Josh Nadeau > Quotes

“We never arrive at True Love, we just journey deeper and deeper into it.”
― Josh Nadeau

“Saints are made by making people strong where they're weak, teaching them endurance through embodied practice, so they can run as so to win the prize.”
― Josh Nadeau

“Misery doesn't love company, it needs it. We need to now we're not alone, even if it's arm in arm on a sinking ship.”
― Josh Nadeau

“All the effort, all the work, and nothing in me seemed to change. I read the right books, said the right prayers, followed the lists of things to do and things not to do, but I remained the same. Unfinished. Mediocre. Empty. Years of rinsing and repeating yielded only one thing: stagnation, chased down with the inevitable bitterness.”
― Josh Nadeau

“Some people in the church I went to growing up were as close to Sainthood as anyone could be; they were truly Good people. Not in the sense of being perfect, not sanctimony, but Good because they kept choosing the path toward Goodness when anything else would have been easier.”
― Josh Nadeau

“Hindsight is twenty-twenty. That's how we understand our living -- not in the moment, not in the present, but by reflection and introspection.”
― Josh Nadeau

“There's this gray space, this in-between, when we're not where we want to be but also no longer where we were. And often, in that gray space, we are dismissed. Judged, even. For not getting Home fast enough”
― Josh Nadeau

“What I didn’t know then, and what I know now, is that some things can only be learned on the itinerary of Time. We cannot grow a tree in a moment of passion, and the pathway through the Valley of the Shadow of Death has no signposts; there is no map. We must follow our Guide.”
― Josh Nadeau

“That way of life didn't answer my biggest questions; it ran from them using fortune-cookie phrases, a prescription of "take two platitudes and call me in the morning." But those won't do when you're wondering if God's real, if any of this makes sense, and why life matters at all.”
― Josh Nadeau

“Blame won't do for deathbeds, nor will excuses.”
― Josh Nadeau

“That's what I was promised; transformation and deliverance. But all that seemed to come my way was guilt and shame for not arriving.”
― Josh Nadeau

“This is the path for all of us, I'm thinking. It's not just boxing; it's all kinds of things. It's dancing, it's painting, it's plumbing. It's pregnancy and childbirth. It's fatherhood. It's being a true friend. It's learning to develop real skills or strength in life, to grow and to change, we need to admit our weaknesses and face them. We need to admit all the things we don't understand, and we learn by commitment and repetition; we learn by doing.”
― Josh Nadeau

“I was, instead, given a six-shooter of banal Christian phrases to blast into my mind every time I got scared. Spiritual suicide.”
― Josh Nadeau

“Vices hear you. They answer you in the way you want: immediately. Unlike prayer, which teaches that you need to wait in order to hear.”
― Josh Nadeau

“Hiding isn't secrecy; it's not even concealing...Hiddenness is about the search.”
― Josh Nadeau

“Leaving Rock Bottom wasn't a weekend getaway; it was going to take time, and it was going to cost.”
― Josh Nadeau

“How did things get so bad? How did things fall apart so quickly? How do I get out? The questions were too massive to answer, at least with my head pounding the way it was. The only way forward was more of the same. The coping, the enduring, the pretending.”
― Josh Nadeau

“You know that feeling. When exhaustion gives way to the joy of endurance. When all your hard work pays off.”
― Josh Nadeau

“Maybe they were Saints because they were honest and because instead of covering up, they went in headfirst, looking for real change. For real growth.”
― Josh Nadeau