Sarah Arthur > Quotes

“If only life were more on the scale of Orlando Bloom taking down the giant Oliphaunt in The Return of the King rather than the usual, tedious mall-crawl with the Abercrombie crowd! We often wish the daily grind held a greater resemblance to all those fantasy worlds we’ve come to love, don’t we? In our more desperate moments, we’re tempted to walk smack into pillars at subway stations, just to see if we end up at Platform Nine and Three-Quarters. And which of us, at some point in our not-so-distant childhood (yes, let’s be honest!), hasn’t pushed aside the coats in a closet, hoping to find an entrance to another world?”
― Sarah Arthur, Walking through the Wardrobe: A Devotional Quest into The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

“And that’s what we’re truly longing for. On those weekends when we’re suddenly gripped with the urge to watch all three extended editions of The Lord of the Rings, what we really want, deep down inside (besides therapy), is the assurance that there is a realm someplace where evil has been conquered once and for all.”
― Sarah Arthur, Walking through the Wardrobe: A Devotional Quest into The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted; which means that if the rest of us want to get close to God, we seek them out-not because of what we could possible offer them, as if we're the spiritual first responders on the scene to save the day, but because we recognize how much they have to teach us about who God really is." -Quoted by Sarah Arthur, Author of The One Year Daily Grind.”
― Sarah Arthur, The One Year Daily Grind

“Just because your faith is shaken doesn’t mean the faith is shaken. The eternal truths of the Kingdom aren’t altered or affected by the experience that shook your beliefs.”
― Sarah Arthur, Walking through the Wardrobe: A Devotional Quest into The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

“To respect someone means to treat their ideas, personal space, belongings, and needs as equal in importance to your own, while to honor someone means to treat all those things as more important than your own.”
― Sarah Arthur, Dating Mr. Darcy

“All fairy tales, Tolkien argued, echo the gospel of Jesus Christ in some way because the gospel is the True Story; it’s the real fairy tale that crashed into the time line of history... ‘The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact,’ Lewis wrote”
― Sarah Arthur, Walking through the Wardrobe: A Devotional Quest into The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

“...God sent His Prince, Jesus, into rebel territory to conquer evil and free us to be true citizens of the Kingdom again... That’s the essential story we find in the Bible, and it’s the essential story at the heart of each of our lives. And that’s what all good fantasy stories have at their core, whether or not it’s a conscious theme.”
― Sarah Arthur, Walking through the Wardrobe: A Devotional Quest into The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

“You are small. Your foe is big. But your God is bigger still.”
― Sarah Arthur, Walking With Frodo: A Devotional Journey Through the Lord of the Rings

“While the Witch plays her pawn, the King sacrifices Himself, and to all appearances, the game is over. But the Lion has one last move...”
― Sarah Arthur, Walking through the Wardrobe: A Devotional Quest into The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

“In short, you can’t have the truths without the Truth. Either Jesus is telling the truth about Himself, or He is lying about everything else too. None of this business about Jesus being merely an enlightened Buddha of sorts, offering wiser-than-average insights into how to live a healthy, balanced life. None of this quoting Jesus in order to make your own point about justice or fairness or peace on earth when you don’t really believe what Jesus said about Himself.”
― Sarah Arthur, Walking through the Wardrobe: A Devotional Quest into The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

“The lesson is this: When the road gets dark and all hope seems lost, there's nothing to do but keep going. We, like Bilbo, must keep up our "hobbitry in heart." Even more important, as people of faith, we recognize that we are not alone. Whatever happens from this point on, we put our trust in God. And we go on.”
― Sarah Arthur, Walking with Bilbo: A Devotional Adventure through the Hobbit

“...we hunger for other worlds. We long to go beyond the streets we know, beyond our familiar woods and fields, and into the land of Faerie; to Middle-earth, Narnia, or Summerland; to the kingdom east of the sun and west of the moon. This longing isn’t incidental.”
― Sarah Arthur, Walking through the Wardrobe: A Devotional Quest into The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

“There’s nothing more ridiculously juvenile than people thinking they have to be grown up and serious when it comes to living the Christian life.”
― Sarah Arthur, Walking through the Wardrobe: A Devotional Quest into The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

“The basic principles of logic dictate that a statement cannot be both true and false at the same time... and that a statement must be either true or false... Lucy is lying, or she is crazy, or she is telling the truth. She can’t be some combination, and she can’t be none of those things... The laws of logic dictate that she must be one of them... Notice how practical common sense about the suposed impossibility of other worlds doesn’t come into the equation.”
― Sarah Arthur, Walking through the Wardrobe: A Devotional Quest into The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

“Funny how it all turns to theological babble the more we try to identify just exactly what we’re talking about with this whole law business. No wonder C.S. Lewis wrote a story instead! Sure, he tackled the issue of moral law in Mere Christianity too. But nothing sticks in our imaginations quite so clearly as the sight of the White Witch, her bare arms raised above her head, standing over the willing, innocent, self-sacrificing Lion on the Stone Table.”
― Sarah Arthur, Walking through the Wardrobe: A Devotional Quest into The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

