Spong

Paul's words are not the Words of God. They are the words of Paul- a vast difference. — John Shelby Spong

In my book, The Sins of Scripture, I traced the development of tribal religion, which included ideas like God's killing the Egyptians because they hated the chosen people. Then a God of love finally appears in the Book of Hosea, about the 8th century. A God of justice appears in the Book of Amos in the late 8th century or early 7th century. — John Shelby Spong

One of my professors said to me once, "Any god that can be killed off will be killed, but if I can shake up your faith in your god, it means you already don't have much of a god." — John Shelby Spong

Religion is a mixed blessing. — John Shelby Spong

I want to see Christianity enhance our humanity instead of rescue us from some fall. I don't want us to be depending on this supernatural God up in the sky; I want us to recognize that God is part of who we are and that we have to live out the meaning of God with other people. That means we must live in mutual respect and interdependence; it means we have to limit our own desires in order for the body politic to survive. — John Shelby Spong

When I grew up in the South, I was taught that segregation was the will of God, and the Bible was quoted to prove it. I was taught that women were by nature in inferior to men, and the Bible was quoted to prove it. I was taught that it was okay to hate other religions, and especially the Jews, and the Bible was quoted to prove it. — John Shelby Spong

When I look back at the Christian faith, I see that we have had to retranslate, almost reinvent ourselves a number of times. — John Shelby Spong

Jesus becomes the captive of the hysterically religious, the chronically fearful, the insecure and even the neurotic among us, or he becomes little more than a fading memory, the symbol of an age that is no more and a nostalgic reminder of our believing past. To me, neither option is worth pursuing. — John Shelby Spong

Our problem is not that we're fallen; our problem is we haven't become human yet. The question is, what can make us human, so that we can give life away and give love away and not be grasping after trying to protect our own lives all the time? That's the way I see the Jesus story, and I think it's a powerful and profound story. — John Shelby Spong

Matthew is the only gospel that uses the Sermon on the Mount, for example, because that's the new Moses making a new interpretation of the law on a new mountain. So then you begin to put all these things together, and I don't know how you can make sense out of that book if you don't know the Jewish background. — John Shelby Spong

The trouble with Christianity was that by about 150, there were hardly any Jews left in the Christian church, and so from that time until the last part of the twentieth century, the only people reading the gospels and interpreting the gospels and writing commentaries on the gospels were gentiles who were simply ignorant of the Jewish background, and I just thought they were prejudiced. — John Shelby Spong

Some parts of the Bible are dreadful. In fact, my working title for The Sins of Scripture was "The Terrible Text of The Bible." — John Shelby Spong

I get letters every week from people who live in rural Texas or rural Mississippi and who feel totally alone. They feel like they must be the strangest person in the world. They don't fit in to the religious milieu of their communities. It doesn't make any sense to them. They read some of my columns and they know that there's somebody in the world at least as crazy as they are, and so they write and say is there anybody else? — John Shelby Spong

The Bible was written between 3,000 and 2,000 years ago, and it's filled with the knowledge that people had in that period of time, some of which you and I rejected long ago. The Bible says that women are property, that homosexuals ought to be put to death, that anybody who worships a false God ought to be executed, that a child that talks back to his parents ought to be stoned at the gates of the city. Those ideas are absurd. — John Shelby Spong

There are some great values in Christianity, but I think the values are located more deeply in our humanity than they are in our religion. There are certainly some survival values. — John Shelby Spong

The trouble is, the same thing that enabled us to survive evolution is also going to kill us, because in the final analysis, if survival is the primary motivation of every human being, then we will finally be in a situation where might will make right and only one person will survive. — John Shelby Spong

Now, the fourth gospel says that the moment that Jesus is glorified is the moment he's put to death on the cross, not the resurrection. The moment he's put to death on the cross is when he shows forth glory, and the reason that is, is that he became free enough to give his life away and to love those who were taking it from him. And that's what God is all about. That's the mystical point of view that was hidden from me for years. — John Shelby Spong

I cannot say my yes to legends that have been clearly and fancifully created. If I could not move my search beyond angelic messengers, empty tombs, and ghostlike apparitions, I could not say yes to Easter. — John Shelby Spong

Men didn't like to empty bedpans, so we made women nurses. Then men didn't like to do the administrative stuff, so women were allowed to become secretaries. That's the way they entered the work force. Then we began to educate them because they had to be educated. But it wasn't until after World War II that most of the great universities of this country became coeducational. — John Shelby Spong

We have to start at ground zero and ask what it means to have a real connection with God and what it means to pray. We have to recast our whole understanding of God. We live on the other side of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Steven Hawking, a whole group of people who have recast the way we think about reality. — John Shelby Spong

What the mind cannot accept, the heart can finally never adore. — John Shelby Spong

The 20th century was a turning point; it freed and emancipated women, broke the back of segregation, and began the struggle to give justice to gay and lesbian people. But the Christian church, in both Catholic and Protestant forms, resisted every one of those humanizing developments. The church was on the wrong side of all three of those fights. — John Shelby Spong

In that process of coming to know that which we name as divine, the God who is love is slowly transformed into the love that is God. Let me repeat that...We breathe love in, and we breathe love out. It is omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent. It is never exhausted, always expanding. When I try to describe this reality, words fail me; so I simply utter the name God. That name, however, is no longer for me the name of a being. — John Shelby Spong

I was raised pretty much a fundamentalist, but the one thing that fundamentalism gave to me was the love for that book and a commitment to read and study it. The difficulty is that I've read it all, I didn't skip around, I read it all, and when you read it all, you can't take it literally because you don't want to blame God for a lot of stuff that occurs in that book. There are some pretty violent scenes. — John Shelby Spong

There's an awful lot of biblical ignorance, and the church perpetuates that ignorance. — John Shelby Spong

I'm not writing for fundamentalists. I'm writing for the people who have been repelled by that kind of thinking and yet who think there might be something they haven't yet discovered. — John Shelby Spong

Nobody in the scientific or medical world thinks that homosexuality is something that people choose. It's something we are. Now, I didn't choose to be heterosexual. I just woke up when I was about twelve years old and girls didn't look obnoxious to me any longer, but I didn't make a choice about the matter. I just responded to my own hormones. — John Shelby Spong

Life Lessons by John Shelby Spong

1. John Shelby Spong teaches us to be open-minded and tolerant of different beliefs and perspectives, even if we don't agree with them.
2. He encourages us to think critically and question our own assumptions and biases, so that we can make informed decisions.
3. He also reminds us to be humble and to recognize that we don't have all the answers, and that we must be willing to learn from others.