Ken Gire > Quotes

“We reach for God in many ways. Through our pictures and our prayers. Through our writing and our worship. And through them He reaches us.”
― Ken Gire

“While we have been pursuing God he has been rushing toward us with reckless love arms flung wide to hug us home.”
― Ken Gire

“I would rather be told an R-rated truth than a G-rated lie.”
― Ken Gire

“Dear God,
Reveal to me through stories something of what it is like to walk around in someone else's shoes.
Show me something about myself in the stories I read, something that needs changing, a thought, a feeling or attitude.
Deliver me from myself, O God, and from the parachial and sometimes prejudiced views I have of other people, other nations, other races, other religions.
Enlarge by heart with a story, and change me by the characters I meet there.
May some of the light from their lives spill over into mine, giving me illumination where there was once ignorance, compassion where there was once contempt.”
― Ken Gire

“Because what touches His heart is not how much we know, but how much we love. Not how pure we are, but how passionate. Maybe that is why, when Pharisees were fighting over theology, prostitutes were falling at the Savior’s feet and slipping into the kingdom of God on their tears.”
― Ken Gire, Windows of the Soul: Hearing God in the Everyday Moments of Your Life

“To respect something is to understand that there is something there to see, that it is not all surface, that something lies beneath the surface, something that has the power to change the way we think or feel, something that may prove so profound a revelation as to change not only how we look at our lives but how we live them.”
― Ken Gire, Windows of the Soul: Hearing God in the Everyday Moments of Your Life

“Joy comes when we catch the rhythms of His heart. Peace comes when we live in harmony with those rhythms.”
― Ken Gire

“God doesn't offer his Word as a magic fix-all pill that we can ingest and feel better. Rather, God's Word is the way in which we are invited to encounter the real 'person' of God.”
― Ken Gire, At Peace in the Storm: Experiencing the Savior's Presence When You Need Him Most

“As mysterious as it seems, our prayers have the power to live after us. Spanning years, sometimes centuries, even millennia. Reaching across time to take the broken pieces of a person's life and gently place them into what can only be described as a divine work.”
― Ken Gire, The North Face of God

“C. S. Lewis, in The Screwtape Letters, writes imaginary correspondence between an old devil, Screwtape, and a young demon named Wormwood whom Screwtape is mentoring. At the end of one of those letters, Screwtape writes, "Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”
― Ken Gire, The North Face of God

“Joseph spent most of his life not knowing why God had allowed his brothers to sell him into slavery, why he had allowed him to be brought to a foreign land, why he had allowed him to be falsely accused and thrown into prison. From behind bars, it must have all seemed so unjust. But from the summit of understanding that God later granted him, it all made perfect sense (Genesis 50:20). It was there he learned that the seemingly meandering ways of God weren't simply leading to the shaping of his character but also to the saving of his family (a lineage that led to Christ), preserving them through seven years of famine and prospering them for generations to come.”
― Ken Gire, The North Face of God

“If the word of God dwells within us, then God speaks to others, however inarticulately, through the language of our life.”
― Ken Gire, Windows of the Soul: Hearing God in the Everyday Moments of Your Life

“When suffering shatters the carefully kept vase that is our lives, God stoops to pick up the pieces. But he doesn't put them back together as a restoration project patterned after our former selves. Instead, he sifts through the rubble and selects some of the shards as raw material for another project-a mosaic that tells the story of redemption.”
― Ken Gire, The North Face of God

“If only we arrange our life,” said Rilke, “according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.”
― Ken Gire, Windows of the Soul: Hearing God in the Everyday Moments of Your Life

“In all my perplexities and distresses, the Bible has never failed to give me light and strength. Robert E. Lee”
― Ken Gire, At Peace in the Storm: Experiencing the Savior's Presence When You Need Him Most

“As we observe the events of that Sabbath evening, we see in the background the landscape of God’s kingdom. Look closely. A man with dropsy lies on the floor. A message has been given about how the lowly will be exalted. A mandate has been issued to host banquets for the lowly. A mystery has been disclosed, revealing that the kingdom of God will be built upon the lowest substrata of society. Like Palestine, the landscape of God’s kingdom is sloped so that its river flows to the lowest valleys. The valleys are people whose lives are eroding away. The river is mercy. It flows freely to heal a man with dropsy . . . to host a banquet for the poor . . . to herald a kingdom for those whose only citizenship is the street. And were it not for that river, the world would be a wasteland.”
― Ken Gire, Moments with the Savior: Experience Jesus, The Kindness in His Face, the Forgiveness in His Eyes, and the Power in His Hand (A Devotional Life of Christ)

“Comfort from the sadness we’ve carried in our hearts. An inheritance that staggers the imagination. A feast to satisfy every inner longing we’ve ever had. Mercy to salve every wound we’ve encountered along the way. And, most exciting of all, the embrace of the Father welcoming his children home.”
― Ken Gire, Moments with the Savior: Experience Jesus, The Kindness in His Face, the Forgiveness in His Eyes, and the Power in His Hand (A Devotional Life of Christ)

“That forgiveness is the power to resist bitterness. And surrender, the power to resist selfishness.”
― Ken Gire, Moments with the Savior: Experience Jesus, The Kindness in His Face, the Forgiveness in His Eyes, and the Power in His Hand (A Devotional Life of Christ)

“Help me, O God, To realize the role the wilderness plays
  in my continuing education. Thank You that even in the wilderness there are windows,
revealing what You want from me,
showing that You care,
and clarifying, when I look back,
what You were doing in my life. Thank You, God, for the wild and untamed theology
You have taught me in the wilderness,
and for the assurance that,
though You are not safe,
you are good …”
― Ken Gire, Windows of the Soul: Hearing God in the Everyday Moments of Your Life

“Someone once said that the spiritual significance of something is in inverse proportion to the publicity surrounding it. A publicized event, like a parade, is more spectacular than it is significant. And that is true even if the parade is a religious one. “When you give to the needy,” Jesus said, “do not announce it with trumpets as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”
― Ken Gire, Windows of the Soul: Hearing God in the Everyday Moments of Your Life

“This longing that wells up in us, though, does not spring into existence on its own. “God is always previous,” is the way the theologian von Hügel put it. “You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you,” is the way Aslan put it, the lion in the Narnia Chronicles who called Edmund and three other children from England into the magical land of Narnia. The way the apostle John put it was, “We love because he first loved us.”
― Ken Gire, Windows of the Soul: Hearing God in the Everyday Moments of Your Life