Never Unfriended Quotes

“Because when you tell your stories, you start to recognize yourself in the stories of others. You start to discover that you are both, in fact, inside a shared story.”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding and Keeping Lasting Friendships

“The Never Unfriended Promise

I promise I will never unfriend you.
Not with the swipe of my finger, not with the roll of my eyes, not with a mean word said behind your back, or a circle too small to pull up one more chair.
I choose to like you.
I choose to choose you. To include you. To invite you.
Even on the days we hit road bumps. I don’t want another friendship break up. I want a friendship that won’t give up.
So, I give you my too-loud laughter and my awkward tears.
I give you my sofa for the days you just can’t even. And the nights you need a safe place to feel heard without saying a word.
Let there be coffee and long conversations.
Let there be messy, ordinary Tuesdays where neither of us is embarrassed by our dust bunnies.
I won't try to force our friendship into jeans that won't fit.
I won't treat you like a quick fix.
I will like you just the way you are.
Because I believe in guilt-free friendship.
And on the days we’re tangled up in our own insecurities let’s agree to give each other the gift of the benefit of the doubt. Wrapped up with the giant bow of believing the best about each other, even when we don’t feel like it.
I'm sure I won't always get it right.
But I'll keep showing up.
With encouragement instead of competition. With Kleenex, big news or sad news on the bad hair days and the Mondays and all the in between days with their ordinary news too.
Friendship on purpose.
Here's to me and you.”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding and Keeping Lasting Friendships

“If I wait for my house or my life to be perfect before inviting someone into it, I might never let anyone come through the door.”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding and Keeping Lasting Friendships

“Friendship isn't something we passively receive. Friendship is something we actively do. It's a gift we offer for free, not a demand we make with a stamping foot.”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding and Keeping Lasting Friendships

“Guilt-free friendship says that any time you get back to me is a good time. Guilt-free friendship says that I will always assume the best about your motivations. Guilt-free friendship says that I won't keep score when it comes to emails answered or phone calls returned. Guilt-free friendship focuses on the friendship and ditches the guilt. Guilt-free friendship loves any chance and any slice of time to catch up; it isn't about criticizing how much or how frequently that happens. Instead, guilt-free friendship is generous and forgiving and creates easy space for reconnecting because it doesn't have any conditions for how or when or how often that happens.”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding and Keeping Lasting Friendships

“But love, love equals, “I want the best for you no matter how it makes me feel.”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding & Keeping Lasting Friendships

“No one can steal your dream because God has built it into you.”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding and Keeping Lasting Friendships

“This is the secret to finding and keeping lasting friendships: become women who want to see the women around them flourish.”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding and Keeping Lasting Friendships

“Friends carry our sadness for us when we're terrified we'll be crushed under the weight of it.”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding and Keeping Lasting Friendships

“Seven years later Lisa’s number is still in my phone under her daughter’s name. And Lisa is still my first phone call. No matter what. Sprained ankles, lice, a new writing project, family drama, or that new chick flick. I call Lisa. Now, sure, there have been many, many other attempts with other women who’ve been too busy or too overwhelmed or whatever other “too” might be taking up space in their lives that left no real room to connect. And that’s okay. Because it only takes one. It only takes one friend to fill us up and pull us out of our phobias about being “new.” One friend will kryptonite-proof you against that paranoia that you don’t belong. One friend will insulate you with the delicious sense of familiarity in a completely unfamiliar group. Lisa was my one over and over and over again for those seven years, and it was hard thinking about doing it again without her. But because I remembered how it started, I had a head start on knowing how to start over. Back to basics. The shortest distance between strangers is often a shared honest story.”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding & Keeping Lasting Friendships

“While we might have defined friendship our whole lives by what others do to us, in the end it’s what we do for others that will define us as friends or not. That’s how we get friendship to stick. And that’s what this book is about.”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding & Keeping Lasting Friendships

“We do know better. And if we love our friends deeply, then we’ll be deeply concerned with their well-being, and we’ll handle our news and their hearts with extra care and consideration. Let’s constantly be on the lookout for ways to guard our friendships. And sometimes that starts with what comes out of our own mouths or Instagram streams. Let’s take the extra time and care when we’re sharing news that we know has the potential to sow comparison and jealousy into a friendship that we hold dear. Let’s care more about our friends than our own accomplishments.”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding & Keeping Lasting Friendships

“We live in a world where there are virtual warehouses of new ways we can find to covet our neighbor’s house, family, and life these days. Nothing is as terrifying as thinking you don’t matter because you can’t do it like she does.”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding & Keeping Lasting Friendships

“Stop trying to protect, to rescue, to judge, to manage the lives around you . . . Remember that the lives of others are not your business. They are God’s business. Even your own life is not your business. It is also God’s business.1”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding & Keeping Lasting Friendships

“I once heard the singer Ellie Holcomb say, “God didn’t come to make bad people good; He came to make dead people alive.” It rocked me because I think so much of our lives we spend trying to be good. We forget good is near impossible. It’s life that Christ came to offer us. And only through His life offered for us can we ever arrive at the gift of goodness. We are none of us bad or good; we are all of us dead. Dead in our sins and our old cycles of pain and lies and despair. And Jesus has come to breathe His own living breath into our dry bones. He calls your name into the tomb. He yells it. He sings it. He whispers it. He calls you by name in whatever way He knows you will hear Him best. And then He trades His own life for yours so that you can walk out of your past and your broken relationships and the shrapnel that has characterized your life and walk into the light to stand with Him—the greatest of all friends—beloved, whole, and heart-pumpingly alive.”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding & Keeping Lasting Friendships

“Because here’s the thing I’m finally getting savvy to: just because I think it, doesn’t make it true. Every thought that comes through my mind does not have to be taken and trusted at face value. Just like”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding & Keeping Lasting Friendships

“Before you were born, you were already known and seen and set apart for specific, profound purposes. So there is no way that your girlfriend or favorite pastor’s wife or neighbor or office mate could possibly steal that thing you were built to do. You don’t need to panic or hoard or hide. You only need to answer. Just say, yes. Say with preteen Samuel the simple, obvious words, “Speak, for Your servant is listening” (1 Sam. 3:10). Let’s listen to Jesus’ promises over us and stop tuning into the lie that there won’t be anything left over for us once everyone else has had their slice of the pie.”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding & Keeping Lasting Friendships

“But sometimes, sometimes I remember what a lie sounds like. I recognize it by how it always puts me at the center of an equation and everyone else in the red. How it leaves out important elements and twists others to suit its own ends. How it refuses to take delight in anything that doesn’t belong to me. And on those occasions, I crane my neck around to address the creature squatting on my neck. It does not like that. “Liar,” I say. “Cheat!” “You are trying to sneaky, sneaky snatch my peace, my contentment, and my friendship away from me. But you cannot tug-of-war me away from my faith. And you do not speak for me.”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding & Keeping Lasting Friendships

“a sure antidote to comparison is encouragement. Choosing to encourage instead of compare is a powerful defensive play. But”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding & Keeping Lasting Friendships

“our quest for perfection is a gift to no one. Real”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding & Keeping Lasting Friendships

“If we make loving people a strategy for something else, it isn’t love.”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding & Keeping Lasting Friendships

“forgiveness is not passivity, dear one. It is power. It is the ability to withstand the pressing, quaking gates of hell. Take this power and wield it. It’s your right as a child of God. In the power of Jesus, first you will it and soon you’ll feel it.”19”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding & Keeping Lasting Friendships

“The moment I start to feel that sinking feeling of dissatisfaction welling up in me, I know I need to message a friend, give her a call, or post a note telling her what I love about what she’s doing. I need to deliberately write down how all the ways she’s running confidently in her lane inspire me. Because the more I focus on how her work blesses, the less I’m able to want it for myself. It’s hard to hate something that inspires you.”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding and Keeping Lasting Friendships

“Christ's Kingdom is always intended to be a co-op and never a competition.”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding and Keeping Lasting Friendships

“There's enough work in the Kingdom for everyone.”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding and Keeping Lasting Friendships

“We have worshipped at the altar of inclusion when we were built to worship at the altar of the only living God.”
― Lisa-Jo Baker, Never Unfriended: The Secret to Finding and Keeping Lasting Friendships