Mike Foster > Quotes

“My simplistic answer to the question “Who am I?” is this: my truest, purest, nonnegotiable identity is the beloved. And in spite of my checkered past, my fabulous flops, my painful history, my deepest flaws, my bonehead screwups, and, yes, even beyond my own beliefs about myself, I am God’s beloved. This is my foundational identity and the foundational identity of every human being.”
― Mike Foster, You Rise Glorious: A Wild Invitation to Live Fierce, Free, and Unstoppable in a World that Tries to Break You, Shame You, and Tell You that You're Not Enough

“In the reverse economy of Jesus, the things that break us, God inverts to shape us.”
― Mike Foster, You Rise Glorious: A Wild Invitation to Live Fierce, Free, and Unstoppable in a World that Tries to Break You, Shame You, and Tell You that You're Not Enough

“People of the Second Chance hold to the promise that broken things can be made beautiful again.”
― Mike Foster, You Rise Glorious: A Wild Invitation to Live Fierce, Free, and Unstoppable in a World that Tries to Break You, Shame You, and Tell You that You're Not Enough

“thirty good men and women left to defend”
― Mike Foster, The Right To Bear Arms: After the Riots Begin

“Second chancers must find the party. We must be the party. We must create opportunities to celebrate and become the proverbial hostess with the mostest.”
― Mike Foster, You Rise Glorious: A Wild Invitation to Live Fierce, Free, and Unstoppable in a World that Tries to Break You, Shame You, and Tell You that You're Not Enough

“our own entitlement system. The weight of our government supporting people who can but won’t work, who talk on cell phones they did not pay for, who have children they cannot feed, who live in houses they cannot afford, who drive cars they cannot put gas in, and who eat themselves into obesity, while others work and pay the taxes that you use to buy their votes. They have become the majority. There is no way for the hardworking, taxpaying members of society to vote you out. That is what is wrong with this country. That is what has led to the problem we now face. If you continue to do that, one of two things will happen. Our economy will collapse further, until we cannot recover, and then we will no longer be the United States of America. A nation will arise that none of us will recognize, that most of us will not want to live in.”
― Mike Foster, The Right To Bear Arms: After the Riots Begin

“We may not see how our frayed, smelly imperfections can be redesigned, but God certainly can. He believes that our imperfections are the raw materials for crafting something extraordinary.”
― Mike Foster, You Rise Glorious: A Wild Invitation to Live Fierce, Free, and Unstoppable in a World that Tries to Break You, Shame You, and Tell You that You're Not Enough

“God, family, friends.”
― Mike Foster, The Right To Bear Arms: After the Riots Begin

“Fear, shame, and worthlessness have only the power we give them. This book is about hope, love, and grace and how they work toward the same ends.”
― Mike Foster, You Rise Glorious: A Wild Invitation to Live Fierce, Free, and Unstoppable in a World that Tries to Break You, Shame You, and Tell You that You're Not Enough

“So we thrash about in a pool of comparison and one-upmanship. Our lives become burdened by the heaviness of getting it right. Our joy becomes brittle, and our hearts slowly break. The only possible outcome of this hurry-up-and-matter hustle is the slow crushing of our souls.”
― Mike Foster, You Rise Glorious: A Wild Invitation to Live Fierce, Free, and Unstoppable in a World that Tries to Break You, Shame You, and Tell You that You're Not Enough

“The quick reflexes, the calmness in the face of a storm, the ability to think in the midst of danger that most people don’t have.”
― Mike Foster, The Right To Bear Arms: After the Riots Begin

“What the politicians all feared the most. The people, the descendants of those who built this country and made it great, would one day awaken and say “No more. That’s it.” They will rise up and take back their country and throw all of them out and start over and try not to make the same mistakes again. Just the Constitution and a new beginning.”
― Mike Foster, The Right To Bear Arms: After the Riots Begin

“They have worked hard their whole lives to support their families, while others ate at the trough paid for by them. Many have saved and prepared for times like this, knowing this government was spending itself into oblivion. What’s next? Are you going to take their possessions so that you can feed the same people who caused all this? The people have to realize we cannot survive as a nation if we punish those who work and pay taxes to feed the lazy and then we buy votes with government checks.”
― Mike Foster, The Right To Bear Arms: After the Riots Begin

“People were sitting together, talking and telling stories face-to-face again, instead of staring at a cell phone screens while texting or chatting with someone else hundreds of miles away while ignoring the ones they were with.”
― Mike Foster, The Right To Bear Arms: After the Riots Begin

“Perhaps the beginning of your second chance is not a flaunting of your flaws but a basic form of acceptance. For you, it means coming to peace with what is and with what may never change. I call them life’s irreversible moments, the moments that you can’t fix and that God wants to heal over a lifetime. There is no undoing or getting over them, only a journey to acceptance. They are life’s toothpaste moments because, no matter how hard we try, the toothpaste ain’t going back into the tube.”
― Mike Foster, You Rise Glorious: A Wild Invitation to Live Fierce, Free, and Unstoppable in a World that Tries to Break You, Shame You, and Tell You that You're Not Enough

