Girl Meets God Quotes

“There are a few people out there with whom you fit just so, and, amazingly, you keep fitting just so even after you have growth spurts or lose weight or stop wearing high heels. You keep fitting after you have children or change religions or stop dyeing your hair or quit your job at Goldman Sachs and take up farming. Somehow, God is gracious enough to give us a few of those people, people you can stretch into, people who don't go away, and whom you wouldn't want to go away, even if they offered.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God

“...but that is how the clues God leaves sometimes work. Sometimes nothing comes of them. Sometimes, as in a great novel, you cannot see until you get to the end that God was leaving clues for you all along. Sometimes you wonder, how did I miss it? Surely any idiot should have been able to see from the second chapter that it was Miss Scarlet in the conservatory with the rope.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God

“The only other person I have fallen in love with that way is Jesus, and I hope that goes more smoothly. I hope I remember, when I'm bored with Him, and antsy, and sick of brushing my teeth next to the same god every morning, I hope I remember not to leave Him. I am not so worried that He will leave me. The Bible, after all, is full of stories about God sticking with His Bride, no matter how stiff-necked and prideful and unfaithful she may be.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God

“Here is the thing about God. He is so big and so perfect that we can't really understand Him. We can't possess Him, or apprehend Him. Moses learned this when he climbed up Mount Sinai and saw that the radiance of God's face would burn him up should he gaze upon it directly. But God so wants to be in relationship with us that He makes himself small, smaller than He really is, smaller and more humble than his infinite, perfect self, so that we might be able to get to Him, a little bit.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God: On the Path to a Spiritual Life

“God is a novelist. He uses all sorts of literary devices: alliteration, assonance, rhyme, synecdoche, onomatopoeia. But of all of these, His favorite is foreshadowing. And that is what God was doing at the Cloisters and with Eudora Welty. He was foreshadowing. He was laying traps, leaving clues, clues I could have seen had I been perceptive enough.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God

“All through the Torah, God is pictured as having hands, a face. The rabbis say, Of course God doesn’t really have hands, but the Torah uses the language of faces and hands and eyes so that we will have an easier time wrapping our minds around this infinite, handless God. That is what you say if you are a rabbi. But if you are a good novelist, you actually give Him hands and eyes by the end of the book, and that is what the Bible does. It says, in Deuteronomy, that God brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; and then it gives Him an arm in the Gospel of Matthew.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God: On the Path to a Spiritual Life

“It is a great gift when God gives me a stirring, a feeling, a something-at-all in prayer. But work is being done whether I feel it or not.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God

“The Spirit is the reason we can build a church and have confidence that we will get it at least a little bit right.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God

“The blood of our Lord Jesus Christ,” she says, raising the silver chalice to our lips. Receiving from her is my favorite part of Sunday services. She always says her line with such joy, like it is the greatest thing in the world, which, of course, it is.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God: On the Path to a Spiritual Life

“People think Judaism and Christianity are radically different from one another, and that the difference is straightforward. But on Ascension Day, I am struck by the deep similarity that lies just underneath. Both Jews and Christians live in a world that is not yet redeemed, and both us await ultimate redemption. Some of us wait for a messiah to come once and forever; others of us wait for Him to come back. But we are both stuck living in a world where redemption is not complete, where we have redemptive work to do, where we cannot always see God as clearly as we would like, because He is up in Heaven. We are both waiting.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God

“Being born a human was not the first time God made Himself small so that we could have access to Him. First He shrunk Himself when He revealed the Torah at Mount Sinai. He shrunk Himself into tiny Hebrew words, man's finite language, so that we might get to Him that way. Then He shrunk Himself again, down to the size of a baby, down into manger finiteness.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God

“It means the God who worries about our sins is not only God the judge, but also God the caretaker. He worries about sin because He craves righteousness, but also, simply, because He loves us.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God

“The change, I think, that conversion gradually effects on your heart is this: you come, over some stretched-out time, to want to do the things that God wants you to do, because you want to be close to Him.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God

“Admittedly, it’s a little crazy. Grand, infinite God taking on the squalling form of a human baby boy. It’s what some of the old-timers call a scandal, the scandal of the Gospel. But it is also the whole point.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God: On the Path to a Spiritual Life

“When God made His covenant with Abraham, He promised that He would “make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky.” Jesus is the needle who sews the children of God who are not direct descendants of Abraham into that nighttime sky.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God: On the Path to a Spiritual Life

“There are a few people out there with whom you fit just so, and, amazingly, you keep fitting just so even after you have growth spurts or lose weight or stop wearing high heels. You keep fitting after you have children or change religions or stop dyeing your hair or quit your job at Goldman Sachs and take up farming. Somehow, God is gracious enough to give us a few of these people, people you can stretch into, people who don't go away, and whom you wouldn't want to go away, even if they offered to.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God

“Habit and obligation have become bad words. That prayer becomes a habit must mean that it is impersonal, unfeeling, something of a rouse. If you do something because you are obligated to, it doesn’t count, at least not as much as if you’d done it of your own free will, like a child who says thank you because his parents tell him to, it doesn’t count. Sometimes, often, prayer feels that way to me, impersonal and unfeeling and not something I’ve chosen to do. I wish it felt inspired and on fire like a real, love-conversation all the time, or even just more of the time. But what I am learning the more I sit with liturgy is that what I feel happening bears little relation to what is actually happening. It is a great gift when God gives me a stirring, a feeling, a something-at-all in prayer. But work is being done wether I feel it or not. Sediment is being laid. Words of praise to God are becoming the most basic words in my head. They are becoming fallback words, drowning out advertising jingles and professors’ lectures and sometimes even my interior monologue.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God

“Because I know more and more that this glass here is so very dark, that this really is a long loneliness, that it is both lonely and long.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God: On the Path to a Spiritual Life

“Being a Christian means being a pariah, Lauren, it means not fitting in anywhere in this world.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God: On the Path to a Spiritual Life

“No, no, I'm not one of them. I'm one of you. I believe that Jesus Christ is Lord, but I also wear fishnet stockings and drink single malt Scotch.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God

“Augustine wrote that God sometimes does not give us what we ask in prayer. "Of His bounty, the Lord often grants not what we seek, so as to bestow something preferable.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God

“And I understood that I ought not ask for a prayer language until I could ask without making it the test of my entire faith.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God

“Some days, I believe the Christian story even more than I believe in Australia. After all, I have never been to Australia, it is just a picture on a map. I don't know if I will ever go there, but I know that eventually I am going to Glory.

Living the Christian life, however, is not about that Australia kind of believing. It is about a promise to believe even when you don't.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Girl Meets God