Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
What was intended to harm, God intended it all for good. And no matter what intends to harm you, God's arms have you. You can never be undone.
Adults are tempted to produce and perform Christmas for their kids and their families, and they arrive at Christmas Day weary and disillusioned.
Who would ever know the greater graces of comfort and perserverance, mercy and forgiveness, patience and courage, if no shadows fell over a life?
On the night He was betrayed Jesus broke bread and lifted it up and gave THANKS. If Jesus can give thanks in that, can we not give thanks in all?
God can enter into me, even me, and use these hands, these feet, to be His love, a love that goes on and on and on forever, endless cycle of grace.
Our fall was, has always been, and always will be, that we aren’t satisfied in God and what He gives. We hunger for something more, something other.
Gratitude's not a natural posture. The prince of darkness is ultimately a spoiled ingrate, and I've spent most of my life as kin to the fist-shaker.
Learning slowly to not be so reactionary while inserting verbal gratitude into stressful situations is almost like being healed of mental blindness.
When we can't bottle our tears up anymore, God catches every one in His bottle. God's catching every falling tear because He won't let us fall apart.
I write a chapter, then edit it and edit it and edit it and edit it. I don't think we mine creativity from within. It's bestowed from on high, from God.
Girls rival each other. Women revive each other. Girls empale each other. Women empower each other. Girls compare each other. Women champion each other.
Joy is the realest reality, the fullest life, and joy is always given, never grasped. God gives gifts and I give thanks and I unwrap the gift given: joy.
The book [ One Thousand Gifts] took just over a year to write, on the fringe hours, early and late, around home educating 6 kids and farming and blogging.
Life is so urgent and necessitates living slow. It's only the amateurs-and that I've been, and it's been ugly-who thinks slow and urgent are contradictory.
Parenting is about preparing children to get along with each other, to get along with you and without you, and that it's impossible to get along without God.
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?
When I fully enter time’s swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here.
Of asking nothing of the reader - but offering a still, quiet oasis in the cybersphere to go vertical with God. An island of stillness to know that He is God.
If trust must be earned, hasn't God unequivocally earned our trust with the bark on the raw wounds, the thorns pressed into the brow, your name on the cracked lips.
Giving thanks is that: making the canyon of pain into a megaphone to proclaim the ultimate goodness of God when Satan and all the world would sneer at us to recant.
Motherhood is a hallowed place because children aren’t commonplace. Co-laboring over the sculpting of souls is a sacred vocation, a humbling privilege. Never forget.
The joy of the Lord is your strength and the person of Christ is your unassailable joy - and the battle for joy is nothing less than fighting the good fight of faith.
We were made to live in a posture of grateful worship, and when we live in praise we live our purpose, and all the pieces fall in place, us all falling down in thanks.
We don't see the material world for what it is meant to be: the means to communion with God.... There is a belief missing, that God is good and that he gives good gifts.
We live in a broken world - and for the life of me I can't get it all right. But Jesus takes all our broken messes and He makes them, by His grace, into a mosaic of grace.
When we fixate on the worst in something, we render ourselves incapable of fixing anything... But attend to the good in something - and we act towards the best in everything.
But, someone, please give me—who is born again but still so much in need of being born anew—give me the details of how to live in the waiting cocoon before the forever begins?
Our [people's] very saving is associated with our gratitude. Which follows: if our fall in the garden was ingratitude, then salvation must be intimately related to giving of thanks.
By default, most of us have taken the dare to simply survive. Exist. Get through. For the most part, we live numb to life - we've grown weary and apathetic and jaded... and wounded.
In counting gifts, to one thousand, more, I discover that slapping a sloppy brush of thanksgiving over everything in my life leaves me deeply thankful for very few things in my life.
This day is not a sieve, losing time. With each passing minute, each passing year, there's this deepening awareness that I am filling, gaining time. We stand on the brink of eternity.
Measuring sticks try to rank some people as big and some people as small - but we aren't sizes. We are souls. There are no better people or worse people - there are only God-made souls.
I started blogging in 2004, light years ago on the Web. And I began because I have this handicap - I can't figure out my life or see God clearly unless I untangle my life again with words.
I wonder if the greatest challenges was to keep pressing into [writing] when I had never been here before. I felt like Abraham - being called to something that he didn't know how to get to.
Worry is belief gone wrong. Because you don't believe that God will get it right. But peace - peace is belief that exhales. Because you believe that God's provision is everywhere - like air.
The greatest compliment of the book [One Thousand Gifts]? Maybe the Muslim man in Iraq who was given the book and came to a saving knowledge of Jesus, wanted to live his life in thanks to God?
Writing is this act of faith - a bit like driving in the fog: you can hardly see just in front of you. But you trust God's leading you and you just write into the space you can see ahead of you.
Thanksgiving creates abundance; and the miracle of multiplying happens when I give thanks-take the just one loaf, say it is enough, and give thanks-and He miraculously makes it more than enough.
What if I gave thanks in the trouble, for the trouble, because the trouble is a gift that causes me to turn? What if I loved God not for His goods but for His love itself that is goodness enough?
Maybe the man who said that his doctor had pulled him off Prozac because One Thousand Gifts and taking the dare to write 1,000 gifts was healing deep places in him and leading him to *experience* joy.
[Bill Jensen] shared his extensive publishing background with me, and prayerfully offered to work out a proposal and to see if God opened any publishing doors? I never get over the unexpected ways of God.
But wells don't come without first begging to see the wells; wells don't come without first splitting open hard earth, cracking back the lids. There's no seeing God face-to-face without first the ripping.
Really, the greatest compliments about a book [One Thousand Gifts] are never about the book, or the author of the book, but about the reader and God and how the pages helped them connect at a deeper level.
The cynics, they can only speak of the dark, of the obvious, and this is not hard. For all it's supposed sophistication, it's cynicism that's simplistic. In a fallen world, how profound is to see the cracks?
I don't want a Christmas you can buy. I don't want a Christmas you can make. What I want is a Christmas you can hold. A Christmas that holds me, remakes me, revives me. I want a Christmas that whispers, Jesus.
Darkness transfigures into light, bad transfigures into good, grief transfigures into grace, empty transfigures into full. God wastes nothing – ‘makes everything work out according to his plan.’ (Ephesians 1:11).
The true Love Dare. To move into His presence and listen to His love unending and know the grace uncontainable. This is the vault of the miracles. The only thing that can change us, the world, is this- all His love.
At the last, this is what will determine a fulfilling, meaningful life, a life that, behind all the facades, every one of us longs to live: gratitude for the blessings that expresses itself by becoming the blessing.
Wherever you are, be all there." I have lived the runner, panting ahead in worry, pounding back in regrets, terrified to live in the present, because here-time asks me to do the hardest of all: just open wide and receive.
The practice of giving thanks...eucharisteo...this is the way we practice the presence of God, stay present to His presence, and it is always a practice of the eyes. We don't have to change what we see. Only the way we see.