Audrey > Audrey's Quotes

“…the amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“...sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself...”
― Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“I was the lion who forced you to join with Aravis. I was the cat who comforted you among the houses of the dead. I was the lion who drove the jackals from you while you slept. I was the lion who gave the horses the new strength of fear for the last mill so that you should reach King Lune in time. And I was the lion you do not remember who pushed the boat in which you lay, a child near death, so that it came to shore where a man sat, wakeful at midnight, to receive you.”
― C.S. Lewis

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”

“Day one of our new adventure behind us, we are shocked to learn the hardest lesson of chasing a dream. When you go for it, you don't escape fear, you land in it. Fear is not a dragon to be slain once, it's an ocean to be swum daily.”
― Jon Acuff, Do Over: Rescue Monday, Reinvent Your Work, and Never Get Stuck

“Millennials want to be known by what we're for, ... not just what we're against. We don't want to choose between science and religion or between our intellectual integrity and our faith. Instead, we long for our churches to be safe places to doubt, to ask questions, and to tell the truth, even when it's uncomfortable. We want to talk about the tough stuff—biblical interpretation, religious pluralism, sexuality, racial reconciliation, and social justice—but without predetermined conclusions or simplistic answers. We want to bring our whole selves through the church doors without leaving our hearts and minds behind, without wearing a mask.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“We millennials have been advertised to our entire lives, so we can smell b.s. from a mile away. The church is the last place we want to be sold another product, the last place we want to be entertained.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“Millennials aren't look for a hipper Christianity... We're looking for a truer Christianity, a more authentic Christianity. Like every generation before ours and every generation after, we're looking for Jesus—the same Jesus who can be found in the strange places he's always been found: in bread, in wine, in baptism, in the Word, in suffering, in community, and among the least of these.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“I told them we’re tired of the culture wars, tired of Christianity getting entangled with party politics and power. Millennials want to be known by what we’re for, I said, not just what we’re against. We don’t want to choose between science and religion or between our intellectual integrity and our faith. Instead, we long for our churches to be safe places to doubt, to ask questions, and to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. We want to talk about the tough stuff—biblical interpretation, religious pluralism, sexuality, racial reconciliation, and social justice—but without predetermined conclusions or simplistic answers. We want to bring our whole selves through the church doors, without leaving our hearts and minds behind, without wearing a mask.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“It’s not my job to change people,” Brian told me when I pestered him about it, “just love people.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“We could not become like God, so God became like us. God showed us how to heal instead of kill, how to mend instead of destroy, how to love instead of hate, how to live instead of long for more. When we nailed God to a tree, God forgave. And when we buried God in the ground, Got got up.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“Looking back, I suspect their reactions had less to do with disdain for my doubt and more to do with fear of their own... they weren't rejecting me for being different, they were rejecting me for being familiar, for calling out all those quiet misgivings most Christians keep hidden in the dark corners of their hearts and would rather not name.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“The truth is, we think church is for people living in the “after” picture. We think church is for taking spiritual Instagrams and putting on our best performances. We think church is for the healthy, even though Jesus told us time and again he came to minister to the sick. We think church is for good people, not resurrected people.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“This is what God's kingdom is like: a bunch of outcasts and oddballs gathered at a table, not because they are rich or worthy or good, but because they are hungry, because they said yes. And there's always room for more.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“The church is God saying: 'I'm throwing a banquet, and all these mismatched, messed-up people are invited. Here, have some wine.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“It's funny how after all those years attending youth events with light shows and bands, after all the contemporary Christian music and contemporary Christian books, after all the updated technology and dynamic speakers and missional enterprises and relevant marketing strategies designed to make Christianity cool, all I wanted from the church when I was ready to give it up was a quiet sanctuary and some candles. All I wanted was a safe place to be. Like so many, I was in search of sanctuary.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“But the modern-day church doesn't like to wander or wait. The modern-day church likes results. Convinced the gospel is a product we've got to sell to an increasingly shrinking market, we like our people to function as walking advertisements: happy, put-together, finished—proof that this Jesus stuff WORKS! At its best, such a culture generates pews of Stepford Wife-style robots with painted smiles and programmed moves. At its worst, it creates environments where abuse and corruption get covered up to protect reputations and preserve image. 'The world is watching,' Christians like to say, 'so let's be on our best behavior and quickly hide the mess. Let's throw up some before-and-after shots and roll that flashy footage of our miracle product blanching out every sign of dirt, hiding every sign of disease.'

