Unoffendable Quotes

“You’re not going to like this, but face it for what it is, and say it out loud: “That person I’m angry with? I’m worse.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“Living in humility is refreshing. It’s also incredibly difficult, at times, because it means trusting—really trusting.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“Axel, Babette’s Feast.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“He apparently sees us the same way. He’s not just an artist, of course, like Chris. He’s also a Father. Good dads are like that. You may be a drop-out, underachiever, whatever, and a good dad will still love you, but he’ll push you to change, because he sees a different you ahead. He sees a finished product, an adult who uses his or her talents and is a blessing to others. He sees something wonderful.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“the thing about gratitude and anger: they can’t coexist. It’s one or the other. One drains the very life from you. The other fills your life with wonder. Choose wisely.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“up to you to police people, and that God needs you to “take a stand.” God “needs” nothing. Quit trying to parent the whole world. Quit offering advice when exactly zero people asked for it. Quit being shocked when people don’t share your morality. Quit serving as judge and jury, in your own mind, of that person who just cut you off”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“Once I realized that, traffic went from being an exercise in anger to “forgiveness practice.” Life”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“Offense obscures our vision. Removing offense enables us to see people in wonderful, new ways.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“Forgive in the big things and the small things. Don’t take offense.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“He realized he couldn't be a believer in Jesus and remain angry with his family's killers. He realized it was simply incompatible.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“Life is full of conflicts, disputes, differing perspectives . . . and in all of those, guess whose perspective I hear first? That’s easy: mine. I establish a story line, and I can get angry before I even hear the other side, which is yet another reason to be very suspicious of ourselves.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“I can let stuff go, because it’s not all about me. Simply reminding myself to refuse to take offense is a big part of the battle.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“Truth is—and you already know this—most of the time, whatever it was that we were taking personally, it really didn’t have to do with us. Some people are rude, or selfish, or whatever, and we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. It happens. We can take it personally if we want . . . but why?”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“Make no mistake. Foolishness destroys. Being offended is a tiring business. Letting things go gives you energy.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“The thing that you think makes your anger “righteous” is the very thing you are called to forgive. Grace isn’t for the deserving. Forgiving means surrendering your claim to resentment and letting go of anger.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“God is “allowed” anger, yes. And other things, too, that we’re not, like, say—for starters—vengeance. That’s His, and it makes sense, too, that we’re not allowed vengeance. Here’s one reason why: We stand as guilty as whoever is the target of our anger. But God? He doesn’t. For that matter, God is allowed to judge too. You’re not. We can trust Him with judgment, because He is very different from us. He is perfect. We can trust Him with anger. His character allows this. Ours doesn’t.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“I used to think it was incumbent upon a Christian to take offense. I now think we should be the most refreshingly unoffendable people on a planet that seems to spin on an axis of offense.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“I hope you caught the part that says, “in light of the fact that they have all been loved by Jesus himself . . .” This is why we can, and should, overlook offenses. This is why we give up our “right” to anger, however justified we feel in it. If I’m to love people the way God loves me, I have to love them faults and all. It’s that simple . . . and that excruciatingly difficult.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“When we recognize our unsurprising fallenness and keep our eyes joyfully open for the glorious exceptions, we’re much less offendable. Why? Because that’s the thing about gratitude and anger: they can’t coexist. It’s one or the other. One drains the very life from you. The other fills your life with wonder.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“God sees things we don’t. He must, because He hasn’t vaporized us yet. He must look at a seriously messed-up world and still see what can be done with it. He sees what it can and will be.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“Forgive in the big things and the small things. Don’t take offense. In fact, the stuff that usually might offend us is a huge opportunity! Jesus told us we will be forgiven as we forgive others.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“Not only can we choose to be unoffendable; we should choose that.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“A guy once asked me to go with him to Indonesia to help people after the latest tsunami hit. I said yes. I had no idea what I was doing. We arrived in Banda Aceh two weeks after the destruction. (Indonesia alone lost a mind-bending two hundred thousand lives.) We weren’t welcomed by everyone. Most people love the help, sure. But I felt unwelcome when a group of Muslim separatists threatened to kill us. (I have a sixth sense about this kind of thing.) They were opposed to Western interference in Aceh and didn’t want us saying anything about Jesus. I just wanted to help some people. I also wanted a hotel. I wanted a safer place. I didn’t want to die. I had no idea what I was getting into. We took supplies to what was, before the tsunami, a fishing village. It was now a group of people living on the ground, some in tents. I just followed what the rest of our little group was doing. They had more experience. We distributed the food, housewares, cooking oil, that sort of thing, and stayed on the ground with them. That’s how our little disaster-response group operated, even though I wanted a hotel. They stayed among the victims and lived with them. After the militant group threatened to slit our throats, I felt kind of vulnerable out there, lying on the ground. As a dad with two little kids, I didn’t sign up for the martyr thing. I took the threat seriously and wanted to leave. The local imam resisted our presence, too, and this bugged me. “Well, if you hate us, maybe we should leave. It’s a thousand degrees, we’ve got no AC or running water or electricity, and your co-religionists are threatening us. So, yeah. Maybe let’s call it off.” But it wasn’t up to me, and I didn’t have a flight back. As we helped distribute supplies to nearby villages, people repeatedly asked the same question: “Why are you here?” They simply couldn’t understand why we would be there with them. They told us they thought we were enemies. One of the members of our group spent time working in a truck with locals, driving slowly through the devastation, in the sticky humidity, picking up the bodies of their neighbors. They piled them in the back of a truck. It was horrific work. They wore masks, of course, but there’s no covering the smell of death. The locals paused and asked him too: “Why? Why are you here?” He told them it was because he worshiped Jesus, and he was convinced that Jesus would be right there, in the back of the truck with them. He loves them. “But you are our enemy.” “Jesus told us to love our enemies.” The imam eventually warmed up to us, and before we left, he even invited our little group to his home for dinner! We sat in his home, one of the few in the area still standing. He explained through an interpreter that he didn’t trust us at first, because we were Christians. But while other “aid” groups would drive by, throw a box out of a car, and get their pictures taken with the people of his village, our group was different. We slept on the ground. He knew we’d been threatened, he knew we weren’t comfortable, and he knew we didn’t have to be there. But there we were, his supposed enemies, and we would not be offended. We would not be alienated. We were on the ground with his people. His wives peered in from the kitchen, in tears. He passed around a trophy with the photo of a twelve-year-old boy, one of his children. He told us the boy had been lost in the tsunami, and could we please continue to search for him? Was there anything we could do? We were crying too.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better

“to anger makes us deny ourselves, and makes us others-centered.”
― Brant Hansen, Unoffendable: How Just One Change Can Make All of Life Better