J.S. Park > Quotes

“If you're only thinking, It's evangelism time! —you might become one of those insensitive doctrine-nerds that overcomplicates things while firing off apologetics to "win" people.  But you're a real human being with a story, dealing with other real human beings who have stories. So, what's your story? How did God save you? Maybe you went to church your whole life, and then suddenly God knocked you out of the pew into His total grace and you started feeding the homeless and reading to blind kids. Or maybe you were doing black tar heroin, punching cops in the face while throwing puppies out of a moving vehicle, and Jesus uppercut you in your soul. Either way, you were saved. You have a testimony.”
― J.S. Park, What The Church Won't Talk About: Real Questions From Real People About Raw, Gritty, Everyday Faith

“I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding your love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will simply love. I am giving myself to you, and tomorrow I will do it again. I suppose the clock itself will wear thin its time before I am ended at this altar of dying and dying again. God risked Himself on me. I will risk myself on you. And together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then, and only then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us."[21] — Donald Miller”
― J.S. Park, What The Church Won't Talk About (Revised and Updated): Real Questions From Real People About Raw, Gritty, Everyday Faith

“Right now in your neighborhood, there is 1) a dude who doesn't know the awesomeness of marriage with a woman, 2) a fifteen year old pregnant girl who feels like she only has one option, and 3) a confused kid who can't think for himself on the origin of life because both sides are yelling in his face. What these three people are not doing is thinking of church as the place with all the answers, because most of us have been one-sided narrow-minded jerks.”
― J.S. Park, What The Church Won't Talk About: Real Questions From Real People About Raw, Gritty, Everyday Faith

“The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say 'My tooth is aching' than to say 'My heart is broken.'"[21]”
― J.S. Park, How Hard It Really Is: A Short, Honest Book About Depression

“We often demand of people what only God can give us — encouragement, affirmation, strength, motivation — and we end up wringing others dry. It's okay to expect some things from people, so long as you know they're just human beings who thirst like you. They need an Infinite Well as much as you do. If you drink deeply of Him first, you'll be less controlled (and controlling) by your expectations, and you'll actually seek others not to squeeze from them but to encourage them by your overflow.”
― J.S. Park, The Christianese Dating Culture: On Courtship, Purity Rings, Prayer-Sex, and Other Weird Things We Do In Church

“But you know, I keep serving anyway. I keep acting like God exists. I keep loving people. I keep obeying His commands, as far-away as they feel. I force myself into the church community. I put my tiny little shred of faith into His Son. I pray, even if it's a few words at night. I read Scripture, my heavy head on a pillow as the app shines its tiny little screen into the darkness. And most days, that meager little mustard-seed-faith is just enough.”
― J.S. Park, What The Church Won't Talk About: Real Questions From Real People About Raw, Gritty, Everyday Faith

“And God's Will, in the end, wasn't so much about what they were doing, but the kind of person they were becoming.”
― J.S. Park, Mad About God: The Over-Romanticism of Pain and Why Your Suffering Is Not a Lesson

“You are loved. You might have heard that a million times, but it's no less true. You do have a Creator. He is with you. He is bigger than your situation and closer than your deepest hurt. He's not mad. He is cheering for you and rooting for you this very second. He's okay about all the things before. He sent His Son for that very reason. You can put down the blade. You can throw away the pills. You can quit replaying those regrets in your head. You can quit the inner-loop of self-condemnation. You can forget your ex. You can walk away from the porn. You can resolve your conflicts right now. You can sign up to volunteer at that shelter. You can thank your parents for everything. You can hug the person next to you. You can tell the waiter, "Jesus loves you." You can go back to church. You don't have to sit in the back. You don't have to prove your worth to the people you've let down. You don't have to live up to everyone else's vision for your life. You're finally, finally free. You are loved. I am loved. As much as I love you, dear friend, He loves you infinitely more. Believe it. Walk in it. Walk with Him. God is in the business of breathing life into hurting places. This is what He does, even for the least likely like you and me.”
― J.S. Park, How Hard It Really Is: A Short, Honest Book About Depression

“don't know how to do this. To be friends with the depressed person is a bit of a dance with mashed toes. No one quite knows what they're doing, and we need more rest than the others, but we are trying.”
― J.S. Park, How Hard It Really Is: A Short, Honest Book About Depression

“My faith burns slower, more methodical, seated in the back, plagued with questions, desperate in prayer, trusting those rare moments when Christ is fully visible.”
― J.S. Park, What The Church Won't Talk About: Real Questions From Real People About Raw, Gritty, Everyday Faith

“The Church isn't talking about mental illness. We have amazing secular organizations fighting stigma—and I absolutely love it. But what are we as Christians doing to help those who are hurting? A sermon on God's love won't do the trick. As much as I adore God and love Scripture, a Bible quote isn't going to do the trick. We need hearts poured out for each other. We need true and authentic encounters.”
― J.S. Park, How Hard It Really Is: A Short, Honest Book About Depression

“I wish I could say it gets easier each time, but I never know how long it's going to be. I never know when the colors will come back. I never know if this will be the one that wins.”
― J.S. Park, How Hard It Really Is: A Short, Honest Book About Depression

“Speeding through grief always has a cost. To bury somebody's supposed-to-be is also to bury a story that's untold. When you bury someone's story like that, it gets lodged in the ribcage, it gets radioactive, it festers, it shouts to be heard. Grief is always a voice that needs to speak. If you suppress it, it still speaks— but not always in ways that are healthy. Not in the ways you need. It pushes through your skin like rogue splinters.
Burying a future loss without telling its story can make you sick. Timesick. You get split between timelines. The further along you go, the further away you get from that dream, and you look around and wonder how people can keep going while you want the world to stop, time to freeze, to get back to your real universe. And you get well-meaning people around you, always the ones who mean well, who are nudging you forward, shoving you, really, and you clutch two timelines until you're ripped in half.
Part of my role as a chaplain, I've learned, is to make room for these original timelines. That they may be spoken, shared. The story told. "There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you, Zora Neale Hurston said. It must be conversely true that there is no greater peace than to tell that story.”
― J.S. Park, As Long as You Need: Permission to Grieve

“In depression you become, in your head, two-dimensional—like a drawing rather than a living, breathing creature. You cannot conjure your actual personality, which you can remember only vaguely ... You live in, or close to, a state of perpetual fear, although you are not sure what it is you are afraid of.”
― J.S. Park, How Hard It Really Is: A Short, Honest Book About Depression

“Before thinking about relationships, we're designed to have relational intimacy with God.”
― J.S. Park, The Christianese Dating Culture: On Courtship, Purity Rings, Prayer-Sex, and Other Weird Things We Do In Church

“If depression robs you of your ability to make sense of life, then any advice or solution is not going to reach into the heart of depression.”
― J.S. Park, How Hard It Really Is: A Short, Honest Book About Depression

“1) When it's expressed, it's often hand-waved as nothing more than "sadness" or "introversion" or "laziness." 2) Unless someone has experienced depression, then reaching out is usually ineffectual. It's like describing the Mojave to a polar bear.”
― J.S. Park, How Hard It Really Is: A Short, Honest Book About Depression

“Take anyone who is an over-confident showman or who talks in “teacher tones” or who gets mad when they hear that they’re wrong, and most of the time they’re just afraid.”
― J.S. Park, The Voices We Carry: Finding Your One, True Voice in a World of Clamor and Noise

“It wasn't until I sat with patient after patient, from emergency room to deathbed, that I saw what they saw: In their illness or injury, I saw a memory loss of the future. This is called intrapsychic grief, the pain of losing what will never be, the reaching for something that was supposed to happen.
This intrapsychic grief is a specific but universal ache.”
― J.S. Park, As Long as You Need: Permission to Grieve

“She asks me, "How do you grieve someone you never met?"
With each patient, I hear similar questions. It keeps emerging, this pulse. It presses in every room, leans on every shoulder, demands an answer: How do you grieve future loss? Underneath that, more questions: How do you deal with the viciousness of a broken dream? How do you move on from the picture of life in your head? How do you keep moving through a parallel-universe life?
My patients suffer from good dreams. What I mean is, it's not the nightmares that keep them up. It's the hope. Daydreams of another life. Instead of homesick, they're timesick.
Before becoming a chaplain, I thought grief was about missing the past. About reflecting on all the things before, the stuff we had until mortality crawled through the window. It's true. We grieve the past.
But mostly no one gets a chance to grieve the future. It doesn't seem to read as a real loss.
I need to tell you about this because nobody told me:
The dream that didn't happen is as much of a loss as losing the one that did.”
― J.S. Park, As Long as You Need: Permission to Grieve

“God made the world out of nothing, and as long as we are nothing, He can make something out of us." — Martin Luther”
― J.S. Park, The Life of King David: How God Works Through Ordinary Outcasts and Extraordinary Sinners

“[Q]uitting is not just about running from something, but running towards something better.”
― J.S. Park, Cutting It Off: Breaking Porn Addiction and How To Quit For Good

“In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets."[16] — C.S. Lewis If you're either at the edge of depression or thinking of harming yourself right now, please don't hesitate to call a friend. If they don't answer, leave a long message. You might be surprised that it helps. Also,”
― J.S. Park, How Hard It Really Is: A Short, Honest Book About Depression

“There is no such thing as closure. There is no final stitch, no last loop. We do not move on. We move with.1”
― J.S. Park, As Long as You Need: Permission to Grieve

“It feels like forever while it's there and as though it never happened when it's over.”
― J.S. Park, How Hard It Really Is: A Short, Honest Book About Depression

“You're not alone, you have me.”
― J.S. Park, How Hard It Really Is: A Short, Honest Book About Depression

“We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer."[42]”
― J.S. Park, Mad About God: The Over-Romanticism of Pain and Why Your Suffering Is Not a Lesson

“Pain can make you bitter or it's a motivator. We choose which one. Choose wisely.”
― J.S. Park, Cutting It Off: Breaking Porn Addiction and How To Quit For Good

“You cannot choose whether you get depressed and you cannot choose when or how you get better, but you can choose what to do with the depression, especially when you come out of it."[54] — Andrew Solomon”
― J.S. Park, How Hard It Really Is: A Short, Honest Book About Depression

“It is remarkably invasive, a highly honed, weaponized virus of the mind.”
― J.S. Park, How Hard It Really Is: A Short, Honest Book About Depression