Prayer in the Night Quotes

“Beauty doesn’t take away the pain of suffering or vulnerability. It’s not like cicada song or good coffee make it hurt any less to lose a spouse or a friendship, or even just to have a hard day. But in the times when we think anguish and dimness are all there is in the world, that nothing is lovely or solid, beauty is a reminder that there is more to our stories than sin, pain, and death. There is eternal brilliance. It’s not quite enough to resolve our questions or tie anything up in a nice metaphysical bow, but sometimes it is enough to get us through the next hour. And in enduring a mystery, we need just enough light to take one more step.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“But unless we make space for grief, we cannot know the depths of the love of God, the healing God wrings from pain, the way grieving yields wisdom, comfort, even joy.
If we do not make time for grief, it will not simply disappear. Grief is stubborn. It will make itself heard or we will die trying to silence it. If we don't face it directly it comes out sideways, in ways that aren't always recognizable as grief: explosive anger, uncontrollable anxiety, compulsive shallowness, brooding, bitterness, unchecked addiction. Grief is a ghost that can't be put to rest until its purpose has been fulfilled.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“It is better to come to God with sharp words than to remain distant from him, never voicing our doubts and disappointments. Better to rage at the Creator than to smolder in polite devotion. God did not smite the psalmist. Through the Psalms, he dares us to speak to him bluntly.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“Stanley Hauerwas explains his love for praying “other people’s prayers”: “Evangelicalism,” he says, “is constantly under the burden of re-inventing the wheel and you just get tired.” He calls himself an advocate for practicing prayer offices because, We don’t have to make it up. We know we’re going to say these prayers. We know we’re going to join in reading of the psalm. We’re going to have these Scripture readings. . . . There’s much to be said for Christianity as repetition and I think evangelicalism doesn’t have enough repetition in a way that will form Christians to survive in a world that constantly tempts us to always think we have to do something new.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“We want grief to be a task we can complete; the oven timer of our soul dings and we’re on to something else. But that isn’t how grief works. We control it as much as we control the weather. It is not simply an intellectual activity, a cognitive recognition of loss. Feeling sadness is the cost of being emotionally alive. It’s the cost, even, of holiness.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“Prayer expands our imagination about the nature of reality.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“In times of deep pain in my own life, the belief of the church has carried me. When we confess the creeds in worship, we don’t say, “I believe in God the Father . . .” because some weeks I do and some weeks, I can’t climb that high. Instead we confess, “We believe . . .” Belief isn’t a feeling inside of us, but a reality outside of us into which we enter, and when we find our faith faltering, sometimes all we can do is fall on the faith of the saints. We believe together. Thank God belief isn’t left to me and my ever-fluctuating faithfulness.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“I face things every day, big and small, that are difficult but have not killed me. And I'm finding that what doesn't kill me actually makes me weaker, and maybe that's the point - that the way of glory is discovered through, and only through, the cross. In life's school of love, suffering - what doesn't kill us - makes us more alive to our need and helplessness and, therefore, more able to give and receive love.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“When we want to know God but are too weak to walk, these practices carry us.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“Belief isn't a feeling inside of us, but a reality
outside of us into which we enter, and when we find our faith faltering, sometimes all we can do is fall on the faith of the saints.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“Grief is a ghost that can’t be put to rest until its purpose has been fulfilled.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“The sixteenth-century Saint John of the Cross coined the phrase “the dark night of the soul” to refer to a time of grief, doubt, and spiritual crisis, when God seems shadowy and distant.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“The church’s prophetic witness to an outrage culture is to be a people who know how to weep together at the pain and injustice in the world (both past and present) and at the reality of our own sin and brokenness.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“Steven and Bethany have a lot of friends on the streets, and the afflicted extend hospitality to them. They are welcomed into homeless camps and given advice about where to sleep most comfortably. When they brought their five-month-old on a retreat with them, someone showed them the safest places to spend the night with their baby. One friend they met on the street prayed for them, asking for angels to protect them, for their safety in the night, and that they’d meet the morning with a good breakfast. Bethany”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“God isn’t a sadist who delights in using agony to teach us a lesson. But in the alchemy of redemption, God can take what is only sorrow and transform it into the very path by which we learn to love God and let ourselves be loved. This is the strange (and usually unwanted) way of the abundant life–the dying necessary to bring resurrection.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“Our telos is community not self-sufficiency. It's feast, a life together.

Even now, we work toward this vision of redemption. We weep and watch, but we don't stop there. We don't take a passive posture toward the renewal of the world.

Our shared human vulnerability calls us to action, to work. Our response to human vulnerability, is always in part to seek to mitigate it. To make the world, however slightly, more safe, more beautiful, more just and truthful.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“Even before the first minor chord sounded in humanity's song when things were as they should be, and we knew no suffering or pain. We still were not self-sufficient.

It was not good for Man to be alone.

In our purest humanity we were interdependent and needy. We relied on God and on other people and we worked. We worked together, even. Our common life depended on each other's toil.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“The problem of pain can't be adequately answered because we don't primarily want an answer.

When all is said and done, we don't want God to simply explain himself. To give an account of how hurricanes and head colds fit into his overall redemptive plan. We want action. We want to see things made right.

At its heart, theodicy is the longing for a God who notices our suffering, who cares enough to act, and who will make all things new. It is an ache that cannot be shaken, which we all share deep in our bones and carry with us every day and every night.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“In that moment in the hospital. I was not trying to express my faith. To announce my wavering devotion to a room full of busy nurses nor was I trying to call down, in the words of Richard Dawkins, my Sky Fairy, to come and save me.

Through prayer, I dared to believe that God was in the midst of my chaos and pain, whatever was to come. I was reaching for a reality that was larger and more enduring than what I felt in the moment.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“I wanted to pray, but I couldn't drum up words.

