Sara Hagerty > Quotes

“Too often we try to avoid that scary place where we love so deep, so much, our hearts could break. But without the bitterness, we would never appreciate the sweetness.”
― Sara Hagerty, Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet: Tasting the Goodness of God in All Things

“I don’t want to be a hungry soul just for a season. I want to live hunger. This is what draws me to Him. This is what fills every single bitter circumstance with the opportunity to know Him more. This is what brings me to the sweetness of His presence. And hope happens here at this nexus of bitter and sweet.”
― Sara Hagerty, Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet: Tasting the Goodness of God in All Things

“Fear loses oxygen when every moment suspends itself under the purpose of bringing Him glory, of knowing His name and His nature. Sometimes, instead of leading us up and out of those very fears, big and small, He lets us live them. He gives us over to them. Because it’s in this giving over to our fears that we find the perfect love that frees us from them. Forever.”
― Sara Hagerty, Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet: Tasting the Goodness of God in All Things

“My figurative position of confidence before Him, as a daughter in whom He delighted, was one long exhalation of relief. I didn’t earn this position; I inherited it, and that made my safety all the more secure, no matter His response. The ability He gave me to ask started, first, with Him. From this angle, how could I not ask?”
― Sara Hagerty, Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet: Tasting the Goodness of God in All Things

“I could spend most days looking for the golden moment ahead, when the gold is already in front of me. Available for every messy minute.”
― Sara Hagerty, Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet: Tasting the Goodness of God in All Things

“I often pictured the future from the perspective of fear, as if imagining the worst-case scenario might allow me to prepare myself. But God comes kindly to prepare, and with a grace He’ll release only in that moment, not in advance.”
― Sara Hagerty, Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet: Tasting the Goodness of God in All Things

“If my chief end as a mother is anything less than knowing Him and carrying His glory in my life, I will walk through these years empty.”
― Sara Hagerty, Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet: Tasting the Goodness of God in All Things

“My mess wouldn’t forever be a curse. One day it would be my crown. One day it would tell the story that, yes, He is good . . . to me.”
― Sara Hagerty, Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet: Tasting the Goodness of God in All Things

“We had no logical explanation for how we’d even gotten this far. God was our story — the whole story, the only story.”
― Sara Hagerty, Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet: Tasting the Goodness of God in All Things

“How would parents respond to children who gladly cleaned the house and mowed the lawn but refused to spend time talking with and enjoying them, the very ones who have loved and cared for them their whole lives? We know this isn’t the way things should operate in a healthy family, and yet we often and subconsciously relate to God in this way. We give Him what we perceive to be our obedience yet internally resist a deeper surrender.”
― Sara Hagerty, Unseen: The Gift of Being Hidden in a World That Loves to Be Noticed

“The craving to be seen is universal: we were made to be known. But there is only one who can know us. He is the one who created us to live with moments and hours that no one else can understand”
― Sara Hagerty, Unseen: The Gift of Being Hidden in a World That Loves to Be Noticed

“He redefines my circumstances even without changing them.”
― Sara Hagerty, Unseen: The Gift of Being Hidden in a World That Loves to Be Noticed

“She’s tapping into the deepest cry of the human heart, the heart that can preach a sermon on God’s love one moment and flog itself in private over a single mistake the next. We all struggle to believe His delight. Might this be one of the greatest barriers to our communion with God—believing that the one who made us barely likes us, the one we assume finds us barely tolerable?”
― Sara Hagerty, Unseen: The Gift of Being Hidden in a World That Loves to Be Noticed

“Hiddenness is God’s way of helping us with this holy detachment, slowly releasing our clutch on “the things of earth,” which we were never intended to grip.”
― Sara Hagerty, Unseen: The Gift of Being Hidden in a World That Loves to Be Noticed

“Great kingdom impact comes not just from actions that make a dramatic and observable impact but from all the accumulated moments we spend looking at God, bringing Him glory in private, and letting Him shape our insides.”
― Sara Hagerty, Unseen: The Gift of Being Hidden in a World That Loves to Be Noticed

“I once saw " radical" as selling everything I owned or starting a ministry or adopting children from across the ocean. These days I am redefining radical. I'm realizing that radical is sustained worship of God, against the grain of the world's distractions. It's staying in the game, looking at Him when no one is looking or applauding, or promoting us for it. Keeping my heart hungry for God in the middle minutes is radical.”
― Sara Hagerty, Adore: A Simple Practice for Experiencing God in the Middle Minutes of Your Day

“Thomas Merton says it this way: “If we are to love sincerely and with simplicity, we must first of all overcome the fear of not being loved.”12”
― Sara Hagerty, Unseen: The Gift of Being Hidden in a World That Loves to Be Noticed

“Fear loses oxygen when every moment suspends itself under the purpose of bringing Him glory, of knowing His name and His nature.”
― Sara Hagerty, Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet: Tasting the Goodness of God in All Things

“We realized that our lives aren’t, in fact, a series of rewards for doing things “right.” They are strung-together surprises that continue to speak more of who He is than who we aren’t.”
― Sara Hagerty, Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet: Tasting the Goodness of God in All Things

“Jesus is big in my small, unseen moments. Glorious monotony. He came for these very days.”
― Sara Hagerty, Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet: Tasting the Goodness of God in All Things

“We forget that it’s in the interruptions, the waiting seasons, the disappointments that we grow best.

It is in those times when we are “sidetracked” by a disheartening job, an unshared bed, or a leader who doesn’t acknowledge our gifting that God whispers, This is where you become great—on the inside.”
― Sara Hagerty, Unseen: The Gift of Being Hidden in a World That Loves to Be Noticed

“We realized that our lives aren’t, in fact, a series of rewards for doing things “right.” They are strung-together surprises that continue”
― Sara Hagerty, Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet: Tasting the Goodness of God in All Things

“how”
― Sara Hagerty, Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet: Tasting the Goodness of God in All Things

“So in my mind, God’s question during that encounter in church had less to do with the content — having a family — and more to do with His nature. Why would He put this desire deep within my core only to ask me to relinquish it? Why invite me to travel a road with a dead end? It took me three days to respond. I knew the right answer, but I couldn’t speak it. Instead, I spent hours picturing a life like the one God was asking me to consider, void of family but full of Him. Could I love a God who might take away the very desire He put in me? Could I trust the leadership of a Man when the mystery He offered wasn’t wondrous but perplexing? Could I further engage with the very One on whose watch I was wounded? Somehow, out of this darkness, which seemed so bleak, came a response that I didn’t expect. It was so unlike me that I knew I was being overshadowed. The Holy Spirit erected a resolve in my soul that my flesh could not have produced. Yes! I was made for this yes, and the God whose Spirit meshed with mine inside of me produced it. The question and His answer, from within me, changed everything. Yes, I could love Him. Yes, I could trust His leadership. Yes, I could even find delight and joy and contentment living from the underside of mystery — perplexity. Yes, there was a dance to be danced in this valley.”
― Sara Hagerty, Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet: Tasting the Goodness of God in All Things

“He reaches our hearts when He delays our bodies. He touches our hearts when He heals our bodies. Our knowledge of Him as a healer may need to accrue over a lifetime.”
― Sara Hagerty, Adore: A Simple Practice for Experiencing God in the Middle Minutes of Your Day

“coat, my tired extra mile? “Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely for My sake,” says Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. “Rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Matt. 5:11–12). We read these words and yet too often still experience surprise when our best efforts at Christian living result in something other than Christian applauding. Do the works of God and people will see and they will celebrate, we think. We forget that the map for following God was given to us by a man who was routinely persecuted by the religious leaders of His day, who was abandoned by virtually all of His followers at the end of His life and then brutally murdered.”
― Sara Hagerty, Unseen: The Gift of Being Hidden in a World That Loves to Be Noticed

“In his book Psalms: The Prayer Book of the Bible, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes, “The richness of the Word of God ought to determine our prayer, not the poverty of our heart.”
― Sara Hagerty, Unseen: The Gift of Being Hidden in a World That Loves to Be Noticed

“Jesus' enemy was as real as ours, alighting upon our circumstances, adding weight and confusion to everyday struggles. Revelation calls him the "accuser of the brethren " and says he makes accusations " day and night " ( Rev. 12:10 ). Just as he did with Jesus, Satan capitalizes during the minutes of our day to hurl accusations into our already sailing minds. With eh enemy in our ear our minds need relief. The Word is an agent of healing that we in our venerability need.”
― Sara Hagerty, Adore: A Simple Practice for Experiencing God in the Middle Minutes of Your Day

“Like most pain that we withhold from God’s touch, my paper pregnancy (apparently now also barren) had fostered a fermentation within my heart. My hurt was expanding beyond “just” the issues of childbearing and was touching the broader vision for my life. I was looking at life through the lens of being overlooked by God. I kept my eyes closed to keep the others around me from view — those whom, I naively assumed, could more easily proclaim the truths of God in song because they had what I wanted. Then I saw a vision on the back of my eyelids: the word family scribbled across a piece of paper. The paper had a nail through its center, affixing it to a cross. The Lord whispered inside my spirit as I saw it: If you never have a family, will you still love Me? I walked out of church that day, hardened. Had it really come to this? The very idea that what I most feared — becoming stamped with the word barren — was now not only a possibility but a suggestion . . . and from God?”
― Sara Hagerty, Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet: Tasting the Goodness of God in All Things

“examined in Scripture. I often pictured the future from the perspective of fear, as if imagining the worst-case scenario might allow me to prepare myself. But God comes kindly to prepare, and with a grace He’ll release only in that moment, not in advance.”
― Sara Hagerty, Every Bitter Thing Is Sweet: Tasting the Goodness of God in All Things