More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Being taught to stuff feelings early in life can sometimes mean you never learn how to properly understand feelings later in life. Feelings serve a purpose. Feelings inform us of issues that need to be addressed. They also help us empathize with others, bond with others, and know when we need to give and receive emotional support.
Love needs depth to live. Love needs honesty to grow. Love needs trust to survive.
We found love, and then we chose it over and over together.”
people who are quiet are sometimes the ones in the most pain.
Vulnerability. We have to be vulnerable to look at the realities of our life and make some of the connections we’re talking about. But we also gain even more vulnerability
The one who pretends will never be the one who realizes how desperately they need to be forgiven. So forgiving others will always seem more like another thing they have to do rather than a freeing process they can participate in.
The world defines vulnerability as exposing oneself in such a way as to risk exposure to harm.
He’s more than what he’s done. He’s so much more than the mistakes he’s made. He’s the very breath of God—so
journaling. Though I was forgiving, I was still grieving over all the hurt. I was still grieving over wrongs not yet made right. I was still grieving over choices I didn’t agree with.
Grieving is often a long process that holds hands with forgiveness.
Any sacrifice placed in the hand of God, God can bring good from.
At the very same time we grieve a loss, we gain more and more awareness of an eternal perspective. Grieving is such a deep work and a long process, it feels like we might not survive it. But eventually we do. And even though we still may never agree on this side of eternity that the trade the good God gave us is worth what we’ve lost, we hold on to hope by trusting God.
Everything lost that we place in the hands of God isn’t a forever loss.
If we become more self-aware of how we are processing our thoughts and perceptions and redirect those in more life-giving ways, then inside every loss, a more wise, empathetic, understanding, discerning, compassionate person of strength and humility has the potential to arise within us.
Although satan will battle you every step of the way
We can’t change what we have experienced, but we can choose how the experiences change us.
Whole, healthy people are capable of giving and receiving love. Giving and receiving forgiveness. Giving and receiving hope. Giving and receiving constructive feedback. Giving and receiving life lessons tucked within the harder things we’ve been through. We have to get to the place where the pain we’ve experienced is a gateway leading toward growing, learning, discovering, and eventually helping others.
acceptance, and perspective.
Acceptance was acknowledging that the permanent ink is now dry on those pages of my story. I cannot change what happened.
my perceptions moving forward will determine how I carry the past into my future.
while I cannot change what happened, I get to
choose what I now believe and how what happened changes me f...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
For many of the wrong things that were done to us we didn’t have a say in what happened. But we do have a say in how we move forward.
It took time to get to this place. It will take time to heal and find these healthy perspectives.
None of this could be rushed for me, and none of it should be rushed for you. We need to feel what we feel. We need to think through what we need to think through. We need to get it all out and sort it all out. And, most of all, we need to stay put and be present for it all.
I will reject the seduction of nursing my grudges, and I will stop assuming God didn’t intervene to help me. Instead of running away I will run to God when I need help.
but don’t weaponize your pain against others.
To get better you don’t have to know why. Why they hurt you, why they misunderstood you, why they betrayed you, why they didn’t love you, protect you, or stay like they should. Their reasons are multilayered with a mysterious mix of their own pain. They are dealing with their own heartbreak and their own soul wrestling. And in the end, I don’t think they even know all the reasons they made the choices they did. Knowing why is no gift at all if it never makes sense. Maybe they loved themselves too much or much too little. Maybe their hearts were too disconnected or hard or brittle. Soft hearts
...more
Waiting for something from them holds you hostage to what the other person might not ever be willing to give.
The proof doesn’t serve you; building a case won’t heal you. Holding on to all the hurt will only steal from you all that’s beautiful and possible
I learned God loves us too much to answer our prayers at any other time than the right time.
If we try and draw conclusions from the well of our deep pain, we will only have the sorrow of today to sip from. If, however, we draw strength from the deep well of God’s promises for tomorrow and His faithfulness to us in the past, His living water is the goodness that will seep life into our dry and weary souls.
Even if you don’t know whether to turn left or right, looking up to God is where real hope can be found.
We don’t have to understand God to trust Him.
