No Longer Strangers Quotes

“It's human nature, I think—it's certainly my nature, at any rate—to try to iron all the wrinkles out of life. When we feel like we don't belong, we try to solve the problem by making things a little more uniform, a little more ordinary. We take what we've been told are the best bits of other people's lives and set them as the preconditions for our own satisfaction. We search for home by enforcing someone else's vision of what the word home means. Along the way, we overlook the quirky beauty within the wrinkles, the beauty has always belonged to us and only us. If we want to find our place in the world, we have to let our lives be particular, personal, idiosyncratic. We have to live like we're fearfully and wonderfully made, like we're God's wabi-sabi works of art. How could we possibly belong on someone else's terms when we weren't made to fit in any other body, any other story but our own?”
― Gregory Coles, No Longer Strangers: Finding Belonging in a World of Alienation

“Abraham’s faith is exemplary precisely because he’s still a stranger at the end of the story. Even the land he’s buried on has to be bought specifically for that purpose, because no piece of the promised land belongs to him. His faith is a foreigner’s faith, an unsexy faith, a faith that’s terrible for boosting attendance or tithing numbers. Instead of taking him all the way home, Abraham’s faith takes him only as far as the promise of home.”
― Gregory Coles, No Longer Strangers: Finding Belonging in a World of Alienation

“One of these days, I’ll die and pass into a new kind of life. I’ll look again into the face of the One who has been my protection, my nutrition, my oxygen. Maybe, when that next birthday comes, I won’t be so afraid to say goodbye. Leaving the womb, after all, is just the beginning of the story.”
― Gregory Coles, No Longer Strangers: Finding Belonging in a World of Alienation

“Sometimes our words become so familiar that we forget what they mean.”
― Gregory Coles, No Longer Strangers: Finding Belonging in a World of Alienation

“The way Jesus tells it, if we give up on belonging in order to follow him, we’ll find ourselves belonging anyway, as if by accident, in spite of ourselves. We might not belong the way other people do, with normal homes and normal families and normal ways of fitting in. But we’ll belong in a way that’s a hundred times better, fully in place because we know we are out of place. We’ll belong in all the weirdest ways, finding family among strangers, making homes out of tents that are better than mansions. We’ll belong like aliens.”
― Gregory Coles, No Longer Strangers: Finding Belonging in a World of Alienation