Dogwood Quotes

“Water that’s not moving becomes stagnant. And if there’s not someone pouring into you, the pitcher gets dusty. A person is most satisfied and most useful when she is both giving and receiving. In marriage. In life. In friendship. With God too.”
― Chris Fabry, Dogwood

“My constant companions were fears, not God. I convinced myself he was simply on vacation, out carrying someone else on that beach with all the footprints. My heart had shriveled, and my soul was as wrinkled”
― Chris Fabry, Dogwood

“Ruthie was the first to tell me that God hadn’t abandoned me but was drawing me deeper, calling me out of the shallows, past the abyss, and into the current of his love and mercy. Yeah, right, I thought. God hadn’t asked me if I wanted to go deeper, and thank you very much, I liked the shallows. It’s easier to play when there’s no current. In the middle you lose your footing; you lose control. You lose.”
― Chris Fabry, Dogwood

“Ruthie once said that life isn’t pretty, so you gotta hug the ugly out of it. I hung on to that as the days passed. I”
― Chris Fabry, Dogwood

“God, I wrote, I don’t know if you care about my heart or my life, but if you do, I desperately need you. Or maybe you’re already doing something and I’m oblivious. I don’t know how this works. I’m at the end. Break through. I don’t want to hurt my kids. I don’t want to hurt my husband. I don’t want to hurt the church. And I don’t want to hurt you. Please help me.”
― Chris Fabry, Dogwood

“I love you with all of mine. Daddy”
― Chris Fabry, Dogwood

“It’s not faith to say that when something painful happens, when you lose and lose again and the hurt goes so deep that you don’t think you can take another breath, it’s all going to work out for good. Faith doesn’t explain. It doesn’t even need to know or expect a happy ending. That’s not what we’re promised. Faith is abandoning illusions. It rests in something bigger, something beyond us and our ability. And I suspect you know that now.”
― Chris Fabry, Dogwood

“There had been a connection long ago, but that had been severed. Something in me wanted to hold on, to roll back the clock and never let him go, but I had made my choice, as he had, and we had to live with our choices.”
― Chris Fabry, Dogwood

“Most people never get old enough to let go of the illusion. . . .” “Which illusion?” “The one that says you can have a perfect life, a perfect marriage, a perfect child, or whatever else you dream of being perfect. That you can get to a point where there’s no pain. That you never lose sleep.” Ruthie put her head back on the rocker. “Basically life is a dance through a field full of cow manure. Most people won’t even go into the field; they go around it and pretend. Or they try to tiptoe here and there and stay close to the fence. They never see that all that fertilizer creates some beautiful flowers and some of the greenest grass you’ll ever see.”
― Chris Fabry, Dogwood

“If you’ve ever had a friend who cares enough about you to get down in the dirt and roll around, to cry and laugh and shovel the manure of life, you’ll know how I felt when Ruthie leaned forward. I still get shivers thinking about her words and how true they were. How true they are.”
― Chris Fabry, Dogwood

“Nobody knows that but you and God. And you don’t even know the half of it. You see, he looks at our lives as a whole, not just today, tomorrow, yesterday, and next week. Not even this year and next. He’s not counting your failures and your mistakes and keeping a running tab like heaven’s waiter. He sees the end just as well as the beginning. He knows about the pit you’re in right now.”
― Chris Fabry, Dogwood

“God puts every one of us here for a purpose. There’s some pull on our lives that draws us toward that purpose, and the farther we go away from it, the more unhappy we are. The closer we get, the more we yearn and desire it.”
― Chris Fabry, Dogwood

“You struggle. You fight and you claw inside that head of yours. You wrestle with God, with the idea that he actually cares for you, with the place your children have brought you, and a thousand other things. There’s something about your struggle others need to know. That they’ll benefit from.” “I don’t understand.”
― Chris Fabry, Dogwood

“Ruthie handed me a leather-bound notebook and said she wanted me to fill it with everything I could remember.”
― Chris Fabry, Dogwood

“There’re some things that can’t be helped. They just are. You either live with them or you don’t. Simple as that. There’s nothing simple about it. You got that right. You certainly got that right.”
― Chris Fabry, Dogwood

“You once said a man’s life is a series of choices. Small decisions made every day that don’t seem to matter. That nobody notices but you, if you even notice. Over time, those decisions are like raindrops, falling and filling the stream of a life. You believed the big choices were made in the small ones. If I had chosen differently in a thousand ways, maybe I wouldn’t be here.”
― Chris Fabry, Dogwood

“Good things can come from pain, he said. Not all of it is good, of course, but some of it. And the places it leads are good places, not bad. Never be afraid of the places pain will take you.”
― Chris Fabry, Dogwood

“Yeah, right, I thought. God hadn’t asked me if I wanted to go deeper, and thank you very much, I liked the shallows. It’s easier to play when there’s no current. In the middle you lose your footing; you lose control. You lose.”
― Chris Fabry, Dogwood

“Sleep is a luxury to anxious minds.”
― Chris Fabry, Dogwood

“It’s because I want you to remember that character counts. You can be the best there ever was at something, but if you have no character, what do you have? On the other hand, if you have very little as far as accomplishments but you have character, well, then you’re all right in my book.”
― Chris Fabry, Dogwood

“Some people are given a great gift of not caring what others think or about anything but being faithful to what they’re called by God to do.”
― Chris Fabry, Dogwood

“We were separated by years, tastes in music, food, clothes, and politics, but we delighted in baseball.”
― Chris Fabry, Dogwood

“sometimes you need permission to remember. There are things locked up inside all of us that we don’t think are affecting us but have bearing on our lives every day.” “You”
― Chris Fabry, Dogwood