My destiny is to remind you to look up from the castles you’re building in the sand long enough to notice the cathedrals that God’s building all around you – without you, without your sweat, without your tears, without your consent. While you dream your dreams, he’s busy building your destiny. And there is as much beauty in your destiny as there was in your dream. Let go and believe that whatever its is, it will be beautiful.
What my friends didn’t know about me and I didn’t know about Amma is that people who are hurting don’t need Avoiders, Protectors, or Fixers. What we need are patient, loving witnesses. People to sit quietly and hold space for us. People to stand in helpless vigil to our pain.
Forgiveness and grace are like oxygen: we can’t offer it to others unless we put our masks on first.
People always seem quite shocked by the cruelty that’s happening in America’s schools. I’m baffled by their shock, and I’m concerned about what’s not being addressed in their proposed solutions.
Sometimes you have to leave to discover that you left everything you needed back home.
I think I love my people more than normal people love their people. My love is so overwhelming and terrifying and uncomfortable and complicated that I need to hide from it.
I do not have the heart to suggest that maybe life doesn’t respect the boundaries of our tidy formulas, and that knowledge is not a fortress that keeps out pain.
Since the day I decided to become sober and a mother, I’ve been trying to become who I am supposed to be.
I only remember waking up late the next morning and finding myself in bed with this boy who feels both completely out of my league and just like home. I.
The Warrior feeds all three of her selves: mind, spirit, body. I breathe deeply and then start on the potatoes. Eat until you’re full. Trust your body to guide you. Treat yourself like someone you love, Glennon. Listen to what you want and need and give it to yourself. Be your own friend.
Maybe there is no way for love to fail, because the eventual result of all love is New Life.
Teamwork. Love takes teamwork, I think.
Grace makes no disclaimer. It’s true for all or none.
Education is like Christmas. We’re all just opening our gifts, one at a time. And it is a fact that each and every child has a bright shiny present with her name on it, waiting there underneath the tree. God wrapped it up, and he’ll let us know when it’s time to unwrap it.
A heart expands exactly as much as her owner allows.
Fancy language tends to make “in” people feel more in and “out” people feel more out, and I don’t think that’s how words are best used. Words are best used to describe specific feelings, ideas, and hearts as clearly as possible – to make the speaker and the listener, or the writer and the reader, feel less alone and more hopeful.
You have to turn your head to see peripheral miracles.
I’ll be helpless and broken and still – surrendered to my powerlessness. Mutual surrender, maybe that’s an act of love. Surrendering to this thing that’s bigger than we are: this love, this pain. The courage to surrender comes from knowing that the love and pain will almost kill us, but not quite.
My body is my teacher now, and I have learned. Pain and love are places I must be brave enough to visit. My courage will come from knowing I can handle whatever I encounter there – because I was designed by my creator to not only survive pain and love but also to become whole inside it. I was born to do this. I am a Warrior.
I have accepted another one of life’s dangerous invitations: the invitation to feel. My.