Shanna > Shanna's Quotes

“The desert shatters the soul's arrogance and leaves body and soul crying out in thirst and hunger. In the desert we trust God or die.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path

“People in the valley have been broken open. They have been reminded that they are not just the parts of themselves that they put on display.”
― David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

“We can make the right answer sound old hat, but I guarantee this: God will surprise you. He will make you stop. You will struggle. He will bring you up short. You will hurt. He will take his time. You will grow in faith and in love. He will deeply delight you. You will find the process harder than you ever imagined--and better.”
― David A. Powlison, God's Grace in Your Suffering

“Think about it: whether your child is tiny or college-age or anywhere in between, verbal put-downs are a subtle but very real form of child abuse.”
― Anne Ortlund, Children are Wet Cement: Make the Right Impression in Their Lives

“Why is it so important to affirm a child? Because a child who is truly accepted by his parents and/or influencing adults can growing up learning to accept himself. Without a constant, debilitating sense of guilt and defeat, he will become at ease with himself. He'll be able to admit his own failures and weaknesses. He'll be able to forget himself and love others. He won't spend his energies worrying about what people think of him, and he won't spend his energies putting down others.”
― Anne Ortlund, Children are Wet Cement: Make the Right Impression in Their Lives

“Is your adult child out of the nest--and all you dreamed he would be? Affirm him over and over; enjoy him as your dear friend. Don't tell him what to do! Don't tell his spouse what to do! Those days are over.”
― Anne Ortlund, Children are Wet Cement: Make the Right Impression in Their Lives

“The people who are made larger by suffering go on to stage two small rebellions. First, they rebel against their ego ideal. .. down in the valley, they lose interest in their ego ideal”
― David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

“Consider the possibility that a creature of infinite love has made a promise to us. Consider the possibility that we are the ones committed to, the objects of an infinite commitment, and that the commitment is to redeem us and bring us home.”
― David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

“When we manage to make something pretty, it's only because we are ourselves a flourish on a greater canvas.”
― Andrew Peterson, Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making

“It is not wrong to admit that our choices change little in this world; there is so much over which we can exert little if any influence. That doesn't mean our choices are meaningless; they matter and last into eternity because each of our individual lives is a thread of a great tapestry that in its corporate beauty is glorious. But we can't always see the future, nor how one seemingly small and insignificant choice ripples across countless lives.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path

“The chance you had is the life you’ve got. You can make complaints about what people, including you, make of their lives after they have got them, and about what people make of other people’s lives, even about your children being gone, but you mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: ‘Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks.’ I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.”
― Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter

“You think winter will never end, and then, when you don't expect it, when you have almost forgotten it, warmth comes and a different light. Under the bare trees the wildflowers bloom so thick you can't walk without stepping on them. The pastures turn green and the leaves come.

You look around presently, and it is summer. It has been dry a while, maybe, and now it has rained. The world is so full and abundant it is like a pregnant woman carrying a child in one arm and leading another by the hand.”
― Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter

“And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.

But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remembered now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.”
― Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter

“He had learned that fear when he was little and once passed the white people’s church. The kids came out of the church when they saw him. They threw rocks and bricks and called him the vilest names that could spring from a southern tongue. And he asked his grandparents, ‘What kind of god they got up inside that church?”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

“There are times when dreams sustain us more than facts. To read a book and surrender to a story is to keep our very humanity alive.” - Warsaw ghetto survivor Helen Fagin”
― Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction – A Neuroscience Guide for Parents on Brain Development and Family Bonds

“The most thankful person is the most fully human.”
― Thomas Goodwin, What Happens When I Pray

“We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection

“It is not a waste to write beautiful prose or poetry for one person's eyes alone!”
― Edith Schaeffer, Hidden art

“One active artist gives courage and incentive, and germinates ideas in others for producing more art.”
― Edith Schaeffer, Hidden art

“Ideas carried out stimulate more ideas.”
― Edith Schaeffer, Hidden art

“But oughtn't we to be prepared for the best too? It's just as likely to happen as the worst.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea

“Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, "Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it." Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water–-peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing–-the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“The only way to learn is to live.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Never underestimate the big importance of small things”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Bethel reveals that God is present in every liminal place, lending his anchoring weight to our weightless lives. Our in-between places--between jobs, between cities, between houses--can easily feel like a bookmark, as if their only job was separating past from future. But these places are indeed part of the story, even when we have failed to give them a name... A nameless place can be the site of tentatively taking our first step toward trust; it's at Bethel that we can begin believing in a God, who journeys with us.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

“Stability is good advice, but sometimes, like Jacob, we end up with a life that, in the rearview mirror, looks much more erratic than we might [have] originally intended. The greatest consolation for the geographically displaced is.. Jesus... He left home and its happiness with abandon, even delight.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

“Their stability was an obedient commitment to whatever was daily and whomever was closest; in devotion to God, they kept up the practice of embodied, localized love.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

“God's work is not nearly as glamorous as our self-glorifying ambitions. In fact, it is as unassuming and quietly aspiring as the commitment to forgive and to help.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

“The real risk to faith is not to wrestle...”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness