Lore Ferguson Wilbert > Quotes

“We need to teach how to touch with true care. Care for our own bodies and for the bodies of others, because those bodies were created by a good and caring God.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, Handle with Care: How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in Life and Ministry

“I am temporal, and I am eternal, and neither makes complete sense, but I believe it nonetheless. Adsum. I am here.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor

“I want to make the loss of relationships and the crumbling of institutions all their fault and not mine. Their isolationism, their idolatry, their idealism about what constitutes faithfulness. But the truth is it takes two to drift apart through time or willfulness. One leaves or the other lets them or both leave. It's never all down to one of us.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor

“Even now I'm trying to attempt an honest assessment of these broken relationships, and it feels nearly impossible to hold all that hurt in a hand and now that, in some ways, they are holding their own handful of hurt from me and that we're prevented from seeing one another wholly.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor

“I have known real grief from real deaths, but the grief surrounding the death of friendships or relationships or institutions is another kind of grief. It's a grief with no home.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor

“This is sometimes how I think of pain in our lives. Even if our bodies and lives are a landscape of hurt and healed wounds, because we are humans and we live in a story as unique to us as our fingerprints or DNA, every cut is new and foreign, never before seen or experienced.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor

“I want to write good words- truthful and slant words- and sometimes they will hurt people I love. And I hate that.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor

“God's love for us is not his transaction for our perfect actions. His love is the gift, our faith is the response.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, Curious Faith

“I wonder why we find it so uncomfortable to maintain relationships with those who have sauntered to goodness elsewhere and found it.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor

“When we pretend to have all the answers, we're not telling the truth.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, Curious Faith

“To belong to God means to stand where we are and say, "This is who I am and all of who I am." But to belong to God also means to say, "This is who I am not and who I relinquish the need to be.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor

“Help me hold what is beautiful in the world, and even though it contains unexpected ashes and terrible tears, remind me it also holds the source of life.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor

“This means we must choose to walk in humility, trusting the Holy Spirit to give us wisdom when we ask, discernment when we’re confused, healing when we need it, forgiveness for where we’ve sinned, and help for all the ways we use our hands to live.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, Handle with Care: How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in Life and Ministry

“It takes a lot of work to believe that th beliefs and convictions of someone else are just as viable as our own. And not just viable but valuable.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor

“we have to discern the Spirit’s prompting, and then walk in faithfulness therein.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, Handle with Care: How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in Life and Ministry

“Despite all our hope in a world to come and belief in a new earth, the earth we live within now is foreshadowing the way we will all go.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor

“Curiosity will free you to live in the mystery of God's love.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, Curious Faith

“I am here and I am loved by I Am.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor

“It is not always, as we might suspect, the hardwoods that necessarily live longer but sometimes the softer woods.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory: An Invitation to Rootedness and Resilience from the Forest Floor

“...faith is progressive; it's fluid and it moves. It grows and shrinks and billows and bellows and believes and sometimes doubts. It is in motion. It is moving. It is acting even if we are standing still.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, Curious Faith

“Knowing we are valuable to God means we will care for wounds as we discover them. It means we will submit to the whole healing process, even the painful parts that feel like antiseptic or physical therapy. It means we will not pretend hard things don't hurt or emotions aren't real or death doesn't sting. It means we will weep when we're sad, laugh when we feel joy, have silence when we don't have words, and shout when it's right. It means we will acknowledge our own grief and attend to it. It means each generation becomes a little more healed and whole as we go, until the whole world is reconciled to Christ in wholeness.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, Curious Faith

“And if the bad news is that we are all unclean, the good news is that there is one gospel to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, Curious Faith

“Only when we are free from condemnation is our endeavor to refrain from sinning rooted in the freedom Christ offers.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, Curious Faith

“...all injustice is spiritual.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, Curious Faith

“What is more vulnerable than knowing God knows the exact number of our days? That the moment of our death is in his mind? To know that and to believe it is to be aware of our mortality, our frailty, our fallibility, and our vulnerability. It outs us as God-made and not self-made. We cannot hide from it.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, Curious Faith

“We're afraid he has plans for others, but not for us. That he has hopes for others, but not for us. That he has a future for others, but not for us. That he's with us but that he's turned his back on us.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, Curious Faith

“In order for me to believe in God and trust him and walk with him, believing he is safe is of first order.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, Curious Faith

“...what is oppression but the hands of a human being manipulated by the enemy for injustice?”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, Curious Faith

“But one of the greatest errors in our moment in history will be if we let this moment pass us by without a better understanding and practice of healthy, pure, good touch.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, Handle with Care: How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in Life and Ministry

“I don't need a God who just exists; I need a God who cares, who intervenes, who shows up, who makes right, who enacts justice, who extends mercy.

I need a God who delivers.

I need a God who is not just there but a God who is here.

I need a God who doesn't just give me what I want when I want it but who shows up in the middle spaces - who reminds me of his nearness, goodness, faithfulness, and presence. And if I don't sense those aspects of God, today I need to keep asking for it and not just some temporary relief of my most pressing desires.”
― Lore Ferguson Wilbert, Curious Faith