I was in a hospital gown soaked with blood. This was not the time for formality. I wanted healing, but I needed more than just healing. I needed this moment of crisis to find its place in something greater...the vast mystery of God, the sheer authority of God's power, the reassurance of God's goodness. I had to decide then in that moment, when I didn't know how things would turn out, with my baby dead and my body broken, whether these things I preached about God loving me and being for me were true. Yet I was bone weary.

I was heartbroken. I could not conjure up spontaneous and ardent faith.

My decision about whether to trust God wasn't merely an exercise of cognition. I wasn't trying to pass some Sunday school pop quiz. I was trying to enter into truth that was large enough to hold my own frailty, vulnerability, and weak faith. But truth as deniable as it is definite. But how, with worn out tears, and blood, in a place without words and without certainty, could I reach for that truth?”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“The promise of the resurrection is that Jesus is still at work today in our own lives, in the present tense.

So we wait and watch for the coming kingdom, when God will finally set things right, but we also wait and watch for glimpses of that kingdom here and now.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“Grant me O Lord for your sake, through the work of your Holy Spirit:
Love for my patient;
Joy in participating in this work;
Peace as I follow your lead;
Patience in the trying times of this case;
Kindness to all in the room;
Goodness in this difficult task;
Faithfulness to have integrity in the details even when no one else but you sees;
and Self-control that my own sins of anger, anxiety, and vain glory would not mar my judgement.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“God promises us simply himself. He refuses to be an end to any other means.

By his mercy, we can taste eternal life, which is defined by scripture not as making it to heaven, or seeing our dreams come true, or nothing bad ever happening, but as knowing the true God and the one he has sent. (John 17:3)”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“In his piece, I used to be a human being, Andrew Sullivan a journalist and popular blogger, discusses how he quit what he calls his addiction to technology and social media. He wanted to learn to practice silence. He went on a retreat that required silence all day and night with no cell phone, internet, gps, or even conversation. A few days into his retreat, he was suddenly and to his surprise, overwhelmed by painful childhood memories.

'It was as if, having slowly and progressively removing every distraction from my life, I had suddenly been faced with what I was distracting myself from. Resting for a moment against the trunk of a tree I stopped and suddenly found myself bent over convulsed with a newly present pain, sobbing.'

Every crutch he had habitually turned to had been taken away. He couldn't call or text a friend. He couldn't check twitter or email. He had to sit in the pain of his long-buried childhood trauma. And what he found was that he not only survived the experience, but that he found healing through it.

There is wisdom that can be brought only in self-denial. Only when all our other props devices and numbing agents are taken away. Sullivan writes, 'The sadness shifted into a kind of calm and rest. I felt other things from my childhood-the beauty of the forest, the joy of friends, the support of my sister, the love of my maternal grandmother.'

He spent a lifetime avoiding suffering, but the only way to the other side was through it. The only way he could find healing was by denying himself the thing that gave him an identity and a career. The thing he most compulsively went to for comfort.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“What is your name...

Years later a different question bubbled up, 'Mama do you love me? Daddy do you love me?' She was a little older now and knew that she was asking the question a lot. She admitted so and would say, 'I'm sorry I'm asking again." But she needed to hear the answer again and again. She didn't ask because we hadn't told her that we loved her, but because it's so easy to doubt it. To question whether it's true to wonder whether the answer can be trusted. We all need to hear it over and over again.

I come to God again and again with all kinds of questions, but all of them in one way or another boil down to the two questions my daughter has asked me thousands of times: what is your name? Do you love me?

In the scriptures, a person's name is always linked to their character-who they are and what they are like. My constant question to God is what are you like? Can you be trusted? Are you good? And I ask, do you love me? Will you tell me? It's hard for me to remember and to believe. Are you a God of love? And is that love for me? Even here? Even now?”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“If we do not make time for grief, it will not simply disappear. Grief is stubborn. It will make itself heard or we will die trying to silence it. If we don't face it directly it comes out sideways, in ways that aren't always recognizable as grief: explosive anger, uncontrollable anxiety, compulsive shallowness, brooding, bitterness, unchecked addiction. Grief is a ghost that can't be put to rest until its purpose has been fulfilled.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“God loves us passionately and wants to bring us joy and flourishing, but this doesn't preclude a cross. God's love is refracted through the cross, which often makes it hard to see or recognize. But if we are to learn to trust - to place the weight of our lives on the love of God - we can only learn this through the cross.

We come to know and trust God's love more deeply through our own crosses, the things that make us feel we cannot go on, the things that make us tired - the job loss, the break up, the sickness, the loneliness, the long struggle with sin, the estrangement from a friend, the disappointment, the deaths of those we love, our own death.

I wish there were some easier way, some way to learn to trust God that was paved with luxury and endless ease, but per crucem ad lucem: the way to the light runs smack dab through darkness - or more accurately, we discover the light speeding toward us these very dark places.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“There is wisdom that can be wrought only in self-denial - only when all our other props, devices, and numbing agents are taken away.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“To walk through suffering as a Christian - to share in Christ's sufferings - we have to face the darkness. We have to feel the things we hate to feel - sadness, loss, loneliness. We have to drink the bitter cup we've been given. No shortcuts. No free passes. But this is the strange way of true comfort. It's the only way to discover soothing that is substantial enough to bare the weight of our souls.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep

“Suffering strips away the self. This sounds terribly painful, and it is. But the meaning and object of suffering isn't pain; it is to learn to give and receive love. God isn't a sadist who delights in using agony to teach us a lesson. But in the alchemy of redemption, God can take what is only sorrow and transform it into the very path by which we learn to love God and let ourselves be loved. This is the strange (and usually unwanted) way of abundant life - the dying necessary to bring resurrection.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep