Joshua Luke Smith > Quotes

“begin every session confessing that I do not know how to pray, what to pray, or when to pray. Still, I do yearn to pray and not because I’m pious but because I’m unpredictable and I’m in pain and I’m homesick and I’m in love and I’m angry. I am overwhelmed with gratitude at the impossibility of life’s goodness while being simultaneously enraged by the injustice of it all. I tell them, simply, that it’s all got to go somewhere, all the little paper cuts and seismic tears in our reality, the love we feel for our children and the bloodlust for our enemies, it all sits in our soul, simmering, demanding attention. It will find its way out, one way or another.”
― Joshua Luke Smith, This Is the Main Event: Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have

“place, where David could have written his. The Psalms, if nothing else, reveal what it is to speak to God in our actual voice, offering the raw ingredients of our actual, unedited life, making honesty the form for our prayer. We may not use the language or tone passed down to us in the Psalter, but we can take great comfort that those words printed in fine ink on wafer pages with gilt edges were once the shitty first drafts of a prayer journal, the chicken-scratch words of a lyric pad.”
― Joshua Luke Smith, This Is the Main Event: Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have

“remind them, as I remind myself and you, dear reader, that the journey toward finding the life we long for in the life we have begins by naming our pain and refusing the temptation to live in illusion, to feel it all and to find the God who is close to the brokenhearted.”
― Joshua Luke Smith, This Is the Main Event: Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have

“The irony here is that the same anesthetic that numbs our pain also numbs our passion. We doomscroll to dull our grief and in doing so allow the disease of indifference to sever the nerve endings of our joy that was awake to all we had.”
― Joshua Luke Smith, This Is the Main Event: Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have

“Eugene Peterson said, “Pain isn’t the worst thing. Being hated is, and so is despair, and so is death. But the worst thing of all is failing to deal with pain. And we do that by telling God the pain—and that’s what lament does.”
― Joshua Luke Smith, This Is the Main Event: Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have

“all right where we are, even though that might scare us half to death. We’ll move through the terrain of lamentation, consecration, and adoration, words that I hope will become familiar companions to you, essential landmarks on the journey toward the life we long for. We’ll travel deeper into who we are and where we are, and we’ll begin to see that, as one priest (Brennan Manning) said, it’s better to “live naked in truth than clothed in fantasy.”14 We’ll choose to bring the meager offering of our lives, like loaves and fishes, before the God who loves us, and trust that something beautiful can come of it all.”
― Joshua Luke Smith, This Is the Main Event: Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have

“blessing those who mourn, Jesus is inviting us to interact with the world as it is, to forsake illusion for truth, to stain God’s shirt with tears and restore the nerve endings of our soul.”
― Joshua Luke Smith, This Is the Main Event: Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have

“These three movements—lamentation, consecration, adoration—aren’t steps to master or boxes to tick. Together, they are the posture of a life lived awake to God: the life I long for, hidden in the life I have. So this is what we’ll do: instead of escaping into the shallow lands of doomscrolling and denial, wishing we were somewhere else, we’ll begin to feel”
― Joshua Luke Smith, This Is the Main Event: Discovering the Life You Long for in the Life You Have