Dan B. Allender > Quotes

“The work of restoration cannot begin until a problem is fully faced.”
― Dan Allender

“[Biblical counseling] Must insist that the image of God is central to developing a solid view of personality; that our sinfulness, not how we've been sinned against, is our biggest problem; that forgiveness, not wholeness, is our greatest need; that repentance, not insight, is the dynamic in all real change.”
― Dan Allender

“Fasting from any nourishment, activity, involvement or pursuit—for any season—sets the stage for God to appear. Fasting is not a tool to pry wisdom out of God's hands or to force needed insight about a decision. Fasting is not a tool for gaining discipline or developing piety (whatever that might be). Instead, fasting is the bulimic act of ridding ourselves of our fullness to attune our senses to the mysteries that swirl in and around us."—Dan B. Allender, PhD”
― Dan B. Allender, To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future

“Too often we think sharing our weaknesses will cause us to lose respect. We think making our weaknesses know will cause us to lose the honour to be able to proclaim the Word of God in our congregations or our businesses. I know longer believe that is true. Not today, in our post modern culture. What I do believe is the more you tell the truth about yourself – appropriately, winsomely, age-appropriately, within a context – the more effective your leadership will become, the more you will develop a true leading character. The more you tell of your own failure of character, the more God will use that for His purposes.”
― Dan B. Allender, Leading Character

“So take seriously the story that God has given you to live. It’s time to read your own life, because your story is the one that could set us all ablaze.”
― Dan B. Allender, To Be Told: Know Your Story, Shape Your Future

“Genuine trust involves allowing another to matter and have an impact in our lives. For that reason, many who hate and do battle with God trust Him more deeply than those whose complacent faith permits an abstract and motionless stance before Him. Those who trust God most are those whose faith permits them to risk wrestling with Him over the deepest questions of life. Good hearts are captured in a divine wrestling match; fearful, doubting hearts stay clear of the mat.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Wounded Heart: Hope for Adult Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse with Bonus Content

“The damage done through abuse is awful and heinous, but minor compared to the dynamics that distort the victim’s relationship with God and rob her of the joy of loving and being loved by others.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Wounded Heart: Hope for Adult Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse

“But the part of ourselves we hate the most is our longing to be wanted and enjoyed.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Wounded Heart: Hope for Adult Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse

“We're in the presence of a good story when the flaw that shatters shalom is also the doorway to redemption... Whether it be our own flaw or the sin of others, God uses the raw material of sin to create the edifice of his redeemed glory.

The point cannot be overemphasized: your plight is also your redemption. The Bible assumes that its stories are also our story... We are Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Their stories are a paradigm of our own. Each of us is called, redeemed, and exiled - again and again.”
― Dan B. Allender, To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future

“I know without a question you love me and you know I love you, but I am unwilling to let your awkwardness with personal conversations keep us at a distance. Now let's be clear. I'll call when I want to, for as long as I want to, and I will ask anything I want about how you are feeling, what you think of as you face death, what your relationship is with the Lord, and anything else I want to know. You can do as you choose. Hang up on me. Refuse to answer. Refuse to feel. Do what you want, but I will too.”
― Dan B. Allender, Bold Love

“One of our greatest failures in our busy, driven culture is that we don't celebrate the temporary untying of a complex narrative...What is your style of celebrating an ending? Do you only throw large parties after someone graduates, gets married, or dies? If so, then all the other endings in your story are lost in the wake of another day's busyness. Perhaps one of the reasons you and I don't party well, is that we don't know what to do with the tragedies that linger in our life...Can you imagine receiving an invitation "JOIN ME IN A CELEBRATION OF NO LONGER BELIEVING I'M STUPID"?

We don't allow endings to be noted, let alone celebrated. Therefore we never allow denouement to be invigorate the upward movement of a new story.”
― Dan B. Allender, To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future

“Courage is fear that has said its prayers.”5”
― Dan B. Allender, Leading with a Limp: Take Full Advantage of Your Most Powerful Weakness

“In those moments of unnaming when we have lost ourselves, we must remember to return to our past redemptions to find God's mark of glory on our abandonment, betrayal, and shame. We wrongly believe that we will be happy if we can escape the past. But without our past we are hollow and plastic beings who have only common names and conventional stories. When we enter into our story at the point we lost our name, we are most likely to hear the whisper of our new name.”
― Dan B. Allender, To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future

“Our ideal self is revealed in what we value (passion), how we understand the world (belief), and what we do to reach our ideal (behavior). Our passion, belief, and behavior fit together so intimately that I can say this with confidence: • What we do is what we really value.”
― Dan B. Allender, To Be Told: Know Your Story, Shape Your Future

