Where the Light Fell Quotes

“The project helps me separate the school’s subculture from the body of faith it so jealously guards. Perhaps, the thought crosses my mind, I am resisting not God but people who speak for God. I’ve already learned to distrust my childhood churches’ views on race and politics. What else should I reject? A much harder question: What should I keep?”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“An awful new realization hits me. My brother and I are the atonement to compensate for a fatal error in belief. No wonder our mother has such strange notions of parenting, and such fierce resistance to letting us go. We alone can justify our father’s death.”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“is easier to live in the world without being of the world than to live in the church without being of the church. —Henri J. M. Nouwen”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“We tiptoe around everything except the truth: that one of her sons has left and the other is counting the days, that she has lost control, and that we will never replace her husband and are incapable of meeting her needs. I sometimes see in her face a look of fear and loss. I try to think like her—a disillusioned widow and parent. I soon give up. I can only think like me. One thing becomes clear, though. If this is the Victorious Christian Life—if this is what a person who hasn’t sinned in decades looks like—then I want no part of it.”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“In the churches of my youth, we sang about God’s grace, and yet I seldom felt it. I saw God as a stern taskmaster, eager to condemn and punish. I have come to know instead a God of love and beauty who longs for our wholeness. I assumed that surrender to God would involve a kind of shrinking—avoiding temptation, grimly focusing on the “spiritual” things while I prepared for the afterlife. On the contrary, God’s good world presented itself as a gift to enjoy with grace-healed eyes.”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“Perhaps, the thought crosses my mind, I am resisting not God but people who speak for God. I’ve already learned to distrust my childhood churches’ views on race and politics. What else should I reject? A much harder question: What should I keep?”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“I have come to know instead a God of love and beauty who longs for our wholeness. I assumed that surrender to God would involve a kind of shrinking—avoiding temptation, grimly focusing on the “spiritual” things while I prepared for the afterlife. On the contrary, God’s good world presented itself as a gift to enjoy with grace-healed eyes.”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“In order to be prepared to hope in what does not deceive, we must first lose hope in everything that deceives. —Georges Bernanos (in Reason for Being by Jacques Ellul)”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? —Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“I can never figure out how to have a friendly conversation with someone when my main point is that they are going to Hell.”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son! Even though I can’t describe what the poem means, the words themselves stir me. Somehow I grasp that if you can control the inside of yourself, nothing on the outside can get to you. I want that kind of control.”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;… If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“Later that year, he reads us the poem If, by Rudyard Kipling. I’ve never heard anything so profound. Part of it goes: If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“Nothing plagues me more than the question of whether I am really saved. I’ve said the Sinner’s Prayer so many times that I can spell it backward. I go forward and get prayed over by church elders while I keep my hands clasped together and my eyes squinched shut. I do it again, several times, afraid salvation is like a vaccination that may not take. Still, I can never silence the nagging questions: Do I really mean it? Is it genuine? I remember how Mother offered me to”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“The organ strikes up, and together we sing the invitation hymns. “Earnestly, tenderly, Jesus is calling / Calling, O sinner, come home!” Just like the Billy Graham crusades on the radio, these invitations end with “Just as I Am.” We sing all seven verses. The third verse is the one that gets to me: Just as I am, though tossed about With many a conflict, many a doubt, Fightings and fears within, without,”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“A nephew once sent me a quote that gives me perspective on the church: “An idea cannot be responsible for those who claim to believe in it.” I have spent my adult life sorting through the gospel message that I heard from those who claim to believe in it, searching for the “idea,” the life-giving Essence itself.”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“Marshall needs to feel love for the person he is, not just the person he should be or could be.”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“Unlike me, she believes life is meant to be lived, not observed or analyzed.”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“The Latin phrase dona bona, or “good gifts,” appears throughout his writings. “The world is a smiling place,” he writes, and God its largitor, or “lavisher of gifts.” A smiling place—not once have I thought of the world like that. Perhaps I lack certain receptors for goodness, as Mr. H. suggested. How can I find the dona bona?”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“In my reading I have discovered Augustine, a connoisseur of women, art, food, and philosophy, who celebrates the goodness of created things. He says of his preconversion years, “I had my back toward the light, and my face toward the things on which the light falls.”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“Classes at the school focus so intently on the invisible world—on concepts such as omniscience, omnipotence, and sovereignty—but here in the visible world, at the margins of belief, I feel the first uninvited stirrings of desire to know the source of such beauty. As G. K. Chesterton put it, “The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.” Nature teaches me nothing about Incarnation or the Victorious Christian Life. It does, though, awaken my desire to meet whoever is responsible for the monarch butterfly. —”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“Abruptly, I see my makeover project in a different light. It occurs to me that deconstructing a person is easier than constructing one.”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen. —Edward de Bono, The Mechanism of Mind”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“I felt a sudden contraction in my chest. For the first time ever, I sensed an emotional tie to my father. It seemed odd to imagine him, a virtual stranger, caring about me. During the last months of his life, my father spent his waking hours staring at those three images of his family, my family. There was nothing else in his field of view. Did he pray for us? Yes, surely. Did he love us? Yes. But there was no way to express that love with his children banned from the room.”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“As G. K. Chesterton put it, “The worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank.”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“He attends what he calls an “atheist church,” a Sunday assembly of humanists who expend much energy opposing a God they don’t believe in. On my last visit, he had a copy of The God Delusion on his coffee table, along with a ticket to attend a lecture by its author, Richard Dawkins. The wounds of faith embed like permanent tattoos. “Do you think he will ever change?” friends ask me, and I have to answer no. It is never too late for grace and forgiveness—unless a person determines it is.”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“I learn from these conversations that, from birth to death, people matter in the South. They are the main topic of concern, not the economy or foreign policy or scientific discoveries. Somehow I know that if our house burns down or we run out of money or I get hit by a car, this would be the place to live. Southerners look after their own.”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“It is easier to live in the world without being of the world than to live in the church without being of the church. —Henri J. M. Nouwen”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“C. S. Lewis once said that God sometimes shows grace by drawing us to himself while we kick and scream and pummel him with our fists. That is my story.”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell

“The worst moment for the atheist is”
― Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell