The Healing Path Quotes

“To be playful is to enter the battle of life for others just as you are, accepting your limitations while dreaming of the unlimited and redeemed. It is to engage in the present with your full presence for the sake of another's future.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

“It is sacrifice, sorrow, and blood that bind the hearts of warriors and lovers together, not mere fraternity. If we don't bleed together, then when times are tough we will likely not cleave to each other. War compels us to cleave and compels us to grow. The war must be bigger than our relationship, bigger than the wounds of failure, bigger than my comfort.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

“No one can change without facing both the harm that has come from living in a fallen world and his own disastrous attempts to make life work apart from God. We change to the degree we see both the foolishness of our idolatry and the beckoning beauty of God's waiting heart.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

“Calling is often thought of as what we do - our occupation. There are times when calling is also an occupation, but more often than not, calling is how we live out our burdens in conscious and committed use of ourselves for the glory of God. calling is not an office, an occupation, or a career. A personal calling is not something that can be discovered simply by taking a spiritual-gift inventory or test. It is revealed only as we walk the healing path and identify our unique burdens and dreams, as we follow our hearts toward what causes us to weep, scream, and sing with delight. Am I called to be a therapist? A writer? A teacher? No, I'm called to live out the gospel in whatever sphere I wish to enter than enables me to use my gifts, talents, and skills to bless others and glorify God.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

“Faith is our ballast, the ground of confidence that enables us to withstand sorrow and loss. Hope is the wind that drives us forward to risk for redemption. Faith and hope take us to the greatest comfort and most radical danger of our lives: love. Love calls us to open our ambivalent hearts, wait in desire, embrace others for a time, and then free them to follow the calling of God in their own lives.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

“Love is the fruit of faith's memory and hope's desire. To remember God's Exodus goodness is to find a solid rock in the midst of swirling seas. To dream of God's coming redemption is to struggle and keep hope burning in the midst of unexplained suffering, in the absence of God's intervention. It is not possible to love others unless our hearts are growing in faith and hope. Faith and hope birth love as we live out our calling in anticipation of his coming.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

“Hope compels us to live for the future by pouring ourselves out as offerings to God in our relationships with others. The primary way we give God glory is through loving others. Evil intends for us to succumb to betrayal by giving up on relationships; it intends for us to resign to powerlessness by giving up on the future. Once we lose faith and hope, then we are more susceptible to ambivalence and shame. But just as God restores faith and hope, he redeems shame and births love.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

“Hope waits but does not sit. To wait is not to sit idly by, whittling our life away until something happens. That is killing time, distracting ourselves to death. Hope strains with eager anticipation to see what may be coming on the horizon. Hope does not pacify; it does not make us docile and mediocre. Instead, it draws us to greater risk and perseverance.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

“As we surrender our imaginations to a future glory, we are not recasting the present in terms of how we want the world to be (that is illusion), nor are we reordering our lives to add new elements and delete the ones we don't want (that is delusion). Instead, surrender is holding reality firm in the grip of unflinching honesty while also seeing every moment in the light of the invisible, eternal, and redeemed. It is the visionary gift of the interior decorator who can come into a dilapidated room and see new form, color, and structure. She sees reality and she sees potential - simultaneously. The eyes of hope see the shining, residual glory in every sinner and the greater glory of what will one day be revealed through their existence.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

“Biblical hope is substantial faith regarding the future. Hope looks at the shattered remnants of the soul hit by the storm and envisions not merely rebuilding, but rebuilding a life that has even more purpose and meaning than existed before the loss. Hope is the dream of shalom, the anticipation of joy that courses through us and prompts us to rise and rebuild, to envision and risk for what is not yet. Hope takes the experience of loss and powerlessness and uses it as the raw material for writing a new and unexpected story.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

“Surrender is turning over all that we are to God's mercy. It is laying down our arms and confessing that his power and glory outnumber our puny weapons. Even more, surrender confesses that our deepest desire is not to succeed in business, to marry, to have kids, to be well or simply happy; instead, our deepest hunger is to see him. Surrender goes even further: It despises anything and everything in us and outside of us that compromises our passion to be caught up in his glory and love. Surrender frees us to admit our powerlessness, our emptiness, and our hunger for glory. And it frees us to enter our frustrating, boring, and despairing moments with imagination. We each live in the midst of what 'is'. Hope compels us to look beyond what 'is' to what 'will one day be', and that is the Day of the Lord. It is in imagining the 'will be' that we often fail to linger. Most of the time we face what is and either resign to it or work to change it to 'what could be'. But focusing too soon on 'could be' makes us critical merely pragmatic rather than able to exercise our capacity to dream wild dreams. It is the 'will be' that softens our judgment, deepens our childlike anticipation, and in turn enables us to shape the 'could be' with greater creativity.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

