Get Your Life Back Quotes

“Start with something you love. The laughter of your child. Sunlight on the ocean. Your beloved dog. A favorite song, music itself. Perhaps a photo, like my caribou. A favorite spot—your garden, the cliffs at the sea, the family cabin. Someone dear to you. We begin with the things we love; this is the way back, the path home. For we don’t always draw the connection—God made these specifically for you, and he gave you the heart to love them. You’ll be out for a bike ride in the very early morning, cool breeze in your face, all the sweet, fresh aromas it brings, the exhilaration of speed, and your heart spontaneously sings, I love this! The next step is to say, So does God. He made this moment; he made these things. He is the creator of everything I love. Your heart will naturally respond by opening toward him.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“Pray for people who are in a better situation than you are, who are more gifted than you are, or who currently have wonderful circumstances coming their way. Rejoice with those who rejoice. Pray for someone else’s promotion, someone else’s pregnancy, someone else’s healing. That crucifies envy.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“Touch nature. I’m serious—every day, your soul needs to engage creation.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“beauty reassures. This is especially important to our search here for the grace beauty offers our life with God. We need reassuring. Beauty reassures us that goodness is still real in the world, more real than harm or scarcity or evil. Beauty reassures us of abundance, especially that God is absolutely abundant in goodness and in life. Beauty reassures us there is plenty of life to be had. I believe beauty reassures us that the end of this Story is wonderful.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“We talk about unplugging, but we’re enchanted—by the endless social media circus of love and hatred, the vapid, alarming, sensational, and unforgivable. We’re snagged by every new notification. And while we’ve always had our individual struggles and heartbreaks to deal with, now we have the tragedies of the entire world delivered to us hourly on our mobile devices. This is all very hard on the soul. Traumatizing, in fact.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“The moment of perceiving something beautiful confers on the perceiver the gift of life.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“Encounter weather whenever you can. Don’t hide from it; experience it.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“When your phone chirps or vibrates, don’t react. Make it wait till you pick it up. In these small ways I’m making my phone a tool again, something that serves me instead of the other way around.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“Pause when you are offered beauty and make the conscious decision, I receive this grace. We open our clenched soul to let it in. To find God in it. I will often pray, Thank you for this beauty. I receive it into my soul. And with it I receive you, in it, by it, through it—your love, your goodness, your life.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“Let’s be honest: we prefer distraction. The more distracted we are, the less present we are to our souls’ various hurts, needs, disappointments, boredom, and fears. It’s a short-term relief with long-term consequences. What blows my mind is how totally normal this has become; it’s the new socially acceptable addiction. I’ve got a friend who decided to break with his; he now turns his phone off over the weekend. I text him, and he doesn’t reply until Sunday night or Monday morning. I’m embarrassed by my irritation: C’mon, man—you know the protocol. Everybody agrees to be totally available, anywhere, anytime, 24/7. It’s what we do. What does it say that you look like some sort of nut job when you turn your phone off?”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“To make room for God to fill the vessel of our soul, we have to begin moving out some of the unnecessary clutter that continually accumulates there like the junk drawer in your kitchen.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“Wildness, open spaces, and animals living in utter freedom are all good for our humanity. Sometimes we need geography to usher soul into spaciousness, lightheartedness.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“Honestly, I think most people live their daily lives along a spectrum from slightly rattled to completely fried”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“the Self stakes out its own territory within us to assure getting its own way, ordering our world to its likings. It has imbedded assumptions and privileges in our psyche; there is a momentum to its desires, motives, and presence in us. I call this the Self Life.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“You must guard your heart with everything you’ve got, especially in times of disappointment and pain. Your secret weapon against the enemy’s hatred is to love God right then and there, in the midst of the sorrow, whatever it may be.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“No other act will bring you a greater measure of God than loving him, actively engaging your heart and soul in loving him.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“You’ve got to release the world; you’ve got to release people, crises, trauma, intrigue, all of it. There has to be sometime in your day where you just let it all go. All the tragedy of the world, the heartbreak, the latest shooting, earthquake—the soul was never meant to endure this. The soul was never meant to inhabit a world like this. It’s way too much. Your soul is finite. You cannot carry the sorrows of the world. Only God can do that. Only he is infinite. Somewhere, sometime in your day, you’ve just got to release it. You’ve got to let it go.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“My soul just can’t do life at the speed of smartphones. But I was asking it to; everybody’s asking theirs to.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“Beauty is one of the richest graces God has provided to heal our souls and absorb his goodness.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“Second, we chose to believe Christ is already within us, and we remind ourselves of this marvel. The springs of life well up from within.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“Envy first brings depression: “My life isn’t as good as yours.” Then comes offense: “Why should you have what I don’t have?” Which degrades into hatred.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“The best way to get there is to think upon the things we love and remind ourselves, “This is from God; this is his true heart.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“the rooted person is able to meditate—give sustained attention to—the revelation of God. Not swipe, not multitask. Lingering focus.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“I’ve been part of some extraordinary experiences with God. I’ve had global adventures with him. But I don’t live there. Getting there, just like getting to love or anything else that’s wonderful in this life, is in the dailies.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“After I finish a phone call and before I start something else, I simply pause. When I pull into work in the morning and when I pull into my driveway in the evening, I pause.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“when I pull into the driveway at the end of the day. I don’t have to leap from the car; I can take a moment. I turn the engine off, sometimes lay my head down on the steering wheel, and just breathe. I try to let go of the day.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“we can’t stand at a distance from our own soul and ask Christ to “go in there and deal with it.” This isn’t hostage negotiation; we don’t hide a block away and hope God takes care of business. This is your own soul we’re talking about; the door opens from the inside. “I stand at the door and knock,” Jesus explained. “If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in” (Revelation 3:20). We open the door to our soul from the inside. This is the purpose of naming the loss, feeling it, allowing ourselves to return to the place in our own being that we walked away from. We must enter these places ourselves—the memory, the emotion, whatever it is we are aware of. We inhabit our own soul again. Jesus insists on it. Once there, we open the door from the inside, inviting Christ in, which he is always so eager to do.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“Allow your soul to feel. Don’t tell it what to feel; it knows what to do. Just give it permission. It might be anger at first, or it might be sadness, loneliness, why bother? You might find yourself shouting some profanities—that’s okay. Your losses matter. Don’t edit yourself into silence.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“Every moment you have ever been happy, thrilled, comforted, hopeful . . . that was God loving you.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad

“your heart spontaneously sings, I love this! The next step is to say, So does God. He made this moment; he made these things. He is the creator of everything I love.”
― John Eldredge, Get Your Life Back: Everyday Practices for a World Gone Mad