Fit to Burst Quotes

“Prioritizing obedience in the face of stress is a wonderful way to disarm it.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“If our children’s lives are the sea floor, we need to leave the gold all over it, everywhere, in little bits. We can’t do it one big nugget. We can’t even do it in a bunch of medium chunks. We have to leave gold through their lives in a fine dust that’s spread all over everything. At the end of our children’s lives, we hope we hope it is worth a fortune. But at any given moment it is the little things that contain the gold. The gold is quick forgiveness. It is quick repentance. It is cheerful smiles and tender hugs. It is teasing and laughing. It is loving. It is Daddy throwing yet another wrestle party all over the house. It is dinner. Regular. Predictable. It is having physical needs looked after. It is being disciplined. It is being challenged. It is being educated. Being made to do something you didn’t want to. It is not being the boss. It is not getting away with lying. It is knowing who to talk to. It is knowing you will feel better when you do. It is security. It is joy. It is every day. It is life. It is knowing your faith, and knowing that it is your parents’ too. It is knowing your people and being known by them.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“But our opportunities to bless our children are often most present when we least feel like it. This is why we cannot depend on our emotions to dictate our actions. We need to discipline our own emotions to fall in line with obedience. We are to love our children. We are to bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. That means all the time. You”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“Gratitude is like that. It transforms. It is such a force that it cannot coexist with selfishness, with discouragement, with discontent.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“The more you discipline yourself to overcome discouragement with obedience, the less discouragement there will be to overcome.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“Some incredibly fast years of my life were made up of the longest days in history.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“Real life is messy because it is going somewhere. Things constantly need to be done because people are constantly growing.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“When you believe to your core that you are forgiven and loved, one of the first things that happens is you start doing things. Fruit is intimately connected with forgiveness. When we are forgiven, we do not gallop out into a life of ambiguity and indifference. We do not become great negotiators of whether or not it matters that we aren’t doing things. We become filled with gratitude, love, joy, and peace. And then, having a firm foundation of another’s righteousness, we are free to go out and do.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“When you are a mother and a homemaker, you are your own boss. The days are what you make of them. The tasks that need to get done are put on a list at your discretion. This means that you must be leadership material.

At the same time, what you get done is up to you, too. You also have to be a hardworking employee. The part of you that decides where to go must work with the part of you that needs to go there. Making a list that you cannot accomplish does not make you a better housewife, it makes you a bad leader.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“We could get so into health food that our husband doesn't feel welcome at his own table. In other words, we could get so consumed with the healthy food that we are no longer healthy people. We could, in pursuit of health, break fellowship with our husbands as well as Jesus”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“Here is the thing: law and grace are friends. They were always meant to go together. If the law is the skeleton, grace is the flesh. Without the law in there, the grace is just a blob. And without the grace, the law can’t move. It can’t carry grace anywhere. If there is no law, there is no grace. And without grace, the law is dead. Your parenting needs to represent both the law and the grace to your children.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“Obedience is bigger than discouragement, and the two can not live side by side. When you need encouragement, obey. When you are tired, walk. When you feel lost, remember. The more you discipline yourself to overcome discouragement with obedience, the less discouragement there will be to overcome.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“Someone once said, very wisely, that we need to imitate the psalmist: We need to spend less time listening to ourselves, and more time talking to ourselves. Like the psalmist saying, “Oh my soul why are you grieving? Why disquieted in me? Hope in God, your faith retrieving, He will still your refuge be” (Ps. 42). He is giving himself a pep talk. He is counseling himself with what he knows to be true in a time that doesn’t feel smooth.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“This kind of stress is simply the ambient noise of faithfulness. This is the kind of stress that you feel right before Thanksgiving dinner. When you could just take a nap instead of slapping together one more pie. But the pie is good. And making it is good. And the fact that your legs ache and your hair is frizzy is just a sign that you have been doing other good things. What I mean by ambient noise is not just the soothing sound of waves in the background. It is more like you are a basketball player on the free-throw line, and the other team’s fans are getting all the noisemakers out. When all that screaming and honking and waving and shouting insults is going on, it doesn’t mean that you are doing something wrong. It means that there is a lot of noise in the room hoping you will do something wrong. Some kinds of “stress” are simply what happens when you are being faithful.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“But what is the church here on earth for? It is here to proclaim the love of God, to bear witness to what He has done for us. Our duty as wives is to help our husbands. Part of that duty is to help our husbands love our children. Let me hasten to clarify that last little bit. I don’t mean that you are to help him love the kids your way. I mean that you are to help him convey his love to them. When your husband goes off to work, he is loving his family. When he brings home a paycheck, he is loving his family. But if there is no mother taking that paycheck and translating it into a hot meals, into clothes for the children, into the comfort of home, then the children may very well not feel that love from their father. It is a mother’s job to communicate the love that the father has towards his children. It is our job to translate. When we take the work that our husband does and turn it into fellowship around the table, he is able to enjoy both the fruit of his work and the enjoyment of his love. He provided for us, and we are rejoicing in that.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“What tends to happen with situations like this is that the parents get irritated and end up disciplining. They may still feel like they really enforced the law. But the truth is, they bullied.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“Jesus does not care even the tiniest bit what you do for your salvation, because there is nothing you can do for it. But He cares very much what you do with it.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“Christ’s life given up for others is the centerpiece of our faith. Our lives given up for others is the centerpiece of our faithfulness.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“Discontent will never change the world. If you want your work to have a lasting impact on the world, define yourself with gratitude.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“Make obedience your fundamental. If you prioritize obedience, everything else will fall into place. Prioritizing obedience in the face of stress is a wonderful way that to disarm it.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“The great blessing of being a Christian is that we have both a reason for the journey that we are on, and a companion for it. We are not alone. We are not striving for acceptance, because we have already been accepted and forgiven.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“The funny thing is that we know well that we learn through repetition. We need to practice songs before we can sing them. We need to try something over and over before we have mastered it. We have accepted that part of being human. What we appear not to have accepted is the subject matter. I don’t want to cook for the family again. I don’t want to do the laundry again. I don’t want to vacuum, to make a birthday cake, to blow a nose, to change a diaper, to pick up toys. I don’t want to practice this work that God gave me because, frankly, I’d rather not be good at it. Because, somewhere in there, we don’t like what God has called us to do.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“When we want the cost to be shared by all, we are not imitating Christ. When we imitate Christ, we want to give what costs us much, and we want to give it freely.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“This book is about that. About giving. About sacrifice. About humbling yourself. About valuing others. But primarily it is about life. It is about sinking your teeth into the kinds of moments that motherhood offers you. It is about growing in Christ in the mundane. It is about seeing the gospel in the work you are doing. It is about joy and faith and laughter beyond the sacrifice.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“We cannot change the world if we are not in fellowship with the Savior. And if we are in fellowship with Him—if our lives overflow with gratitude, with joy, with laughter—then there is nothing we can do to keep that from changing the world, because the world will be changed through Him in us.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“We cannot earn anything by doing, so it is dangerous to start talking about anything that Christians should be doing. If you could be the most accomplished mother in the world on your own strength, it wouldn’t matter in the end. There is no freedom from sin that you can find by doing something. Jesus is all. His blood is sufficient, and there is nothing you can do that will change that.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“You are not here in this world to work your salvation in (thank God), you are here to work it out.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“So the real goal here should be to illustrate for our children the attributes of both great leadership and faithful following. They should see us setting realistic (but maybe difficult) goals, and working hard toward them. They should see us being visionaries who are anchored firmly in reality. They should see us steadily plodding, faithfully working on things in a realistic way. They should see us laboring hard to make a beautiful life for them while not losing sight of them in it.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“But this is the real world....while practice and training and preventative measures might make things flow more smoothly, they won't necessarily make things easier. It is simply going to be hard work.

If you trained as a runner, you would get better and better at running the same race over time. You would speed up. Your form would be better. You would probably enjoy yourself more. But it wouldn't be easy. Professional athletes make what they do look easy. But if they are still pushing themselves, it is still hard.

....We think that if we were doing motherhood right, then it wouldn't be this hard. Of course there are a lot of ways to improve what we do, to make things easier. But that's like improving a runner's form. You still have to run, and it still won't be easy.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood