Placemaker Quotes

“Gardens are a place of encounter with the God who draws near. In a garden, we find Christ, who is our peace. I”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“When we pray for guidance, perhaps God’s answer is every way he hems us in, like a river.”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“If peace is a state of harmony, if it is a kind of wholeness or completeness, then we will never find it by running away from broken things and messy places. We will find it, in truth we will make it, when we draw near to the mess with shovels and paint cans. We may have a dream of peace that looks like a country porch or an isolated mountaintop, and we may receive peace in those places, like deep breaths of fresh air, but we realize our dream of peace only when we come down to that place where mountain meets valley town, country meets suburbia, city meets garden, or our past meets our present.”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“But remaining is not such an easy thing to do. To remain requires a stillness and a steadfastness in spite of the many things that will make us want to pick up and run.”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“Is life anything more than a litany of the things we lost in winter?”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“Dreams ask for commitment. They require a running leap. They require patient waiting.”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“Dead things are risk-free and easy to manage, but can they feed the soul? If I want a home that is alive, I think I must accept the chaos of its living.”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“Choices are always powerful. It does not matter that we rarely understand exactly what we are choosing. Perhaps that is precisely where the power lies: not in the choosing but in the learning how best to live with our choice.”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“We often discover “the right place” only through trial and error, wandering and waiting, following and believing. Quite often, the right place is, for a season at least, the place where everything is harder, the place where we feel least at home.”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“Quite often, the right place is, for a season at least, the place where everything is harder, the place where we feel least at home.”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“When we felled the trees, did we lose forever those places capable of touching the very depths of our God-given capacity for wonder?4 Or can we remake such places today?”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“But what if beauty is one of the greatest gifts I give my neighbors and my guests? What if my own choices give others the permission they need to forgo the plastic jug, to light the special candle, to sit quietly in the afternoon with milky tea in a bone china cup? I believe beauty reflects the truth about who God is and what this world is all about. What could be more important than cultivating beauty in little ways and large, however I am able?”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“the best gifts in life don’t simply drop from above. Rarely, if ever, do we pray a simple prayer then watch as the desire of our hearts falls neatly into our hands. Instead, the best gifts, like the gifts of my sons and my daughters, and like the gift of every one of our homes, are those that invite our participation, our prayer, our desire, and only then, when we have so much more to give, our gratitude. Because “a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“When we felled the trees, did we lose forever those places capable of touching the very depths of our God-given capacity for wonder? Or can we remake such places today?”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“Gain precedes loss, and loss precedes restoration, but most stories begin even before that; most stories begin with emptiness.”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“waiting is endless as long as you wait.”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“The wilderness is not necessarily a desolate place. It has its own unique beauty, and that beauty is enough. It does not need us. It does not ask for our participation. This may be one reason why wilderness wandering is such a harsh experience, but this is certainly one reason why time in the wilderness is a gift. Our cultivation and our care are not required. God himself plants trees in that place; God himself draws water from dry rocks. The gift of the wilderness is that this is the place we go simply to receive. This is the place we go to listen. In the wilderness, we are given the opportunity to lay down the burden of our desire to make and remake so that when some other place invites our participation and our creative efforts, we are ready to offer those things with humility. The trees—even in the wilderness—are singing a song, but if we plunge ahead in accompaniment without first stopping to listen, and without letting ourselves be changed by the song, we may find ourselves leaving not beauty but crooked patios and poison ivy and heartbroken tears in our wake.”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“Like winter, the wilderness is always a promise. God leads us in and, one way or another, he leads us out again. Or, if he doesn’t lead us out, he does something almost more miraculous: he plants trees in the desert, and he causes rivers to flow there.”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“The places we call home sometimes need protection from our inexperience and our selfishness. The places we call home are almost always enriched to the extent that they are shared. Is it possible to care for a place without hurting it, through ignorance or arrogance? Is it possible to care for a place with open hands, always ready to give it away like so many fishes and loaves?”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“And God continues to lead each one of us in and out of wilderness places. Sometimes these wilderness places are metaphorical; sometimes they are places we can point to on a map.”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“The in-between can be purposeful. Sometimes, it is exactly what we need.”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“The wilderness is a place without paths. Its geography is unknown and unmapped. Wandering is what one does in the wilderness because nothing else is possible. To walk a straight path through the wilderness requires outside assistance, such as a pillar of fire—or GPS. If the metaphorical wilderness serves some purpose in our lives, that purpose is found primarily in waiting and in stillness. We may move in the wilderness, but we never arrive. Like the lines of our patio, we drift away from true, though in my experience such drifting often returns us to a deeper truth we could not have received before our wandering began.”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“Poison ivy is a native not only to the American wilderness but to the wilderness of halfway places that grow up around every new housing development and shopping center, highway and train track. Such wilderness is the shadow cast by our collective progress. Studies have shown that poison ivy is especially sensitive to the levels of carbon dioxide in our air. The higher the concentration, the more vigorous the plant, and the more virulent its poison. Since the 1960s, the poison in poison ivy has doubled its strength.4”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“If peace is a state of harmony, if it is a kind of wholeness or completeness, then we will never find it by running away from broken things and messy places.”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“I loved silver trees. He loved salty waves. We looked at both through eyes of love, which means, I think, that we each saw what God sees.”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“If we waited till we saved up enough for air conditioning, if we waited for Bill to finish repairing the brick walls, if we waited till our children were less in the way or our energy levels less depleted, we would lose out on that glimpse, that foretaste, that reflection of the long-desired day when God’s coming kingdom has fully come. We might forget that life’s sweetest moments are not so far off, nor so difficult to achieve.”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“a common mistake we make is to assume that the right thing will be an easy thing. Even the Promised Land was full of intimidating giants. God may choose places for us, but he invites us to participate in the making of them, and this participation requires the kind of faith and courage that can look a great deal like foolishness.”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“Is it possible to care for a place with open hands, always ready to give it away like so many fishes and loaves?”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“The wilderness is not necessarily a desolate place. It has its own unique beauty, and that beauty is enough. It does not need us. It does not ask for our participation.”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace

“Perhaps most dispiriting, the elegant top curve on each of the original windows was covered and squared off with a trip of wood in order to make those flat-topped storm windows fit. The curve of the windows is still visible from inside the house, but, for sixty years or so, no one has seen that once elegant curve from the outside.”
― Christie Purifoy, Placemaker: Cultivating Places of Comfort, Beauty, and Peace