Roots and Sky Quotes

“We must plant our dreams in real earth. We must dirty our hands. It's the only way. Whether we dream of planting flower gardens or churches, ever dream needs a place in which to take root and grow. Every dream needs a home.”
― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

“God does not erase our losses, those empty places in our lives, but he does something almost more miraculous. He fills the loss with a sign of his presence.”
― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

“If I want to abide in this day, to make my home in it, I must only tear my eyes from tomorrow and look around. For there is a wholeness to this day that I do not want to miss.”
― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

“I am uncertain whether I took my first steps on clay soil or sand, but I know I have long wondered if home is the place from which we come or the place we are headed.”
― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

“Our lives are stories built of small moments. Ordinary experiences. It is too easy to forget that our days are adding up to something astonishing. We do not often stop to notice the signs and wonders. The writing on the wall. But some days we do.”
― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

“When something breaks down or does not go as planned, we are given a glimpse of our great need.”
― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

“I want to observe the ordinary things of earth—the moon, the stars, the rainbows, even the yellow leaves of the old cherry trees—and receive their messages. To hear them say what every weary traveler, every earnest seeker, longs to hear. Welcome home.”
― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

“Homecoming is a single word, and we use it to describe a single event. But true homecoming requires more time. It seems to be a process rather than a moment. Perhaps we come home the way the earth comes home to the sun. It could be that homecoming is always a return and our understanding of home deepens with each encounter.”
― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

“As humans, we roam the entire world. We even venture beyond it not space. The whole planet is ours, but the whole planet is not our home. Instead, home is the ground we measure with our own two feet. And home is the place that measures us. Home is the place that names us and the place we, in turn, name. It feeds us, body and soul, and if we are living well, we feed it too.
Home is the place we cultivate with our love.”
― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

“That our lives are not defined by what we’ve lost but by all that returns, fresh and new.”
― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

“We speak frequently of our fear of the unknown, but it is our known fears that often make us stumble.”
― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

“During Advent, we prepare room in a new day for an old story. Through our attentive waiting, we participate in the story of the season and make it new again. And we are made new by it. We emerge at the other end of Advent’s tunnel, and we are not as we were when our journey began.”
― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

“What is God doing in my life? In the mornings, I wake to find that he has traced the world in silver. Every blade of grass. Each pumpkin on the porch. In the afternoons, I find him washing these fields with the mellow sunlight of autumn. He has gilded every rail in the fence and the sheet metal roof of the old red barn. He has transformed familiar trees into something otherworldly.”
― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

“Our lives are stories built of small moments. Ordinary experiences. It is too easy to forget that our days are adding up to something astonishing. We do not often stop to notice the signs and wonders. The writing on the wall.”
― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

“The wavy panes of glass that remain in our windows now look to me like miraculous survivors. How is it that something so fragile has endured for so many years? The old glass reminds me that the distortions and imperfections inevitable in human creation don't always detract from beauty. Sometimes they enhance it.”
― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

“Thought the past is unavoidable here, no place is a blank slate, and memory may be just as necessary for placemaking as vision. If it is possible to cultivate peace on the earth, it may be that this is only possibly by cultivating memory. One of the greatest promises of Scripture is that even the very ends of the earth will remember and so return to the Lord.”
― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

“When I stop trying to fill my empty places, I leave room for glory.”
― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

“As humans, we roam the entire world. We even venture beyond it into space. The whole planet is ours, but the whole planet is not our home. Instead, home is the ground we measure with our own two feet. And home is the place that measures us. Home is the place that names us and the place we, in turn, name. It feeds us, body and soul, and if we are living well, we feed it too. Home is the place we cultivate with our love.”
― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

“Two years before our arrival at Maplehurst, we had left the Midwest eager for new jobs, milder weather, and a house of our own with a real backyard. We were unprepared for the enormity of our losses. Good friends. Close-knit community. A meaningful connection with the work of our minds and our hands.
There was one lost thing, in particular. It was such a natural part of our prewilderness lives that I only ever recognized it after it was gone. In our northern city, we had lived a seasonal rhythm of summer festivals and winter sledding, spring baseball games and autumn apple picking. Our moments and our months were distinguished by the color of the trees, deep red or spring green, and the color of the lake, sparkling and playful in summer, menacing and dull in winter.
These things were the beautiful, sometimes harsh, but always rhythmic backdrop in our days. Time was like music. It had a melody. In the wilderness, the only thing that differentiated one season from the next was my terrible winter asthma. Without time's music, I became aimless and disconnected, like a child's lost balloon.”
― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

“It seems that we, like Jesus before us, will know trouble and displacement. We will be called away from so many great loves: love of family, love of our familiar fields. But we will also be tasked with the work of cultivating new homes and new fields and new relationships. We will wander. We will come home. But always we will follow.”
― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons

“When we begin from a place of belief, no matter how small or insubstantial, we can see what was always there, hidden in plain sight.”
― Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky: A Journey Home in Four Seasons