Natasha > Natasha's Quotes

“Instead of asking myself, Is her room clean? Did he ace that test? I’m asking, Did I connect with them in a way that I will remember twenty years from now? Did I listen when she called my name four times? Did our hearts meet for a brief moment? Did he know that even when I couldn’t fix the problem, I was there for him?”
― Kristen Welch, Rhinestone Jesus: Saying Yes to God When Sparkly, Safe Faith Is No Longer Enough

“It is easy to think you have a heart for orphans on the other side of the world, but to resent the demands of the children in your living room. You cannot have a heart for the gospel and fussiness about your life at the same time.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Mom Enough: The Fearless Mother's Heart and Hope

“Gratitude is like that. It transforms. It is such a force that it cannot coexist with selfishness, with discouragement, with discontent.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“The more you discipline yourself to overcome discouragement with obedience, the less discouragement there will be to overcome.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“But our opportunities to bless our children are often most present when we least feel like it. This is why we cannot depend on our emotions to dictate our actions. We need to discipline our own emotions to fall in line with obedience. We are to love our children. We are to bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. That means all the time. You”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“When you are a mother and a homemaker, you are your own boss. The days are what you make of them. The tasks that need to get done are put on a list at your discretion. This means that you must be leadership material.

At the same time, what you get done is up to you, too. You also have to be a hardworking employee. The part of you that decides where to go must work with the part of you that needs to go there. Making a list that you cannot accomplish does not make you a better housewife, it makes you a bad leader.”
― Rachel Jankovic, Fit to Burst: Abundance, Mayhem, and the Joys of Motherhood

“You do not exist in this world to get things done. You exist to glorify God by doing good to others.”
― Tim Challies, Do More Better: A Practical Guide to Productivity

“Studies show that aggressively expressing anger doesn't relieve anger but amplifies it. On the other hand, not expressing anger often allows it to disappear without leaving ugly traces.”
― Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

“When we cannot find joy in our circumstances, we can find joy in God who is unchanged and unchanging. We can rejoice, not in what is going on around or within us, but because God is our strength and He will continue to be.”
― Katie Davis Majors, Daring to Hope: Finding God's Goodness in the Broken and the Beautiful

“It is a bit of a mess, this business of love. As more and more people enter our lives, we are left with not choice but to enter theirs as well. Even more so, over time their pains become our pain and their joys become our joy and this sharing of the Gospel becomes a sharing of life. This, at first glance, seems so burdensome, so overwhelming, but somehow I have found it not to be any longer. Something about shouldering the burdens of another brings a lightness to our own affliction. We are in it together, and Christ is in it with us.”
― Katie Davis Majors, Daring to Hope: Finding God's Goodness in the Broken and the Beautiful

“As time passes, I realize more and more how conditioned I have been to be ashamed of my weakness. Somehow it is okay to attend to the brokenness in the lives of others, but to admit to brokenness in our own homes, even in our own hearts? We have been told that this is downright embarrassing. What we know to be true, though, as we dig into Scripture, is that God is not ashamed of our weakness. He is not ashamed of it, because He can use even this to glorify Himself.”
― Katie Davis Majors, Daring to Hope: Finding God's Goodness in the Broken and the Beautiful

“Sometimes when you're in a dark place you think you've been buried, but you've actually been planted.”
― Christine Caine

“God is able to take the mess of our past and turn it into a message. He takes the trials and tests and turns them into a testimony.”
― Christine Caine, Undaunted: Daring to do what God calls you to do

“When there is a fight between your heart and your head, experience has taught me that the best thing you can do is pick up your Bible and remind yourself of what God says.”
― Christine Caine, Undaunted Bible Study Guide: Daring to Do What God Calls You to Do

“It was my moment of wondering what, in my life, had been my golden pin like Schindler's, the thing so precious to me that it never occurred to me to use it to ransom the life of someone else.”
― Christine Caine, Undaunted: Daring to do what God calls you to do

“When someone is trapped in a burning building, you don't try to work out what caused the fire and then decide whether the people inside get your sympathy. When people are in danger of burning up, you rush to save them. Especially if you remember how much it hurts to be burned.”
― Christine Caine, Undaunted: Daring to do what God calls you to do

