Frank Page > Quotes

“The hurt means you're alive. It means your body is reacting and willing to fight - both to fight back and fight through it. So rather than running from grief's harsh reality, you may find that in letting it groan and pierce and ache and cry, you begin to exhaust some of its staying power. You expose its secret hiding places. You force it into the open air where it can be more easily outlined and dealt with.”
― Frank Page, Melissa: A Father's Lessons from a Daughter's Suicide

“But answers to questions this large and complex must be given the space of days and time to unfold themselves. By scrawling your own punctuation, forcing by suicide to turn the question mark into a period, you close out a sentence that still contains all the potential elements of a good story. You shut the book before it's had a chance to show you where God is going with all this background material.”
― Frank Page, Melissa: A Father's Lessons from a Daughter's Suicide

“So let us step into this river of peace - bravely, willingly - undaunted by the swiftness of the current and the unknowns of the passage ahead.”
― Frank Page, Melissa: A Father's Lessons from a Daughter's Suicide

“More important, I know what I've seen God do, up close, right here in my own family, silently comforting us inside closets of darkness so black and siffocating I didn't realize they actually existed on earth and, if they did, how they could possibly be endured.”
― Frank Page, Melissa: A Father's Lessons from a Daughter's Suicide

“And He never stops absorbing the part of our pain we could never endure without Him.”
― Frank Page, Melissa: A Father's Lessons from a Daughter's Suicide

“And I beg you to try rallying enough courage to tell them what's going on so they can support you with their love and sit with you in your sadness.”
― Frank Page, Melissa: A Father's Lessons from a Daughter's Suicide

“And even if prayer seems futile and unnecessary, even if tears are quite often your only food - "day and night," as the psalmist said (Ps. 42:3) - hope still lives because God still loves.”
― Frank Page, Melissa: A Father's Lessons from a Daughter's Suicide

“He is willing to just sit with us in our grief and not judge us for being so lost about what to do.”
― Frank Page, Melissa: A Father's Lessons from a Daughter's Suicide

“You must keep your senses trained to the presence of new or repeat thought patterns, not allowing them eight-lane freedom to run up and down inside your head without being pulled over for closer inspection. Staying renewed in mind means keeping the floodlights on and the alarm systems triggered, ever on the watch for intruders into your mental living space.”
― Frank Page, Melissa: A Father's Lessons from a Daughter's Suicide

“The fact is, taking your honest self to God, even with all its raw emotion and blinding grief, is exactly the place you need to take it. If the alternative is to dump your anger on others, especial in the form of indirect critisism and personal attack, you'll find much less to clean up later if you just pour it out in prayer to the One who can actually do something with it. If the alternative is to stow it all away in a hidden tank deep within your heart, afraid of offending God by speaking it aloud, then you're better of releasing the valve in frank communication with your heavenly Father than cramming all that pain and suffering into tight living quarters that will never be able to hold it.”
― Frank Page, Melissa: A Father's Lessons from a Daughter's Suicide

“Much like Elijah (1 Kgs 19:3-18), Jonah sank into a selfish state of mind. Here again the message of the Book of Jonah is seen to be abidingly relevant. Countless numbers of modern-day believers miss much of the joy of being involved in God's wonderful work because of self-centeredness.”
― Frank Page, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah: An Exegetical and Theological Exposition of Holy Scripture

“Jonah's dialogue with God in the fourth chapter suggests that he may have preached this message with the secret hope that Nineveh would be destroyed. Fretheim states: “Jonah had just experienced the unmerited grace and goodness of God in his own life. Now he turns right around and makes it as difficult as possible for the Ninevites to experience God's deliverance…a graceless message delivered by one living in the shadow of an experience of grace.”22 Nevertheless, although Jonah apparently did not mention the possibility of deliverance in response to repentance, both he and his audience may have assumed it. At least his audience hoped for it. If this were not so, why had Jonah's deity given them forty days? As Stuart explains, there was ambiguity in the message, for the forty days might be “simply to assure that the divine judgment was not far off.” Also the word for “destroy” carries a certain vagueness, since it can mean either “turn” or “overthrow” (see comments on Amos 5:7 in this volume). It can signify “judgment, a turning upside down, a reversal, a change, a deposing of royalty, or a change of heart.” In other words, Jonah's words could mean either that in “forty more days Nineveh would be destroyed” or that “in forty more days Nineveh would have a change of heart.”23 Therefore the ambiguity in these words given by the Lord may have been what opened the door of understanding for the Ninevites and led to their positive response.”
― Frank Page, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah: An Exegetical and Theological Exposition of Holy Scripture

“Worship is a place of spiritual battle and souls are the ultimate prize!”
― Frank Page, Hungry for Worship: Challenges and Solutions for Today's Church

“At the very worst we see a prophet with a shocking disregard for human life and a bitter hatred toward those who had experienced mercy. At the very best he was a prophet who misunderstood God's mercy and had a limited view of God's plan for the redemption of his own people. While there may have been some reasons for Jonah's displeasure, it is sad to see him place limits on the same grace that saved him. While missionaries and evangelists would be delighted at such results, Jonah failed to recognize his privilege of being an instrument of God in a miraculous situation. Failing to recognize God's sovereign plan, he missed the joy of the situation.”
― Frank Page, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah: An Exegetical and Theological Exposition of Holy Scripture