But if the world is watching, we might as well tell the truth. And the truth is, the church doesn't offer a cure. It doesn't off a quick fix. The church offers death and resurrection. The church offers the messy, inconvenient, gut-wrenching, never-ending work of healing and reconciliation. The church offers grace.”
― Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

“Something happens when you feel ownership. You no longer act like a spectator or consumer, because you're an owner. Faith is at its best when it's that way too. It's best lived when it's owned.”
― Bob Goff

“Something happens when you feel ownership. You no longer act like a spectator or consumer, because you’re an owner. Faith is at its best when it’s that way too. It’s best lived when it’s owned.”
― Bob Goff, Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World

“He was committed to me and he believed in me. I wasn't a project; I was his friend. I wondered if maybe all Christians operated this way. I didn't think so because most of them I had met up until this time were kind of wimpy and seemed to have more opinions about what or who they were against than who they were for.”
― Bob Goff

“I don't validate my faith with a church attendance scorecard. I think of church as a vibrant community of people consisting of two or more of varied backgrounds gathering around Jesus. Sometimes they are at a place that might have a steeple or auditorium seating. But it's just as likely that church happens elsewhere, like coffee shops or on the edge of a glacier or in the bush in Uganda. All of these places work just fine, I suppose, When it's a matter of the heart, the place doesn't matter. For me, it's Jesus plus nothing—not even a building.”
― Bob Goff, Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World

“Ryan's love was audacious. It was whimsical. It was strategic. Most of all, it was contagious. Watching Ryan lose himself in love reminded me that being "engaged" isn't just an event that happens when a guy gets on one knee and puts a ring on his true love's finger. Being engaged is a way of doing life, a way of living and loving. It's about going to extremes and expressing the bright hope that life offers us, a hope that makes us brave and expels darkness with light. That's what I want my life to be all about—full of abandon, whimsy, and in love. I want to be engaged to life and with life.”
― Bob Goff, Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World

“I've learned that God sometimes allows us to find ourselves in a place where we want something so bad that we can't see past it. Sometimes we can't even see God because of it. When we want something so bad, it's easy to mistake what we truly need for the thing we really want. When this sort of thing happens, and it seems to happen to everyone, I've found it's because what God has for us is obscured from view, just around another bend in the road.”
― Bob Goff, Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World

“I once heard somebody say that God has closed a door on an opportunity they had hoped for. But I've always wondered if, when we want to do something that we know is right and good, God places that desire deep in our hearts because He wants it for us and it honors Him. Maybe there are times when we think a door has been closed and, instead of misinterpreting the circumstances, God want us to kick it down. Or perhaps just sit outside of it long enough until somebody tells us we can come in.”
― Bob Goff, Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World

“Because of our love for each other, I understand just a little more how God has pursued me in creative and whimsical ways, ways the initially did not get my attention. Nevertheless, He wouldn't stop. That's what love does—it pursues blindly, unflinchingly, and without end.”
― Bob Goff, Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World

“Yet Jesus continues to select broken and splattered people not just as followers, but as participants. He called people like me who can't even figure out which way to turn a screw to tighten it or even stack a cake correctly the ones who would build a kingdom. And then, if we're willing, He serves us up—rocks, small bits of asphalt, and all.”
― Bob Goff, Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World

“Words of encouragement are like that. They have their own power. And when they are said by the right people, they can change everything. What I've found in following Jesus is that most of the time, when it comes to who says it, we each are the right people. And I've concluded something else. That the words people say to us not only have shelf life but have the ability to shape life.”
― Bob Goff, Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses

“I used to think religion tasted horrible,
but now I know I was just eating the fake stuff.”
― Bob Goff, Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World

“None of us want to make God look bad. But in the end, being fake makes God look worse. It makes people think he tastes like Crisco.

Not only that, but when we meet people who have been fed the fake stuff about who God is and what He's about, it's not surprising that they have a little indigestion. So we can either spend our time talking about wrappers or we can show them what God is really made of. We can show them that God is full of love and is the source of hope and every creative idea. People don't want to be told that their experiences were wrong or that their wrapper or someone else's wrapper is made of the wrong stuff. Instead, we get to be the ones to show them real love from God.”
― Bob Goff, Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World