“No matter what circumstances we might face in life, it is possible for us to overcome in the midst of them by taking hold of God’s thoughts.”
― Christine Caine

“We may not understand the pathways God lays out before us. We may not even like walking the journey. But even in failure, we can trust that He’ll do more than we expect.”
― Mary E. DeMuth, Everything: What You Give and What You Gain to Become Like Jesus

“The Gospel isn’t a life management program. It shouldn’t merely be the crutch we fall on when life gets ugly. It should be the legs we walk on, the air we breathe.”
― Mary E. DeMuth, Everything: What You Give and What You Gain to Become Like Jesus

“The church is not a place for perfection. It is, and should be, a haven of protection.”
― Mary E. DeMuth, We Too: How the Church Can Respond Redemptively to the Sexual Abuse Crisis

“We are to be agents of His great upside down Kindgom, where the outcasts are listened to, the broken are given dignity, and those suffering under the weight of sexual exploitation are rescued and healed.”
― Mary E. DeMuth, We Too: How the Church Can Respond Redemptively to the Sexual Abuse Crisis

“The church is the hands and feet of Jesus, and it is our duty to continue the mandate to protect the innocent, while turning perpetrators in to the proper authorities.”
― Mary E. DeMuth, We Too: How the Church Can Respond Redemptively to the Sexual Abuse Crisis

“A perpetrator may have hurt someone for a few minutes of his/her life and may even regret it, but the survivor lives with the pain, triggers, shame and fear for a lifetime.”
― Mary E. DeMuth, We Too: How the Church Can Respond Redemptively to the Sexual Abuse Crisis

“One more, final question came from the audience on my last night in Newtown, and it was the one I most did not want to hear: “Will God protect my child?”
I stayed silent for what seemed like minutes. More than anything I wanted to answer with authority, “Yes! Of course God will protect you. Let me read you some promises from the Bible.” I knew, though, that behind me on the same platform twenty-six candles were flickering in memory of victims, proof that we have no immunity from the effects of a broken planet. My mind raced back to Japan, where I heard from parents who had lost their children to a tsunami in a middle school, and forward to that very morning when I heard from parents who had lost theirs to a shooter in an elementary school.
At last I said, “No, I’m sorry, I can’t promise that.” None of us is exempt. We all die, some old, some tragically young. God provides support and solidarity, yes, but not protection—at least not the kind of protection we desperately long for. On this cursed planet, even God suffered the loss of a Son.”
― Philip Yancey, The Question That Never Goes Away

“The gospel presents both high ideals and all-encompassing grace. Very often, however, the church tilts one direction or the other. Either it lowers the ideals, adjusting moral standards downward, softening Jesus’ strong commands, rationalizing behavior; or else it pulls in the boundaries of grace, declaring some sins worse than others, some sinners beyond the pale. Few churches stay faithful both to the high ideals of gospel and its bottomless grace.”
― Philip Yancey, Soul Survivor: How My Faith Survived the Church

“If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
― Albert Einstein

“[God] occupies all the difficult spaces humanity has endured. While I can't fully reconcile the problem of evil and why so many people have been sexually violated over the centuries, I do know this: Jesus has wept alongside me, and he weeps for his church to rise up valiantly and love the least, the last, and the lost. This is our WE TOO moment, to purposefully suffer alongside the sexually broken.”
― Mary E. DeMuth, We Too: How the Church Can Respond Redemptively to the Sexual Abuse Crisis

“The church acts most like Jesus when it protects the victimized.”
― Mary E. DeMuth, We Too: How the Church Can Respond Redemptively to the Sexual Abuse Crisis

“Sometimes,' I said, 'you have to let one story end so the next one can begin.'
'How do you know when that will happen?'
'You don't,' I said. 'Which is why you should always carry on.”
― Lindsay Mattick

“I don’t believe it is wise or truthful to the power of the gospel to identify oneself by the sins of one’s past or the temptations of one’s present but rather to only be defined by the Christ who’s overcome both for those He calls His own.”
― Jackie Hill Perry, Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was, and Who God Has Always Been