“Biblical hope is substantial faith regarding the future. Hope looks at the shattered remnants of the soul hit by the storm and envisions not merely rebuilding, but rebuilding a life that has seven more purpose and meaning than existed before the loss. Hope is the dream of shalom, the anticipation of joy that courses through us and prompts us to rise and rebuild, to envision and risk for what is not yet. Hope takes the experience of loss and powerlessness and uses it as the raw material for writing a new and unexpected story.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

“When the storms come, we typically respond to them by raging against the gale or turning away from the loss, resigned and despondent. Most choose the latter option, because once we relinquish desire the loss does not seem so severe. But resignation is always a betrayal, not only of desire but also of hope.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

“My faith in God's character grows to the degree I remember God. Faith is trust in the goodness of God. I grow as I recall and recollect the stories of God in the Bible, in the lives of others, and in my own life. To recall is to name, with sufficient detail to be moved by God's presence, the life scenes or events in which he showed up as Rescuer. The external world and our internal gyroscope are never so clear that we have absolute assurance that a personal God is at work redeeming us. Instead, we have a gallery of pictures - a wall of remembrance that holds the faces of the actors in our lives who spoke their part in the play of our redemption.... Memory is the key to faith. The dilemma is that as I remember the moments where God has redeemed me, I am also left with the many moments he has chosen, apparently, to abandon me or - even more painful to admit - betray me.... We recall and recollect moments of horror that were not (apparently) redeemed and moments of glory that (apparently) ended prematurely. We suffer when we remember. And as we suffer, we doubt. It is doubt that sends us on a search to comprehend God. And it is that search that leads us not so much to God as much has it brings God to find us. Do we find God? Indeed, but only because he finds us first. And it is the wonder of being found that we enter a place of rest and stability that gives us not only faith, but a sense of our identity and calling. God is telling a story. His story. He is intimately involved in the passing minutes of every one of my days and every one of yours. He also orchestrates and tells our stories. He is both author and narrator. Faith increases to the degree we are aware of, caught up in, enthralled by, and participating in his and our story.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

“Evil prefers extremes. If it can't produce a structureless, chaotic, consuming culture, then it will work to bring about the opposite: a contained, constrained, orderly world of law and predictability, devoid of mystery. Evil will prompt the prodigal to demand his inheritance and flee the father to live a licentious life, or it will entice the older brother to slave away, doing right, obeying the rules, and stoking a fire of resentment toward the father for not providing the opportunity to rest and frolic.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

“Being faithful, hopeful, and loving is not a matter of working hard, but of savoring and desiring more of the small amounts of faith, hope, and love that are already within us.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

“Risks often appear foolish or even stupid. But hope makes us playful, free, and inventive. Hope is not naive desire but a calculated risk that declares, whatever the loss, it is better than remaining where we are.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

“It is not wrong to admit that our choices change little in this world; there is so much over which we can exert little influence. That doesn't mean our choices our 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: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

“The goal of evil is to destroy our future by stealing our hope.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

“Evil knows we would rather delude ourselves, deny the truth, and eventually justify even harmful behavior as our only choice. In the end, we will have lost our character, relationships, and soul.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

“How evil works is beyond our comprehension. Does it have the power to whisper new thoughts in our ear? Or does it take our thoughts and manipulate them by altering our circumstances? Does evil intensify our dark desires and simply give us the nudge we're already naturally inclined to follow? Or all of the above? It is my experience that evil operates on all three levels and more, but its goal is the same: Offer glory, then give nothing but heartache, impotence, and shame.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

“Pointless repetition creates a reasoned and well-mannered suburbia, but it does not lend itself well to a life that stretches out for eternity. We are to yearn for God, to pant for his coming. We are to shape our present in light of the eternity we anticipate. By merely surviving, we live for a now that is not permeated by the leaven of heaven. But by reaching out to eternity is to live with an unquenchable hope, refusing to resign to being as we are in the world as it is.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

“We can't hold on to memory, nor can we hold captive love in the present. We can't will our dreams to come true. To do so is to try to possess what can thrive only with freedom. Jealousy is a death grip that strangles the life of the other. We fear the loss of the one who has given us life, but in our stifling clinch we end up destroying what we have loved.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

“Hope is what propels us into the future. If hope is lost, then we are cast into a mechanical, rote existence that experiences each day as nothing more than a repetition of what has come before. When hope dies, vitality, passion, and creativity are lost.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

“Betrayal, whether the result of mutual failings or one party's error, leaves the heart sick over the past and fearful of future loss. When the past is lettered with the rusted-out remains of broken friendships, the heart is robbed of the desire to trust - not only in the relationship that has suffered harm, but in all other relationships.... When we are betrayed, our trust in others is shaken. When the wound is profound, we often question why God allowed the harm to occur. The current blow often erases the memory of other times God has saved us, or if we do recall these moments, we are left with more confusion as to why he didn't rescue us this time.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life

“This life has great suffering and sorrow woven into its fabric, but it also has an incandescent beauty and compelling call. For now, the beauty serves as a window through which we can glimpse the face of God, which we will one day see in its glorious fullness.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life