The Cry of the Soul Quotes

“Ignoring our emotions is turning our back on reality; listening to our emotions ushers us into reality. And reality is where we meet God.”
― Dan Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“The absence of tumult, more than its presence, is an enemy of the soul. God meets you in your weakness, not in your strength. He comforts those who mourn, not those who live above desperation. He reveals Himself more often in darkness than in the happy moments of life.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“Every emotion, though horizontally provoked, nevertheless reflects something about the vertical dimension: our relationship with God.”
― Dan Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“(2) The reason for looking inside is not to effect direct change of negative emotions to positive emotions. Instead, we are to listen to and ponder what we feel in order to be moved to the far deeper issue of what our hearts are doing with God and others.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“Righteous anger invites change. It can envision what the other might look like if the arrogance controlling the heart was pierced. Anger is a surgical weapon, designed to destroy ugliness and restore beauty. In the hands of one who is trained in love and who can envision beauty, the knife of righteous anger is a weapon for restoration.”
― Dan Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“all evaluations eventually boil down to this: Am I moving toward God or away from Him? Am I turning toward God with awe and gratitude, or away from Him toward false gods of my own making?”
― Dan Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“We are not machines that can be repaired through a series of steps—we are relational beings who are transformed by the mystery of relationship.”
― Dan Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“The reason we don’t want to feel is that feeling exposes the tragedy of our world and the darkness of our hearts.”
― Dan Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“emotions are not amoral—they vocalize the inner working of our souls and are as tainted as any other portion of our personality.”
― Dan Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“Poetry reaches to the realm beyond the world of sight and sound to reveal what our senses long to see and hear. It is the language not so much of the sublime, but of the truly real.”
― Dan Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“When pain lumbers through the front door, squats down in the middle of your life, and makes itself at home day after day, year after year, it can make you choke. It can make you angry at God.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“God's passion is to rig the world so that we are compelled to deal with whatever blocks us from being like His glorious Son.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“I don’t want to go through what he has suffered. Yet he has glimpsed the face of God and has seen His mercy in the midst of sorrow.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“Oddly, so very oddly, God chooses to reveal His heart through the tainted reality of our sinful inner world. For example, He allows the psalmist to portray His anger in terms of a drunk who has just awakened with a hangover and is unleashing his rage (Psalm 78:65). What are we to learn about God through this startling picture? Does it imply that God is somehow sinful? Of course not. It implies that He reveals His heart through the multifaceted images in His Word that draw from our life experience. Language that speaks of God in what we would consider negative emotional terms reveals the mysterious humility of God: He speaks to us in ways that are sometimes shocking, disruptive, and highly charged. Why such an apparently negative focus in this book on anger, fear, jealousy, despair, contempt, and shame? In part, it is an attempt to show these emotions as far more positive and necessary to life than we normally assume. But even more important, it is an effort to open our vision to perceive the unusual heart of God. God feels anger, fear, jealousy, despair, contempt, and shame—and all of these emotions reveal something about His character. Most gloriously, each one points to the scandalous wonder of the Cross.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“(1) they move against us: attack; (2) they move away from us: abandonment; (3) they move toward us: love. In the context of a sinful, fallen world, our emotional responses to these relational movements can generally be characterized as fight or flight. The following diagram shows how these responses give rise to our difficult emotions.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“Our emotional struggles reflect far more than our battle with people and events; they reveal our deepest questions about God. But how do we make the connection from the horizontal circumstances that provoke our emotions to the vertical conditions they point to? In this chapter, we will explore three fundamental types of relational movement (against, away, and toward) that provoke our emotions. This context helps clarify how our responses in human relationships are rooted in the nature of our relationship with God. As we understand what situationally provokes our emotions, we will open the door to recognizing the deeper struggles involved in all emotion.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“It is in the dark struggles with God that we are surprised by His response to our anger and fear. What we receive from Him during our difficult battle is not what we expect. We assume He wants order, conformity—obedient children. Instead, we find that He wants our passionate involvement and utter awe in the mystery of His glorious character.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“Instead, the Psalms invite us to question God. But they do this in the context of worship—they were the hymnal used in public worship. God invites us to bring before Him our rage, doubt, and terror—but He intends for us to do so as part of worship. This is the kind of emotional struggle we must engage in if we are to fathom the nature of God’s heart for us.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“The presence of disruptive emotions that feel irrational or out of control is not necessarily a sign of disease, sin, or trauma. Instead, it may be the signal that the heart is struggling with God. Therefore, we must view the ups and downs of our emotional life not as a problem to be resolved, but as a cry to be heard.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“Be Still “Be still before the LORD and wait patiently for him; do not fret when people succeed in their ways, when they carry out their wicked schemes. Refrain from anger and turn from wrath; do not fret—it leads only to evil” (Psalm 37:7-8). When you are angry, wait. Stop, sit, don’t move! Anger is a catalyst that stirs us into battle. Most of the battles that anger will draw us into fighting are not worthy of our blood. Unrighteous anger will never deepen our heart for God or others unless we are willing to go through anger detox.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“Perhaps a better explanation for why it’s so difficult to feel our feelings is that all emotion, positive or negative, opens the door to the nature of reality. All of us prefer to avoid pain—but even more, we want to escape reality.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“Emotion links our internal and external worlds. To be aware of what we feel can open us to questions we would rather ignore. For many of us, that is precisely why it is easier not to feel. But a failure to feel leaves us barren and distant from God and others.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“change comes through brutal honesty and vulnerability before God. Only face to face with our deepest ruling passions is there hope of redeeming the fabric of our inner world.”
― Dan Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“if we view difficult emotions as problems to be solved, we will end up looking for answers that will work rather than pursuing relationship with God, regardless of immediate outcome. A determination to resolve our emotional struggles inevitably subordinates God as a servant of our healing rather than a Person to be praised.”
― Dan Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“The route to facing what we feel is not by devaluing the darkness of what we feel, but by valuing the deep structure of why we don’t want to feel. Once we face why feeling is so hard, then we can move beyond what we feel to the deeper energy within us that keeps us from grappling honestly with our emotions. Then we will not only feel more deeply, but—more importantly—we will feel our feelings in a way that exposes our struggle with God.”
― Dan Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“Godly despair cries out for perspective but allows the hollowness of loss to move the heart to seek God.”
― Dan Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God