Sparkly Green Earrings Quotes

“Real motherhood is different. It's better and it's messier and it's more complicated. It will break your heart and make you laugh harder than you ever imagined. You find yourself alternating between feeling like your friends talked you into some sort of pyramid scheme so you could share in their misery and thinking this is the most fulfilling thing you've ever done in your life.”
― Melanie Shankle, Sparkly Green Earrings: Catching the Light at Every Turn

“God gives us these raw, little people, and we have to form them and mold them and teach them how to operate in society. And if we get a glimpse of all the ugliness that lies right beneath our own polished surface? Well, then, there's a humbling lesson too. It's those moments when I realize I have to extend grace to Caroline as she figures these things out by trial and error in the same way God lavishes me with mercy, even as I make the same mistakes over and over again.”
― Melanie Shankle, Sparkly Green Earrings: Catching the Light at Every Turn

“I watched her with the crab as she ignored all my admonitions that the poor crab just needed to be set free if he was to have any chance of surviving. And God showed up there on that beach to teach me a lesson. Nothing survives when it's being smothered. Life, real life, requires being free to move about in the great big ocean, not being cradled in little hot hands that will stifle independence and creativity. We can't keep our crabs (or our kids) in a bucket and expect them to go far in life.”
― Melanie Shankle, Sparkly Green Earrings: Catching the Light at Every Turn

“Friends are God’s way of apologizing for your relatives.”
― Melanie Shankle, Sparkly Green Earrings

“...motherhood is the thing in a woman's life that catches her by total and complete surprise.”
― Melanie Shankle, Sparkly Green Earrings: Catching the Light at Every Turn

“Our job as mothers is to do the best we can to teach our children that life is better and friendships are richer when we treat others with kindness, when we remember to share, and when we use nice words. To remember that every person we come in contact with may have a few cracks in their hearts even if we can’t see them and that love is always the best response. But”
― Melanie Shankle, Sparkly Green Earrings

“Anne Lamott says in Traveling Mercies, “I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools—friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty—and said, Do the best you can with these, they will have to do. And mostly, against all odds, they’re enough.”
― Melanie Shankle, Sparkly Green Earrings

“Daniel 12:3 says that those who are wise will “shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.”
― Melanie Shankle, Sparkly Green Earrings

“How amazing that he brings life this way. Through pain and hurt and the ugly things inside us we try to keep hidden away. The things we don’t talk about. In that moment, as I looked at my little girl lying in my arms, I realized this whole process was such a striking picture of how Christ works in us. He takes our disappointments, rejections, and hard times, and he makes something beautiful. He creates life and shows us what beauty looks like in places where we look and see nothing.”
― Melanie Shankle, Sparkly Green Earrings