Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Nobody turns down an invitation to the White House, but I’ve seen plenty of people turn down an invitation to fully live.
God often waits until we're out of ideas before He lets us know His plans. He competes for our hearts, not our attention.
I used to think God guided us by opening and closing doors, but now I know sometimes God wants us to kick some doors down.
Jesus won't try to speak over the noise in our lives; love whispers so we won't be confused about who's doing the talking.
Don't let not knowing how it'll end keep you from beginning. Uncertainty chases us out into the open where God is waiting.
People who take huge risks aren't afraid to fail. In fact, they love to fail. It's because failing means they found the edge.
The way we deal with uncertainty says a lot about whether Jesus is ahead of us leading, or behind us just carrying our stuff.
We keep telling God our opinions; He keeps asking us about our hearts. We'll grow the most when we have the right conversations.
We all want to have a place where we can dream and escape anything that wraps steel bands around our imagination and creativity.
I used to think being loved was the greatest thing to think about, but now I know love is never satisfied just thinking about it.
When we love people but don't make it about us, we're exchanging currency we can use for a while for currency we can use forever.
Do less of what you're terrible at and more of what you're good at. I don't know if that sounds too simple, but it's been working for me.
I used to be afraid of failing at something that really mattered to me, but now I'm more afraid of succeeding at things that don't matter.
It has always seemed to me that broken things, just like broken people, get used more; it's probably because God has more pieces to work with.
...we need to stop plotting the course and instead just land the plane on our plans to make a difference by getting to the "do" part of faith.
Jesus is nuts about kids. He doesn't seem to think much of lawyers which really lands close to home, but He's nuts about kids and loves justice.
Wouldn't you say that most of us are a reflection of or a reaction to the people who have been closest to us? I'm a reflection of my grandmother.
Instead of picking your career and backfilling your life behind that, what if you pick your life and backfill your career with whatever is left over?
Grace works that way. It's a kind word from a gentle person with an impossible prayer. It's a force sometimes transmitted best hand to hand in a dark place.
If you get a no from somebody, don't say, 'I'm going to take this as some big cosmic signal.' No, you just got a no, deal with it. Just go to the next step.
Secretly incredible people keep what they do as one of God's best-kept secrets because the only one who needs to know - the God of the universe - already knows.
Living a life fully engaged in full of whimsy and the kind of things that love does is something most people plan to do, but along the way they just kind of forget.
Instead of closing our eyes and bowing our heads, sometimes God wants us to keep our eyes open for people in need, do something about it, and bow our whole lives to Him instead.
We're part of God's much bigger plan for the whole world. Just like God's Son arrived here, so did you. And after Jesus arrived, God whispered to all of humanity “It's your move.
When you are in high school, you don't give much thought to what you can't do. For most people, that gets learned later, and for still fewer, gets unlearned for the rest of life.
I think of the church as this bride of Christ, who is incredibly capable of doing amazing things. And so where we see injustice, we come, not with fists clenched but with palms up.
That's what love does - it pursues blindly, unflinchingly, and without end. When you go after something you love, you'll do anything it takes to get it, even if it costs everything.
Does the church have all kinds of problems? You bet, because it's made up of people like me, so I get that part too. But all I need to know about the church is that Jesus picked her.
You know... life can be like a big game of Battleship. The enemy knows where your ships are and is trying to call the right number and sink them. But he can't sink you if you're with God.
I live in constant anticipation of good stuff. It's not being 'Pollyanna' about things, but most stories don't have the ending we would give them right away. The better endings come later.
When the kids were growing up, we didn't have a television in the house connected to a cable or an antenna. If something bad happened in the world, I wanted the kids to hear about it from me.
I learned that faith isn’t about knowing all of the right stuff or obeying a list of rules. It’s something more, something more costly because it involves being present and making a sacrifice.
Something happens when you feel ownership. You no longer act like a spectator or consumer, because you're an owner. Faith is at its best when it's that way too. It's best lived when it's owned.
But the kind of love that God created and demonstrated is a costly one because it involves sacrifice and presence. It's a love that operates more like a sign language than being spoken outright.
You don't want to pick a fight with just the guy at the deli, [you want to] pick a fight somewhere in the world and just run towards it. Run because the fight is going to go on without you if you miss it.
What I noticed, though, is almost every time I type the word love, it gets changed to the word live… I learned that fully loving and fully living are not only synonymous but the kind of life that Jesus invited us to be part of.
I want to go barefoot because it’s holy ground; I want to be running because time is short and none of us has as much runway as we think we do; and I want it to be a fight because that’s where we can make a difference. That’s what love does.
That's all the information I need to know about the church, Jesus picked it. And so instead of me telling the church how she would really look better if she had this in her hair, or that over there, I think I'm just respecting the Groom's pick.
Some of us have been told what we want our whole lives. We've been told we should want to go out for sports or not. We should want a college education or a graduate degree or a particular career. We should want to date this person and not the other.
I'm all for getting together with men and women in small groups around Scripture and letting it just wash over us, but for me, I've been meeting with the same ten guys for like 15 years now, but we don't have a Bible study every Friday, we have a Bible doing.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I rushed home before the kids left for school and gathered them around our dining room table and told them what had happened. Like everyone else, we struggled for words to describe to our kids why such a thing would occur.
I think God’s hope and plan for us is pretty simple to figure out. For those who resonate with formulas, here it is: add your whole life, your loves, your passions, and your interests together with what God said He wants us to be about, and that’s your answer.
Being engaged is a way of doing life, a way of living and loving. It's about going to extremes and expressing the bright hope that life offers us, a hope that makes us brave and expels darkness with light. That's what I want my life to be all about - full of abandon, whimsy, and in love.
When you identify with an organization and you want to do stuff [but] you get this inexplicable 'no' - a lot of people get off the end and think, Well, God must have said no to me. No! The organization just said no to you. Find what it is that you were made to do and get on it! Go do what you were made to do.
I know that sounds so circular, but for you, what you were made to do, is different than what I was made to do. But instead of spending all of our time having Bible studies about what we were made to do, go do stuff and you'll figure out what you were made to do, because you'll be great at some things and you'll be terrible at others.
Failure is just part of the process, and it's not just okay; it's better than okay. God doesn't want failure to shut us down. God didn't make it a three-strikes-and-you're-out sort of thing. It's more about how God helps us dust ourselves off so we can swing for the fences again. And all of this without keeping a meticulous record of our screw-ups.
Every day God invites us on the same kind of adventure. It's not a trip where He sends us a rigid itinerary, He simply invites us. God asks what it is He's made us to love, what it is that captures our attention, what feeds that deep indescribable need of our souls to experience the richness of the world He made. And then, leaning over us, He whispers, "Let's go do that together.
Living a life fully engaged and full of whimsy and the kind of things that love does is something most people plan to do, but along the way they just kind of forget. Their dreams become one of those "we'll go there next time" deferrals. The sad thing is, for many there is no "next time" because passing on the chance to cross over is an overall attitude toward life rather than a single decision.
God pursues us into whatever dark place we've landed and behind whatever locked door holds us in. He holds our unwashed and dirty hands and models how He wants us to pursue each other And He says to ordinary people like me and you that instead of closing our eyes and bowing our heads, sometimes God wants us to keep our eyes open for people in need, do something about it, and bow our whole lives to Him instead.
The real game of Bigger and Better that Jesus is playing with us usually isn't about money or possessions or even our hopes. It's about our pride. He asks if we'll give up that thing we're so proud of, that thing we believe causes us to matter in the eyes of the world, and give it up to follow Him. He's asking us, 'Will you take what you think defines you, leave it behind, and let Me define who you are instead?'