The Power of Stillness Quotes

“As challenging as it can be to not seem to be receiving anything back from God in prayer, Adam Miller proposes this as a pivotal moment: “When this happens, you’ll have to make a choice. You’ll have to decide whether to get up and leave the room or whether to continue in silence.” If the latter, “You may discover that God’s silence is not itself a rebuke but an invitation. The heavens aren’t empty, they’re quiet. And God, rather than turning you away, may be inviting you to share this silence with him. This is part of what atonement looks like: sitting in shared silence with God.”5”
― Jacob Z. Hess, The Power of Stillness: Mindful Living for Latter-day Saints

“Are we really willing to wait—if that’s what clarity requires?”
― Jacob Z. Hess, The Power of Stillness: Mindful Living for Latter-day Saints

“This shift in our prayers can be relieving and exciting. Rather than constantly trying to get God on board with Our Big Plans, we start to ground ourselves in the conviction that Father sees more than we do. If that’s true, then our time with God becomes a constant inquiry to better understand and align ourselves with a will whose boundaries are forever extending beyond our own finite perspective—like the horizon on a mountain hike.”
― Jacob Z. Hess, The Power of Stillness: Mindful Living for Latter-day Saints

“for someone deeply hurting and lost to their core, they might need to hear the bigger, simpler message of Jesus. That message is that tomorrow doesn’t have to be like today—and that even this very next moment doesn’t have to be like the last one.”
― Jacob Z. Hess, The Power of Stillness: Mindful Living for Latter-day Saints

“Faith isn’t about getting God to play a more and more central part in your vision of a successful story. Faith is about sacrificing your story on his altar”:”
― Jacob Z. Hess, The Power of Stillness: Mindful Living for Latter-day Saints

“Solitude is the place of our salvation. . . . It is the place where Christ remodels us in his own image and frees us from the victimizing compulsions of the world.” Given that, he suggests that we ought to take responsibility for our own solitude and “fashion our own desert where we can withdraw every day, shake off our compulsions, and dwell in the gentle healing presence of our Lord.”
― Jacob Z. Hess, The Power of Stillness: Mindful Living for Latter-day Saints

“Elder Jeffrey R. Holland made a specific request for healing: “healing for others, healing for those you love and, yes, perhaps especially for those you don’t. The people around us need a lot of help, and I think the Lord expects us to join in that effort. I think that is what he meant when he said, ‘Come; see what I do and watch how I spend my time.’” He continued: “We all know that wonderful call for more labourers into the work of the harvest refers primarily to teaching and testifying. . . . But I wish to suggest tonight that in context it surely is a call to heal one another as well. . . . I ask you to be a healer, be a helper, be someone who joins in the work of Christ in lifting burdens, in making the load lighter, in making things better.”
― Jacob Z. Hess, The Power of Stillness: Mindful Living for Latter-day Saints

“Hmmm, they look boring and uncool; I’m moving on. As covenant people, however, we aren’t consuming Zion, we are building and becoming Zion.”
― Jacob Z. Hess, The Power of Stillness: Mindful Living for Latter-day Saints

“Author Richard Rohr warns against “search[ing] for a life of more events, more situations which have to increasingly contain ever-higher stimulation, more excitement, and more color, to add vital signs to our inherently bored and boring existence.” What happens if we intentionally pause all that seeking and activity? That kind of intentional stillness and silence, Rohr points out, can become “a portal to constantly deeper connection with whatever is in front of you”—thus revealing “the fullness of the now, instead of always waiting and wanting more, instead of waiting for the next thing, the more exciting thing, to happen.”
― Jacob Z. Hess, The Power of Stillness: Mindful Living for Latter-day Saints

“As we create head and heart space to receive, and as we develop the strength to live what we are taught, the brilliance of eternities can be ours.”
― Jacob Z. Hess, The Power of Stillness: Mindful Living for Latter-day Saints

“This young man chose to trust that God would help him to understand the “why” of his experience in time, having faith that all of life’s experiences are purposeful and have power to bring us closer to God. In the meantime, he would focus on living one day at a time, nurturing meaningful relationships with others and with the Savior, and serving in the kingdom in the best ways he could.”
― Jacob Z. Hess, The Power of Stillness: Mindful Living for Latter-day Saints

“having faith that all of life’s experiences are purposeful and have power to bring us closer to God. In the meantime, he would focus on living one day at a time, nurturing meaningful relationships with others and with the Savior, and serving in the kingdom in the best ways he could.”
― Jacob Z. Hess, The Power of Stillness: Mindful Living for Latter-day Saints

“As challenging as it can be to not seem to be receiving anything back from God in prayer, Adam Miller proposes this as a pivotal moment: “When this happens, you’ll have to make a choice. You’ll have to decide whether to get up and leave the room or whether to continue in silence.”
― Jacob Z. Hess, The Power of Stillness: Mindful Living for Latter-day Saints

“Let’s be honest: whatever goodness, beauty, and power can be found in a personal connection with God is pretty hard to find if we can’t even bring ourselves to genuinely stop and be still.”
― Jacob Z. Hess, The Power of Stillness: Mindful Living for Latter-day Saints

“As depression researcher Stephen Ilardi notes, the human body was “never designed for the poorly nourished, sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially isolated, frenzied pace of twenty-first-century life.”9”
― Jacob Z. Hess, The Power of Stillness: Mindful Living for Latter-day Saints