A Different Beautiful Quotes

“Glennon Doyle Melton, author of Carry On, Warrior, once said: Every time we open our mouths and speak, we are either saying “Let there be light” or “Let there be darkness.” When we gossip, when we criticize, when we lie or tell hurtful jokes or use labels that categorize and demean people, we are saying “let there be darkness.” We create a world around us that is not so beautiful. And then we have to live in it. When we offer a compliment, when we defend a friend or a stranger, when we stick to the truth, when we speak a kind word to anyone, we are saying “Let there be light.” We are creating a more beautiful world, and then we get to live in it.9”
― Courtney Westlake, A Different Beautiful: Discovering and Celebrating Beauty in Places You Never Expected

“Brenna is not suffering. She has periods of hurt and of discomfort, and she has endured intense pain during hospitalizations and surgeries. But on a daily basis, she is not suffering; she is thriving and happy.”
― Courtney Westlake, A Different Beautiful: Discovering and Celebrating Beauty in Places You Never Expected

“Physical appearance can’t alter spiritual attributes or personal accomplishments.”
― Courtney Westlake, A Different Beautiful: Discovering and Celebrating Beauty in Places You Never Expected

“Discovering a different beautiful in our lives is a mind-set we practice with each experience and person we meet and connect with, but for full transformation, it comes from a change—sometimes a very gradual change—within our hearts, as we allow God to work in us and through us… from the inside out.”
― Courtney Westlake, A Different Beautiful: Discovering and Celebrating Beauty in Places You Never Expected

“Ever since Brenna’s birth shook up everything we thought we knew, God had been reshaping and remolding my heart to discover all the joy and the beauty that this new world was trying to offer us. I opened myself up to this transformation as I faced each new trial and each new triumph… seeking, begging, learning, and finding strength, peace, gratitude, and joy. As we seek, we find. As we ask, we receive. And as we choose, we allow within us. By deliberately seeking joy and choosing joy throughout the challenges and the sickness, I realized that I had begun to find joy even when I wasn’t intentionally looking for it. By seeking to praise God and choosing to praise God within the trials and uncertainty of life, I had begun to find gratitude even when I wasn’t intentionally reaching for it. With a heart filled with joy over anger, peace over anguish, strength over despair, we can then begin to experience a full appreciation for so much of God’s beauty that we may never have considered before. We can build a life of contentment and gratitude as we appreciate and celebrate this different beautiful. Beautiful has very little to do with appearance—or at least as it pertains to hair color and noses and shoes. Beautiful is a way of being and a way of living, each and every day, perhaps each and every moment. Beautiful is joy radiating from your soul. Beautiful can be found everywhere, when we take the time to see it, when we want to see it. Beautiful can be wherever we seek it—in motherhood, in our homes, in our children, in marriage, in ourselves, in our faith, in our emotions, and in our experiences. The world, through God, is giving us all kinds of beautiful. It’s time for us to be brave. It’s time for us to take this different beautiful as it is offered to us and allow it to change us, to make us better, to connect us with others. If we’re going to open our hearts and live a life that celebrates a different beautiful, we need to shake off the unrealistic expectations, unwritten rules, and false definitions of normal that we place upon ourselves or allow others to pile on us. Living a life according to God’s definition of beautiful means ignoring the should-bes and, instead, chasing the could-bes.”
― Courtney Westlake, A Different Beautiful: Discovering and Celebrating Beauty in Places You Never Expected

“Living out and sharing our beautiful stories every day—both the failures and the successes—reveals the incredible ways God is moving in our lives. When we step up to share this with others, we are sharing God’s love and sovereignty with them. May we choose to create and to tell dazzling stories of beauty with our lives, through our thoughts, actions, and reactions. May we choose our battles wisely so that we can tell stories not of anger or victimization but of grace, courage, and acceptance of self and others. Stories of intense purpose, not of wrongness.”
― Courtney Westlake, A Different Beautiful: Discovering and Celebrating Beauty in Places You Never Expected

“But it takes a certain boldness to stand up and tell a story of celebration. It takes courage to push aside the negative and write our own story of triumph—not just once, but again and again. Choosing this path of courage day after day leads to a life of wonder and beauty, joy and accomplishment—not only in telling our story but in living it out. As Austin Kleon writes in his book Steal Like an Artist: “Write the kind of story you like best—write the story you want to read. Whenever you’re at a loss for what move to make next, just ask yourself, ‘What would make a better story?’ “32”
― Courtney Westlake, A Different Beautiful: Discovering and Celebrating Beauty in Places You Never Expected

“As author Shauna Niequist describes in her book Cold Tangerines, it takes a kind of courage to choose the genre of your own story: When you realize that the story of your life could be told a thousand different ways, that you could tell it over and over as a tragedy, but you choose to call it an epic, that’s when you start to learn what celebration is. When what you see in front of you is so far outside of what you dreamed, but you have the belief, the boldness, the courage to call it beautiful instead of calling it wrong, that’s celebration.31 When you are the author of your own life, you get to decide what makes it into your story—what defines you and drives you and paints the scenes of your existence. And through your actions and your reactions, you also get to decide what scenes don’t make the cut.”
― Courtney Westlake, A Different Beautiful: Discovering and Celebrating Beauty in Places You Never Expected

“We are storytellers with this one life we have been given. We are the main characters in this incredible story, and even when we don’t realize it, God is weaving through our story and using our story to impact the world around us. With every choice we make, we get to choose how to tell this story of our lives. We may not always have control over what happens to us, but we choose how to react to these experiences, and through that, we decide on the genre of our story. Will we be the hero or the victim? Will we write for ourselves a beautiful story worth reading and sharing?”
― Courtney Westlake, A Different Beautiful: Discovering and Celebrating Beauty in Places You Never Expected

“And He meets us in our hardship, carries us through, and reveals the beauty of His kingdom.”
― Courtney Westlake, A Different Beautiful: Discovering and Celebrating Beauty in Places You Never Expected

“In sports, they say that defense wins games. On defense, we jump up, on guard against offenders. Every move is against us. Every move is meant to, quite literally, offend us. But when it comes to relationships with other people, defensiveness doesn’t win. In relationships, sometimes we need to put down our shields and realize that not everyone is an offender.”
― Courtney Westlake, A Different Beautiful: Discovering and Celebrating Beauty in Places You Never Expected