On Getting Out of Bed Quotes

“Don’t do the next thing just so that you can keep doing the next thing. Do the next thing because it honors God and testifies of His goodness and the goodness of your life to your neighbor.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“Sometimes that’s what peace is: an action based on faith and not an emotional state.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“We all suffer silent crises, carrying burdens that are incommunicable to those closest to us and occasionally even opaque to ourselves. Some suffer from diagnosed mental illnesses, some from undiagnosed, and some from mental suffering that has no medical categorization yet is no less real and terrible and hard. But your existence is good.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“This is precisely why we must see that each choice to do the next thing is an act of worship, and therefore fundamentally good. Feeding your pets is an act of worship. Brushing your teeth is. Doing the dishes. Getting dressed. Going to work. Insofar as each of these actions assumes that this life in this fallen world is good and worth living despite suffering, they are acts of faith in God. Choose to do the next thing before and unto God, take a step toward the block. That is all you must ever do and all you can do. It is your spiritual act of worship.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“There’s a kind of unspoken conspiracy to ignore how difficult life is, or to reframe it as something romantic—a heroic challenge we overcome on our way to the good life.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“The most fundamental decision is the decision to get out of bed. And it too communicates something. The decision to get out of bed is the decision to live. It is a claim that life is worth living despite the risk and uncertainty and the inevitability of suffering—one of the few things we can know for certain in this life.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“But what if our contemporary society is not actually built for us, for humans as God designed us? If that is the case, then sometimes anxiety and depression will be rational and moral responses to a fundamentally disordered environment.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“If you take away one truth, the one thing in this book I know with certainty, let it be this: your life is a good gift from a loving God, even when subjectively it doesn’t feel good or like a gift, and even when you doubt that God is loving. Please get out of bed anyway.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“Each morning you must choose to get out of bed or not. All the medication and cognitive therapy and latest research and self-care in the world can’t replace your choice. This decision can be aided by these resources but never replaced by them. Which means that you have to have an answer to a fundamental question: Why get out of bed? Or, more bluntly, why live?”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“These verses have sometimes been twisted to claim that all anxiety is merely a failure to trust God. And while sometimes that is why we are anxious, it is not the only reason. What Paul offers is not an alternative to therapy and medication nor a simple fix to the agony that often abides. Instead, he offers us a peace that can enable us to carry on. What gets me every time is that the peace of God goes beyond “all understanding.” I don’t know how I would handle life if this weren’t true.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“Moments create momentum.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“We almost never take the witness of our actions seriously enough. I suspect that’s because if we did, it would frighten us. It’s scary to realize that my every decision communicates to people around me something about the nature of God, the goodness of His creation and laws.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“So, remember this: tremendous suffering is the normal experience of being in this world. Beauty and love and joy are normal, too, but so is suffering. Second, there are rarely clear answers to depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“To love myself, my neighbor, and God, I must bear all things. Not only all the wrongs and offenses caused by my spouse, family, or even strangers, but also the sufferings I experience internally.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“But I know one more critical truth: because of Christ’s finished work on the cross, because I am in union with Him, there is no condemnation for me.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“When we act on that goodness by rising out of bed, when we take that step to the block in radical defiance of suffering and our own anxiety and depression and hopelessness, with our heads held high, we honor God and His creation, and we testify to our family, to our neighbors, and to our friends of His goodness. This act is worship.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“Likewise, any action we take gambles the limited time we have on earth. We wager all other possible actions by choosing one. Whenever we choose a medical treatment or a school for our kids or a career path, we risk something—being wrong, failure, regret, time, poverty, and so on. Whenever we sin, we wager offense against God and the possibility of uncontainable harm to others (sin is never containable). Whenever, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we turn from sin and choose to honor God and love our neighbor, we wager our fleshly desires. Like Paul, it costs us to obey. To deny sin is to die to self. And that, too, testifies to those watching. It is precisely because our actions are wagers that they communicate something about us and our understanding of the world. They may communicate our trust in the medical community or our trust in public schools or the moral imperative of pursuing our dream jobs. But our actions always speak.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“in the end it is always just you and God and your neighbor and the present choice to act, which at root is actually the choice to worship. And that is okay. Really, it is.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“If you take away one truth, the one thing in this book I know with certainty, let it be this: your life is a good gift from a loving God, even when subjectively it doesn’t feel good or like a gift, and even when you doubt that God is loving. Please get out of bed anyway”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living

“So when you feel worthless or overwhelmed with anxiety, it’s not a sign that you lack faith or are not a true or good Christian. Millions of your brothers and sisters in Christ feel the same way right now. But there is another implication: if our suffering is common, then we should not hide it but instead help others bear it.”
― Alan Noble, On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living