In this blog I’m including words written by other authors. I’m selecting quotes I’ve already used in my books.
I thought about my favorite authors and their books as we had to move all of my many, many, many books to a new office.
A few times I had to open the books and let the words open my heart.
Please take time to read them.
I love the comments. I hope you do:
And faith is, in the end, a kind of homesickness—for a home we have never visited but have never once stopped longing for.
—Philip Yancey
Remember the four words: you are not alone.
—Bob Beaudine
I don’t want to still be mad ten years from now. I don’t want to be unable to talk about it, or have it all come out of me in another way, like suddenly I don’t like children anymore because I lost one, and I could never face it.
—Christopher de Vinck
I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.
—Annie Dillard
You don’t know who someone is until adversity comes. It shows the cracks, and the cracks are where God leaks through.
—Leonard Sweet
Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future.
—Kathleen Norris
Suffering can, if we let it, make us better instead of worse.
—Eugene H. Peterson
It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.
—Annie Dillard
Read less minds. Ask more questions.
—Jon Acuff
For grace to be grace, it must give us things we didn’t know we needed and take us to places where we didn’t want to go. As we stumble through the crazily altered landscape of our lives, we find that God is enjoying our attention as never before.
—Kathleen Norris
As our culture becomes more and more hurried, I am learning the value of the spiritual discipline of slowing.
—Alan Fadling
Wide awake in the presence of God, I realized I had been so focused on asking why a good God allowed bad things to happen that I was missing out on the nearness of God all along. In becoming preoccupied with the why, I was missing the who.
—Margaret Feinberg
For journaling as slowing down, you don’t need to write a lot, and you don’t need to feel pressured to do it in a certain way. Just take a deep breath, and slow down.
—April Yamasaki
Sometimes it seems as if the Christian community is “so busy” with its projects and plans that there is neither the time nor the mood to pray. But when prayer is no longer its primary concern, and when its many activities are no longer seen and experienced as part of prayer itself, the community quickly degenerates into a club with a common cause but no common vocation.
—Henri Nouwen
One of the most discouraging blocks that young church planters run into is the touted success of the American megachurch.
—Calvin Miller
Encouragement is an indispensable part of accountability. We often think of accountability as a negative thing, as an interaction of tough love. But in reality it is as much about the art of encouragement as it is about the art of keeping high expectations. There is so much in life that beats us down and discourages us that we need a steady dose of encouragement. We each need a fellow Christ-follower who is absolutely convinced that we are great and can do great things. We each need fellow apprentices who applaud us when we succeed and pull us up when we fail.
—James Bryan Smith
Resentment, bitterness, and a lack of forgiveness anchor us to a past that cannot be changed. We cannot go back and undo the damage of yesterday, but we can undo the damage it is causing today. We do that with the act of forgiveness.
—Stephen Arterburn
