Abby Hatch

“Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it’s instead like a muscle that tires.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“Why is it,” comedian Lily Tomlin asks, “that when we speak to God we are said to be praying but when God speaks to us we are said to be schizophrenic?” Such a response from ourselves or others to someone’s claim to have heard from God is especially likely today because of the lack of specific teaching and pastoral guidance on such matters.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“An obsession merely with doing all God commands may be the very thing that rules out being the kind of person that he calls us to be.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“if you keep interrupting your evening to check and respond to e-mail, or put aside a few hours after dinner to catch up on an approaching deadline, you’re robbing your directed attention centers of the uninterrupted rest they need for restoration. Even if these work dashes consume only a small amount of time, they prevent you from reaching the levels of deeper relaxation in which attention restoration can occur. Only the confidence that you’re done with work until the next day can convince your brain to downshift to the level where it can begin to recharge for the next day to follow. Put another way, trying to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had instead respected a shutdown.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World