Jen Pollock Michel > Quotes

“We prefer the not wanting and not having to the losing.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“God is the I AM that I AM not the I AM that we wish.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“The Christian story, centered as it is on the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, is the only story for making sense of desire and loss.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“We all have a tendency to use prayer to dictate to God.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Part of the practice of modest faith, in times of suffering, is relinquishing our right to answers. God has never promised to explain himself, but he has promised to stay near. I will never leave, he says; I will never forsake. I am the friend that sticks closer than your brother. Do not think me unmoved by your grief. These are the faithful assurances of God as we have them in Scripture, and here is even more hope available to those willing to search it out. But let’s not be fooled to think that God has promised things like: it will get better, you’ll soon see the purpose behind this pain, there’s never more than you can handle. Often it does get better; often we do see purpose; always there is sufficient grace. But lament must practice the modest faith of finding sufficient that which God provides, even if, in seasons of great sorrow, it may not seem like enough.” …”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Surprised by Paradox: The Promise of And in an Either-Or World

“Sometimes God seems to be killing us when He is actually saving us.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Struggle is a prerequisite to surrender.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“The author says our prayers are misdirected when we ask God that He help us to love Him more. If we pray to him more, we will love Him more.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Our small group is committed to getting the biblical text under our skin.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Without grace, there is fear. And where there is fear, confession will be muted. Confession will always be unwelcome in places where authenticity engenders judgment and where we are pressured to conform and perform. Until we’re allowed to be the mess we are, we will continue the hiding, the lying, and the pretending.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Believing in the sovereignty of God injects courage in the act of desire.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“We want. Life leaks. Desires are disappointed. And God, our Father, remains eternally good.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“New freedoms surface old habits. I haven't left sin behind, only discovered a new medium for my treachery. My real trouble as a writer isn't trying to mean the words that I write. It's living into the words that I mean. Nonfiction writing can feel like the high art of hypocrisy.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Yet the untucked prayers—the prayers of our struggle—prepare the way for surrender, even praise.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Desire, if it is to be trusted, is to be inspired by a holy vocabulary.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Only he who cries out for the persecuted Jews can sing Gregorian chants. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“They recognize the temptation that we individually and churches corporately face to live “above” our places, remaining essentially disconnected from the desires and disappointments of our closest neighbors. They write, “We think there is a deep connection between Adam and Eve’s calling to care for a specific place, and God’s instruction not to eat from the tree of knowledge. After all, grasping Godlike knowledge at the expense of relationship is a way of attempting to transcend your boundaries. It is a way of avoiding both your limitations and your responsibilities.”15”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

“Holy desire can be learned. All prayer is part work and part rest.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“After her initial conversion as a teenager, the author writes, "I was sent back into a world that no longer looked familiar to me. I had to relearn how to do everything.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Sticks and stones may break your bones, and words – can cut your insides.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“They recognize the temptation that we individually and churches corporately face to live "above" our places, remaining essentially disconnected from the desires and disappointments of our closest neighbors. They write, "We think there is a deep connection between Adam and Eve's calling to care for a specific place, and God's instruction not to eat from the tree of knowledge. After all, grasping Godlike knowledge at the expense of relationship is a way of attempting to transcend your boundaries. It is a way of avoiding both your limitations and your responsibilities[...]" We cannot hurry the church's work of faithful presence, which is rooted in a particular place and committed to blessing a particular group of people. If Jesus has loved the world, the church must love its city.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

“Stability, as commitment to place, and enclosure, as commitment to people, aim to prove that demons are not easily left behind. Home, on this earth, is no perfect place, and one of our greatest acts of faithful courage might be abiding the weariness of imperfect company, both that of ourselves and others.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

“Bethel reveals that God is present in every liminal place, lending his anchoring weight to our weightless lives. Our in-between places--between jobs, between cities, between houses--can easily feel like a bookmark, as if their only job was separating past from future. But these places are indeed part of the story, even when we have failed to give them a name... A nameless place can be the site of tentatively taking our first step toward trust; it's at Bethel that we can begin believing in a God, who journeys with us.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

“Blessing and obedience do comfortably and mysteriously coexist.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“The biblical narrative begins and ends at home. From the Garden of Eden to the New Jerusalem we are hardwired for place and for permanence, for rest and refuge, for presence and protection. We long for home because welcome was our first gift of grace and it will be our last. The settings of our first home and our last home will testify to the nature of the embodied story God is writing in human history. Because God's story begins in a garden and ends in a city, place isn't incidental to Christian hope, just as our bodies aren't incidental to salvation. God will resurrect our bodies, and he will -- finally -- bring us home.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

“there is so little of our own maturity and growth that we actually superintend. “I cannot transform myself, or anyone else for that matter. What I can do is create the conditions in which spiritual transformation can take place, by developing and maintaining a rhythm of spiritual practices that keep me open and available to God.”1 We give grace accessibility to our hearts when we engage in intentional spiritual practices. One important spiritual practice is the practice of confession. As Andy Crouch writes, As for Christians, well, we really have just one thing going for us. We have publicly declared . . . that we are desperately in need of Another to give us his righteousness, to complete us, to live in us. We have publicly and flagrantly abandoned the project of self-justification that is at the heart of every person’s compulsion to manage perceptions. . . . This means telling the world—before the world does its own investigative journalism—that we’re not as bad as they think sometimes. We’re worse. . . . If we’re being honest about our own beauty and brokenness, the beautiful broken One will make himself known to our neighbors.2 Confession allows us to be the worst of sinners and yet remain confident that God is committed to us still. Holy desire is best”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“The promises in baptism indicate a very different theology of the family, which recognizes that ‘families work well when we do not expect them to give us all we need.’”14 But whether we baptize our infants or not, the principle is the same: our active participation in the church—and our willingness to see it as home—relieves some of the onerous burdens of childrearing, often made heaviest by our sense of limitation. We can’t parent alone. And we aren’t meant to. We have friends—better, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles—to help carry some of the worry and weight of the family housekeeping. And as I’ve learned from recent research, the most important predictor of whether children from Christian families keep their faith into adulthood is the number of multigenerational connections they enjoy at church. Teenagers may not need a youth group populated by hundreds of peers, but they do need other Christian adults in their church to take an interest in them and communicate that they belong.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

“For centuries the church, while affirming Genesis 2 and the goodness of marriage, conceded the distractions of domestic life. One medieval solution proposed to divide the “housekeeping” among the people of God. Married people would tend to “earth” while monks and nuns, who renounced marriage, would do the work of heaven, praying “for the world, in the world’s stead.”7 During the Reformation, theologians like John Calvin and Martin Luther abolished what had become a sacrosanct division between celibates and married. By developing the concept of vocation, they taught that domestic obligation could be rendered as service to God, just as prayer and fasting were forms of worship: “Everyone [was] now expected to live all their lives coram Deo; before the face of God.”8 At the most fundamental level, vocation became a Christological category—a way of baptizing the housekeeping as sacred duty performed to God in the service of one’s neighbor.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home

“His childhood passed in quiet anxiety.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Every day struck with tsunami force, and only by running full speed did I think I could outwit the daily violence[...] But to run is eventually to run out of breath. Soon I realized that life was not ever going to slow for me -- that I would have to slow for it. Slowing, in fact, would be my only hope of living life, not simply surviving it. And so, in one of the most improbably seasons of my life, I started practicing sabbath, nudged toward the discipline of rest by Gordon Macdonald's book Ordering Your Private World. "If my private world is in order," writes MacDonald, "it will be because I have chosen to press Sabbath peace into the rush and routine of my daily life in order to find the rest God prescribed for himself and all of humanity." As the mother of three young children, I gave up, for one day of the week, the rush to get ahead. The alternative felt like death.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Keeping Place: Reflections on the Meaning of Home