Beholding Quotes

“In those years, my early twenties, when I was bursting into my faith with a burning-hot first fervour, many of my friends and I wanted to see the miracles of the New Testament. I still do. But as the years have passed and that first fervour has given birth to a deeper and more persistent and admiring second love, I've come to see that kindness is a miracle, self-control a shocking characteristic, gentleness and humility rare commodities, and Christian unity almost worthy of greater awe than dead-raising. We were looking for the "grand" stuff, but surprisingly, the "little" stuff was harder to come by.”
― Strahan Coleman, Beholding: Deepening Our Experience in God

“emotion, though a devotional life leads to a sensitivity of feelings. It is the rhythms and moments of our days, weeks, months, and years that open communing space. Devotion isn’t ritual, but it is ritualistic. It isn’t working, but it is about works. It’s about laying hold of our lives in such a way that they become containers for the Spirit of God to fill, creating a counter-liturgy to the gravitational draw of technology, entertainment, and the endless purchasing of things. I’ve learned over the years that devotion isn’t reliant on how spiritually powerful we feel we are. If we have seconds, minutes, and hours in our day, then we can devote our lives to a living affection for God. Because devotion is about making space, and we all have it in some shape or form. When we wake in the morning, we can choose to devote time to God in the same way we devote our bodies to food, hygiene, and exercise. We don’t call those things ritualistic or religious; we don’t have breakfast with a sense of romanticism and heightened emotional experience. We do those things because we’re alive and because they’re good. Becoming a people of prayer is saying that as worthy as our stomachs are of food, our bodies are of cleansing, our lungs are of breathing, God is even more of our attention. And it’s about building habits throughout our day to live into it. If we leave eating to chance, we’ll likely find ourselves oscillating between irritable hunger and satisfaction. Likewise with God, without planning in rhythm, we’ll experience Him in boom and bust. Seasons of wonder and seasons of confusion and frustration.”
― Strahan Coleman, Beholding: Deepening Our Experience in God

“A strange thing happens when we decentralize asking in our prayer life. What do we do? How do we commune with God without agenda or necessity? I wonder if the answer is partly why so many of us pray like crazy in suffering, then forget about God in healing, because we don’t know what to do when the basis of our relationship is no longer desperate acceptance, healing, longing, or need.”
― Strahan Coleman, Beholding: Deepening Our Experience in God

“I’ve been gifted with a life that in whatever state it may continue is full of God’s love. I am never alone. I’ve found what I was made for, to gaze into the God of beauty and to find Him gazing back at me with His eyes of knowing love. To receive this life as sacred.”
― Strahan Coleman, Beholding: Deepening Our Experience in God

“In his book Anatomy of the Soul, psychologist Curt Thompson referenced work done by Daniel Siegel about compassionate listening: An important part of how people change—not just their experiences, but also their brains—is through the process of telling their stories to an empathetic listener. When a person tells her story and is truly heard and understood, both she and the listener undergo actual changes in their brain circuitry. They feel a greater sense of emotional and relational connection, decreased anxiety, and greater awareness of and compassion for others’ suffering.”
― Strahan Coleman, Beholding: Deepening Our Experience in God

“When we honestly ask ourselves which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief or bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is the friend who cares. 46”
― Strahan Coleman, Beholding: Deepening Our Experience in God

“So often the spiritual blankness we feel when we think about God is due to our blankness in general because we spend so little time with ourselves apart from the noise of life.”
― Strahan Coleman, Beholding: Deepening Our Experience in God

“It’s the process by which the Spirit takes hold of the things we’re learning and plants them deep within our souls, where they can germinate and bear godly fruit. Without slowing and thinning in our lives, without enough space to stop and allow that process to take place, we’ll be stuck learning about God but never knowing Him.”
― Strahan Coleman, Beholding: Deepening Our Experience in God

“Imagine if we had to understand God to be with Him; we would never reach a deep enough knowledge to make us feel like we could be close.”
― Strahan Coleman, Beholding: Deepening Our Experience in God

“Many of our greatest challenges in our spiritual lives aren't so much about what we are doing in our prayer lives but about what we're doing outside them.”
― Strahan Coleman, Beholding: Deepening Our Experience in God

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
― Strahan Coleman, Beholding: Deepening Our Experience in God