How do I wake up to joy and grace and beauty and all that is the fullest life when I must stay numb to losses and crushed dreams and all that empties me out?
Great faith is the greatest equalizer, the greatest eraser, and the greatest definer.
Isn’t joy worth the effort of trust?
I didn’t start with any specific steps, but through this intentional, daily practice of giving thanks, I found myself on a transformative journey that affected every aspect of my life – including all the broken places.
And though I don’t know how today’s story will end, I remember: faith thanks God in the middle of the story.
The life that yields the most – yields the most.
Lord God, Maker of all, when You give manna moments, may I give You thanks for the mystery. Because the manna that makes no sense – You will make it my sustenance. Today, in all the “what is it?” moments, turn me to give thanks for who You are.
A willingness to be inconvenienced is the ultimate proof of love.
You do something great with your life when you do all the small things with His great love.
Live everyday like you’re terminal, because you are. Live everyday like your soul is eternal, because it is!
I am what I love, and I will love you like Jesus, because of Jesus, through the strength of Jesus. I will love when I’m not loved back. I will love when I’m hurt and disappointed and betrayed and inconvenienced and rejected. I simply will love. No expectations, no conditions, no demands.
Love defies logic and keeps on loving when it makes no sense because that is what love does.
The only way to rise to the beauty of love is to rise and serve.
I had wanted someone to reach over to me at eighteen, sit in that church pew next to me, someone to touch my shoulder, to steady things and say: “Shame is a bully but grace is a shield. You are safe here.
Great grief isn’t made to fit inside your body. It’s why your heart breaks.
Expectations kill relationships – especially with God.
Time is made for dying in a thousand ways, so why be afraid of dying when a kind of dying could come all the time? Live every day like you’re terminal. Because you are. Live every day like your soul is eternal. Because it is.
Wise men are only wise because they make their priority the seeking of Christ.
Too often we want clarity and God wants us to come closer.
Life is never made unbearable by the road itself but by the way we bear the road. It’s not the hard roads that slay us; what actually slays us is the expectation that this road isn’t what we hoped it to be.
Buy the lie that your life is supposed to be heaven on earth, and suffering can be a torturous hell. But life is suffering, and suffering is but the cross we bear, part of earth’s topography to cross on our way to heaven. I wouldn’t know it for years: Screens sell pipe dreams. Every screen is trying to sell the lie to you – from Hollywood.