Steve N

“Embrace the common: a Sunday afternoon watching sports, Starbucks with a friend, cooking dinner for a neighbor, taking the dog for a walk, heading to a job that is making you more humble and needy because it is so unfulfilling, or working through conflict with a friend you have offended. This and more is all part of it. So do your everyday and your ordinary. Godliness is found and formed in those places. No man or woman greatly used by God has escaped them. Great men and women of God have transformed the mundane, turning neighborhoods into mission fields, parenting into launching the next generation of God’s voices, legal work into loving those most hurting, waiting tables into serving and loving in such a way that people see our God.”
― Jennie Allen, Anything: The Prayer That Unlocked My God and My Soul

“We’ve all fallen, and we have the skinned knees and bruised hearts to prove it. But scars are easier to talk about than they are to show, with all the remembered feelings laid bare. And rarely do we see wounds that are in the process of healing. I’m not sure if it’s because we feel too much shame to let anyone see a process as intimate as overcoming hurt, or if it’s because even when we muster the courage to share our still-incomplete healing, people reflexively look away.”
― Brené Brown, Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution.

“At some point, our faith and our words must become our actions and lives. Do we talk more about God than we obey him? We aren’t going to get to heaven and have God say, “Thanks for talking about doing so much for me with your friends. That was awesome!” Many of us have sat in Bible studies or retreats or church talking about what we want to change and how we want to live for God, only to go home and back to the routine of life. Change is a funny thing. It takes change to change.”
― Jennie Allen, Anything: The Prayer That Unlocked My God and My Soul

“We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). When we don’t love or feel joy or peace or passion, it’s because we do not know his love or his joy or peace or passion. He is a person, not a magic pill you take when your life or your soul is broken. He is a person. He is a person you talk to and listen to and love and respect. He’s someone you decide to spend time with and dream with, whom you follow and learn from and hurt with, and to whom you ask things—someone you choose over anybody else, over anything else. He is a person—the person who defines my life, sweeps in and changes me. When I let him in. We all want to be free, joyful, and peaceful, but we get reluctant to hand God everything. But that is part of the path to the things he promises us.”
― Jennie Allen, Anything: The Prayer That Unlocked My God and My Soul