“Identity is the engine that drives the relationship not only with ourselves but also with God and others. If your identity is broken, your life is broken. If you define it incorrectly, you will carry that wrong definition into your story. If all you see are your limitations, you will miss out on the stunning possibilities God is creating in front of you.”
― Mike Foster, You Rise Glorious: A Wild Invitation to Live Fierce, Free, and Unstoppable in a World that Tries to Break You, Shame You, and Tell You that You're Not Enough

“this was the way life should be. Family working, sharing, and living together with a sense of belonging and purpose, to be needed and wanted and loved by family and friends, to be part of a community that knows and helps one another. Not with families spread all about, seeing each other only once in a while, living in crowded suburbs and cities where neighbors seldom speak to one another and rarely help one another. A life spent constantly running around, hither and yon, all the time coming and going, eating and living on the run, filling their lives with things such as ball games and so on, the whole time missing out on the most important things in life; God, family, friends.”
― Mike Foster, The Right To Bear Arms: After the Riots Begin

“Grace gets censored when we write these devilish decrees for our lives. Secret commandments get scrawled on personal tablets of shame, and we live life as if our stories belong on a discount rack rather than as valued, cherished children of God. We let a moment of pain cut us off from a lifetime of grace.”
― Mike Foster, You Rise Glorious: A Wild Invitation to Live Fierce, Free, and Unstoppable in a World that Tries to Break You, Shame You, and Tell You that You're Not Enough

“Fair. Liberals like to use that word, fair. Get your fair share. Pay your fair share. It’s not fair for someone to have more than others, even if they worked for it and you didn’t. But the problem is, it is always someone else’s time and effort and money you want to share and be fair with. That is the trouble with socialism. Sooner or later you will run out of other people’s money, and then the whole country will fall. History has taught us that time and time again. Don’t you see? That is what the enemy has been waiting for, that is what they have been hoping for. Not to defeat us face-to-face or on the battlefield. They know they cannot defeat us there. They have been waiting patiently while we spend ourselves into oblivion for us to fall from within from the weight of”
― Mike Foster, The Right To Bear Arms: After the Riots Begin

“Second chancers understand our brokenness isn’t something to hide but to integrate into our lives. We do not need to be ashamed. No matter what the world says, we are not “less than” for being broken.”
― Mike Foster, You Rise Glorious: A Wild Invitation to Live Fierce, Free, and Unstoppable in a World that Tries to Break You, Shame You, and Tell You that You're Not Enough

“It has been said that out of every one hundred good men, ten can fight; and out of those, one is a warrior. It’s what warriors do. It’s not something you can teach. It comes naturally to only a few. Like the gladiators of old, only the ones with the right reflexes and instincts survive to fight another day.”
― Mike Foster, The Right To Bear Arms: After the Riots Begin

“You cannot talk butterfly language with caterpillar people.”
― Mike Foster

“Proverbs 22:3: “A wise man foresees the difficulties ahead and prepares for them; the simpleton goes blindly on and suffers the consequences.”
― Mike Foster, The Right To Bear Arms: After the Riots Begin

“the problem with socialism is, was, and always will be that sooner or later the government runs out of other people’s money to spend. If it continued to take from those who work and produce, before long they stop producing, and then there is no one left to get it from.”
― Mike Foster, The Right To Bear Arms: After the Riots Begin

“The feeling a child has for a missing parent or a parent has for a missing child is so strong, it is like a visceral pain coming from deep inside. A nagging, aching pain that hurts without relief, like a cancer growing in your belly that gnaws at you all the time, day and night. One that you would cut out if you could get to it. And even though your body is starving, you cannot eat. And, regardless of how tired you are, you cannot sleep. The kind of consuming and unrelenting longing and mental anguish that causes even the strongest of men to fall to their knees and cry out to heaven for relief.”
― Mike Foster, The Right To Bear Arms: After the Riots Begin

“We the people are the United States of America. Not the military, not Washington, DC, not the president, not the Congress. They all work for the people and by the grace of God. It is only by their will that the federal government exist at all, not the other way around.”
― Mike Foster, The Right To Bear Arms: After the Riots Begin

“people who wanted to change America back to how it used to be. Not an America with the segregation that was part of the past. Americans were all past that. Not an America with discrimination against minorities or women. America was past that, as well. But back to a country where a man’s worth was determined by his character and his work ethic, where a man’s word was his bond. Where people worked for a living, instead of trying to work the system. Where families lived and worked together on farms and in communities, instead of crowding into huge metropolises where every need was trucked in, piped in, and plugged in, and people were tuned in, turned on, online, and lined up for all their needs but did not speak to each other on the street or know their own neighbors or families.”
― Mike Foster, The Right To Bear Arms: After the Riots Begin

“Mother Teresa said, “The problem with the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small.”
― Mike Foster, You Rise Glorious: A Wild Invitation to Live Fierce, Free, and Unstoppable in a World that Tries to Break You, Shame You, and Tell You that You're Not Enough

“Our society had become antagonistic and biased against the principled and moral members of society.”
― Mike Foster, The Right To Bear Arms: After the Riots Begin

“The Creator celebrates broken things as a way to love us. And this, my friend, is also what he invites us to do.”
― Mike Foster, You Rise Glorious: A Wild Invitation to Live Fierce, Free, and Unstoppable in a World that Tries to Break You, Shame You, and Tell You that You're Not Enough