When We Were on Fire Quotes

“Your life AFTER Christ is not static or an end result. You are not suspended in grace above the fray of life. You are looking at God through a kaleidoscope. Your life moves, and the beads shift, and something new emerges. You are defining. Redefining. Figuring it out all over again. You are in motion, in transit, in flux. You will be sad. You will be happy. You will love and doubt and cry and rage, and all of it matters. You are human, and you are beloved, and this is what it is to be Alive.”
― Addie Zierman, When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over

“Without a circle of protective love around us, we are no match for the shadows that stalk toward us in the night”
― Addie Zierman, When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over

“Take the word saved as it is used in the evangelical vernacular. It’s true, you are saved by grace, by love, by light … but it’s only half the story. The truth is that there is so much that you’re not saved from. You are not saved from pain or loneliness or the bite of reality sharp against your skin. You’re not saved from rained-out picnics, from disappointment, from the unkindness of strangers. You’re not saved from lost jobs or lost loves or cancer or car accidents. Saved. But they say, It’s not religion, it’s a relationship. They say, God loves the sinner but hates the sin. They say, Let go and let God. And they’re worse than cliché, really. They’re thought-terminating cliché, a term that psychologist, Robert Lifton, coined in his book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. In this type of cliché, “the most far-reaching and complex of human problems are compressed into brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized and easily expressed.”
― Addie Zierman, When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over

“Yeah, it's kind of shitty," I say. I add the shitty on purpose as a kind of a test. I’ve been using it a lot lately to weed the dangerous Christians out of my life: the ones who have the power to hurt me. Throw out a shit or a damn or a what the hell, and see if you get The Look. Watch to see if the person shifts uncomfortably or looks down at her hands … then you know: this is a Dangerous Christian. The kind who will not be able to handle the truth of your pain, the kind that requires some swearing.”
― Addie Zierman, When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over

“Yes, faith is like being born again. But it is also not like being born again. Unlike the newborn infant, the new Christian has memory, memory that spans back into the darkness from which he came. He is not so much born as waking … every moment to new realities. To a new way of looking at humanity. To grace and to peace and to love. It is not Before and After, a clean split, dark and light. It is gradual illumination, fireflies moving slowly toward you, softening the edge of the darkness so that”
― Addie Zierman, When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over

“And I think in the end, you're not really looking for "the right church." You're looking for yourself. Finding a church is about finding a place where your specific, beautiful heart can hear good news and take it all the way in. A place where they talk about God in a language you understand. A place where you can serve with your whole, broken heart and be healed in all that giving.”
― Addie Zierman, When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over

“Reform suggests that you have already been solidified into a self. You were not. You were barely fifteen. You learn that the brain is not fully formed until you're twenty-five years old, and you wonder, then, what becomes of the mind commandeered before it has learned to follow paths of logic. You were soft as clay straight from the earth. You were reformed before you were formed.”
― Addie Zierman, When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over

“If I had to do it over again, I would have danced like Buenos Aires.
I'd be a helicopter leaf, a snowflake falling. I would have stayed there spinning wild and lonely across the dark, lonely sky.”
― Addie Zierman, When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over

“I think that Andrew and I both used to think that the first most important thing was to love God, and the second most important thing was to love others. But during those hard months, we learned that it was all bound up together. That figuring out how to love each other in the change and in the struggle gave us a new understanding and grasp on God's grace and faithfulness.”
― Addie Zierman, When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over

“These days, faith is a lot like Wisconsin: a series of repetitive ups and downs, the natural rise and fall of the road that stretches before you. Boring. Beautiful. Ridiculous sometimes, as when the road eases into the Wisconsin Dells and there are suddenly giant plastic animals and water slides and a huge haunted mansion tilted along the road.”
― Addie Zierman, When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over

“When people confide their deep hurt to you these days, you are at a loss for what to say. A long time ago, you used to say, "I'll be praying for you," and you always meant to do that, to take those heavy burdens off their shoulders and hoist them up to the Lord. But the truth is, you usually forgot. Usually, this was the thing you said to end the conversation, a nice way to say, "I'm sorry. I can no longer handle the depth of your pain. I don't want to talk about this anymore.”
― Addie Zierman, When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over

“You'd been in Sunday school long enough to know how the story goes: the voice of God comes down from the sky and asks you to go where you don't want to go, to do what you don't want to do. And you have to do it anyway.”
― Addie Zierman, When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over

“You have learned that it is impossible to divide things neatly, and that the second you begin to define something, you limit it. There is no such thing as "cut and dried" in a world of broken humanity. Gray bleeds into gray bleeds into gray, no matter how you slice it.”
― Addie Zierman, When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over

“I was at the part of self-exploration where you have to be surrounded with miscellanea in all of its diversity in order to figure things out.”
― Addie Zierman, When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over

“He laughed, and he made me laugh, and it was because his relationship to his faith was not a do-or-die mission but something life-giving and fluid. Like a river. Like a fountain. It was in the generosity of his faith and his love that I found the rest I'd been hoping for when I filled out the applications and packed my bags for Minnesota.”
― Addie Zierman, When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over

“It's not, of course, the perfect term. *Reform* suggests that you have already been solidified into a self. You were not. You were barely fifteen. You learn that the brain is not fully formed until you're twenty-five years old, and you wonder, then, what becomes of the mind commandeered before it has learned to follow paths of logic.

You were soft as clay straight from the earth. You were reformed before you were formed.”
― Addie Zierman, When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over

“life is not so much a mission as beautiful drudgery.”
― Addie Zierman, When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over

“[His faith] was a hundred small perfect steps that in the end can never add up to dance ... not the kind I wanted, anyway. Not the tango of Argentina, of the Spanish birthday party.”
― Addie Zierman, When We Were on Fire: A Memoir of Consuming Faith, Tangled Love, and Starting Over