Gaslighted by God Quotes

“Our job is not to put a rosy face on the carnage of other people's sin in our own lives. Our job is not to try to anticipate God's meaning and then manipulate outcomes accordingly at the risk of somehow screwing up the ultimate plan if we end up guessing wrong. Our job is to make meaning of the circumstances. We are entrusted with the sacred responsibility to create order. To defend justice. To restore peace.
Even if we never witness that victory ourselves.
Even if the story ends before the chaos does.
Even if the order is not ours to comprehend.
Even if we are still in the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Even if we never see Moses plucked from the bulrushes.
Even if the stone has not yet been rolled away from the tomb.
Because the meaning, ultimately, lies not in what happens, but in what we make of it.”
― Tiffany Yecke Brooks, Gaslighted by God: Reconstructing a Disillusioned Faith

“When you move first toward being healthy, holiness will follow. But you cannot have genuine holiness without first achieving healthiness. God cares about your holiness and your happiness, but God also cares about your healthiness, because it is the pivot upon which everything else turns. It is not by accident that Jesus was both a teacher and a healer. . . . You cannot be truly holy without first being healthy, and your holiness is a sad legacy if you can find no joy in it.”
― Tiffany Yecke Brooks, Gaslighted by God: Reconstructing a Disillusioned Faith

“Cultivating deep-seated joy to carry us through the painful times of life is absolutely a praiseworthy pursuit, but in no way does it mean that God is uninterested in our day-to-day happiness. When we measure our spiritual success in terms of how much we have suffered for the sake of the gospel, how unpleasant our daily battle against sin is, or how exhaustive our devotion, we are stripping ourselves of the sacred gift of delight.”
― Tiffany Yecke Brooks, Gaslighted by God: Reconstructing a Disillusioned Faith

“Cultivating deep-seated joy to carry us through the painful times of life is absolutely a praiseworthy pursuit, but in no way does it mean that God is uninterested in our day-to-day happiness. When we measure our spiritual success in terms of how much we have suffered for the sake of the gospel, how unpleasant our daily battle battle against sin is, or how exhaustive our devotion, we stripping ourselves of the sacred gift of delight.”
― Tiffany Yecke Brooks, Gaslighted by God: Reconstructing a Disillusioned Faith

“For whenever I speak, I must cry out, I must shout, “Violence and destruction!” For the word of the LORD has become for me a reproach and derision all day long. If I say, “I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,” then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot. (20:8–9)”
― Tiffany Yecke Brooks, Gaslighted by God: Reconstructing a Disillusioned Faith

“Churches and “religious folks” tend to panic at the first sign that someone’s faith isn’t rock solid, so they often respond by piling on every Scripture, prayer, and argument they can think of rather than realizing that spiritual growth will always involve shifting, and sometimes shedding, beliefs. “Every moment of doubt does not have to be a catastrophe of faith. That’s not sustainable. It’s wrong to force a crisis of faith on someone who isn’t having one,” she insists.”
― Tiffany Yecke Brooks, Gaslighted by God: Reconstructing a Disillusioned Faith

“If anything, silence from God may be an indication that you are mature enough to let go of immature expectations and encounter another, deeper, facet of the Creator of the universe.”
― Tiffany Yecke Brooks, Gaslighted by God: Reconstructing a Disillusioned Faith

“The God that I had grown up with was gone now. At that point, my understanding of God was probably one of the most immature things about me. I probably had a plastic Jesus, buddy-God, good-luck-charm God—or I spoke enough of the vocabulary but really I was just parroting.… Somehow I thought certain things were birthrights instead of blessings. There is a big difference between being abandoned by God and being betrayed by your own immature understanding of God.”
― Tiffany Yecke Brooks, Gaslighted by God: Reconstructing a Disillusioned Faith