“Hope waits but does not sit. It strains with eager anticipation to see what may be coming on the horizon. Hope does not pacify; it does not make us docile and mediocre. Instead, it draws us to greater risk and perseverance”
― Dan Allender

“Hope refuses to believe that the inevitable is so. What has always been and can’t change is an illusion; if anything is true, it is that change is inevitable, not that the inevitable will not change. But evil caustically replies, Nonsense. It is what it is. You will only be more discouraged and frustrated until you accept reality.”
― Dan B. Allender, Healing the Wounded Heart: The Heartache of Sexual Abuse and the Hope of Transformation

“If we enter our story in heartache, we will hear the whisper of the name that will one day be ours.”
― Dan B. Allender, To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future

“We each see ourselves as being a certain kind of person with a specific set of values, beliefs, and dreams. In practice, however, we often are not what we want to be but instead end up choosing what others expect us to be. This is called our ought self. Avoid it.”
― Dan B. Allender, To Be Told: Know Your Story, Shape Your Future

“We are what we choose. And we choose whatever our deepest passion compels us to be and to do. To understand the truth of this simple principle, we must examine choice’s power to shape our character.”
― Dan B. Allender, To Be Told: Know Your Story, Shape Your Future

“We live in a day when our sense are so dull that we need extreme sports, bingeing, or dangerous pastimes to give us a sense we are alive. We crave reality — both pain and pleasure — so much that many young people cut themselves, saying, 'I just wanted to feel something.”
― Dan B. Allender, Sabbath

“So we grow up in a sea of stories told in a way that fits what we want others to know about us. The stories told in most families are a kind of propaganda. The tragedy is that often these stories are simply a form of dis-information...
But our families name us without knowing the consequences. So our life is a journey to discover our true name, though; sadly many of us never choose to begin that search.”
― Dan B. Allender, To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future

“A denouement is not a complete or fully resolved ending but a satisfying closure to a story. [in French translates 'an untying, a relaxing of a knot of complexity']
Denouement is the rest that comes when all the disparate plot lines of a story, gnarled and taut, have been untied and an order has come about that brings a new moment of shalom.”
― Dan B. Allender, To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future

“Ignoring our emotions is turning our back on reality; listening to our emotions ushers us into reality. And reality is where we meet God.”
― Dan Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“Tragedy always moves our story forward in a way shalom could never accomplish.”
― Dan B. Allender, To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future

“The triggering event and resulting shame is worse than being rejected because rejection assumes a path by which to return to acceptability. The fear involved in shame is of permanent abandonment, or exile. Those who see our reprehensible core will be so disgusted and sickened that we will be a leper and an outcast forever.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Wounded Heart: Hope for Adult Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse

“But if we honestly name the passionate desires of our heart, and if we risk seeing those desires come to be, the plot of our life story will begin to move with greater intentionality. Yet the only way we can keep walking on that path is to allow our self moments to rest and celebrate the temporary climax of a story in denouement.”
― Dan B. Allender, To Be Told: God Invites You to Coauthor Your Future

“Because of the way God has made us, it is impossible finally and completely to deaden the soul. The soul will resurrect, in spite of the cruelty used to destroy it. It will pop up and then be slain again, return and be shoved down through contempt. The power to destroy the soul is not in the hands of Satan, another human being, or even oneself. Nevertheless, when we manage to deaden our soul, even temporarily, we open the door to terrible consequences.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Wounded Heart: Hope for Adult Victims of Childhood Sexual Abuse

“The reluctant leader doesn’t merely give accolades to others. It is her true joy to see others awaken to their potential and exceed their greatest dreams. It is the hope of every good teacher to have students who take their work further than the teacher was able to do. To be surpassed is the ideal. To be replaced is the goal, not a sign of failure.”
― Dan B. Allender, Leading with a Limp: Take Full Advantage of Your Most Powerful Weakness

“The absence of tumult, more than its presence, is an enemy of the soul. God meets you in your weakness, not in your strength. He comforts those who mourn, not those who live above desperation. He reveals Himself more often in darkness than in the happy moments of life.”
― Dan B. Allender, The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest Questions about God

“We are not to work on the Sabbath because it takes us out of the play of joy. It is as bizarre as making love to your spouse, but getting out of bed during the process to cut your lawn or wash dishes. Such an offense would do far more than spoil the mood; it would be a direct assault on the integrity of joy, announcing that a mundane chore is more pleasurable than sexual joy with your spouse.”
― Dan B. Allender, Sabbath