“There is a certain embarrassment about being a storyteller in these times when stories are considered not quite as satisfying as statements and statements not quite as satisfying as statistics; but in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells. —FLANNERY O’CONNOR9”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“Of the Father’s love begotten, Ere the worlds began to be, He is Alpha and Omega, He the source, the ending He, Of the things that are, That have been, And that future years shall see, Evermore and evermore! —Translated from a poem by AURELIUS PRUDENTIUS (Roman, ca. AD 348–415)4”
― Sarah Arthur, Light Upon Light: A Literary Guide to Prayer for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany

“Enter Madeleine. Here was a Christian author who could function quite unperturbedly from inside paradox, who dared to question the assumption that all things must be either/or. Why can’t it be both/and? What is this nonsense about “secular”? Why can’t God use those things if God wants to? Why can’t God speak through this or that person (if God can speak through a donkey, for instance)? Who says?”
― Sarah Arthur, A Light So Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L'Engle, Author of A Wrinkle in Time

“The radical call of faith is not to insist upon a set of universal principles about right and wrong, but to offer an alternative story by which lives can be shaped into new instincts, new practices, new ways of speaking and being in the world. We want our teens to make a decision consistent with the better story of which they are a part, a decision that doesn’t even feel like a decision but a script they know by heart.”
― Sarah Arthur, A Light So Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L'Engle, Author of A Wrinkle in Time

“C. S. Lewis said it this way: “In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. . . . I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”12”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“Creed by Abigail Carroll, p.196-197

I believe in the life of the word,
the diplomacy of food. I believe in salt-thick
ancient seas and the absoluteness of blue.
A poem is an ark, a suitcase in which to pack
the universe—I believe in the universality
of art, of human thirst

for a place. I believe in Adam's work
of naming breath and weather—all manner
of wind and stillness, humidity
and heat. I believe in the audacity
of light, the patience of cedars,
the innocence of weeds. I believe

in apologies, soliloquies, speaking
in tongues; the underwater
operas of whales, the secret
prayer rituals of bees. As for miracles—
the perfection of cells, the integrity
of wings—I believe. Bones

know the dust from which they come;
all music spins through space on just
a breath. I believe in that grand economy
of love that counts the tiny death
of every fern and white-tailed fox.
I believe in the healing ministry

of phlox, the holy brokenness of saints,
the fortuity of faults—of making
and then redeeming mistakes. Who dares
brush off the auguries of a storm, disdain
the lilting eulogies of the moon? To dance
is nothing less than an act of faith

in what the prophets sang. I believe
in the genius of children and the goodness
of sleep, the eternal impulse to create. For love
of God and the human race, I believe
in the elegance of insects, the imminence
of winter, the free enterprise of grace.”
― Sarah Arthur, Between Midnight and Dawn: A Literary Guide to Prayer for Lent, Holy Week, and Eastertide

“Like Gandalf, God knows the battle going on inside our hobbitlike selves, the wrestling match between the Baggins and the Took. The Baggins side of us takes our creature comforts for granted. We assume these comforts are part of the terms and conditions outlined in the job description Jesus offers when he says, "Follow me." But God never said anything about discipleship being comfortable. He's more interested in coaxing the Took side of us to the fore, the side that's willing to endure a little hardship for the sake of the final destination. When we learn to live without, we discover what we're really made of.”
― Sarah Arthur, Walking with Bilbo: A Devotional Adventure through the Hobbit

“There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation. Walking on Water”
― Sarah Arthur, A Light So Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L'Engle, Author of A Wrinkle in Time

“It's a theme born out of the Christian faith rather than a pagan understanding of the universe. Both views agree that we human beings are small, frail, and limited in our ability to battle the forces of the world that seek to destroy us.
In response, the pagan worldview says, "We cannot win this on our strength. Therefore, let us go down fighting nobly and die well."
The Christian worldview, on the other hand, says, "We cannot win this on our own strength. Therefore, we must rely on a Power outside of ourselves to win this for us.”
― Sarah Arthur, Walking with Bilbo: A Devotional Adventure through the Hobbit

“The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is—not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself.”
― Sarah Arthur, A Light So Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L'Engle, Author of A Wrinkle in Time

“We sought those experiences only story can provide, experiences that our crazy college days could never give us: timelessness, transcendence, intimacy, identity, mystery, subversion, enchantment, wonder, play, resonance, world building.”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“Story is the primary way we impart what really matters to the next generation.”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“Postmoderns must have the opportunity to experience the story as a story without the gospel being continually reduced to mere message.”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry

“Luci (Shaw) captured it well when she wrote to Madeleine, in Friends for the Journey, "And you, on your part, can make radical theological statements with which I may disagree, but again, because of our bond of love we accept each other for who we are , flawed and failing, but always truth-seeking.”
― Sarah Arthur, A Light So Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L'Engle, Author of A Wrinkle in Time

“When engaging youth with the Bible-as-story, we must be wary of our impulse to “clarify” what’s happening in a given narrative, to explain “what John is getting at” or “what Matthew is trying to say” or “what Paul really means here.”13 I’ve been guilty of this more times than I care to admit, and I’m not alone.”
― Sarah Arthur, The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry