Charity > Recent Status Updates

Our children do not need self-esteem—they need God-esteem. If they have God-esteem, they will understand their value but not make too much of themselves. Instead, they will expend themselves, allowing the perfect image of God to be reflected through their lives

Consider this—the average (that is, normal) person between the ages of nine and seventeen scores as high on anxiety scales as children who were admitted to psychological clinics for severe disorders in the 1950s. We simply have not been tending to the spirits of our children or teaching them the art of tending their own spirits.

“But the God who saw Bethlehem, the God who saw a little shepherd boy, the God who saw me, is the God who sees you too. He sees you not just at Christmas. He sees you on your best days and on your worst days—and He loves you.”

“Sometimes we get so hung up on doing something great, we forget the best thing is often the smallest.”

“What we didn't fully grasp was that adoption-our road to parenthood-would be a portal to understanding suffering. Choosing to walk straight into the white-hot pain of our grieving kids was an important entry point to the discovery that some of the best gifts are laced with the deepest sadness.”

“One goal I’ve had since Jesus rescued my soul is to hear, “Well done.” By Growing Slow, I learned that he doesn’t want to tell me “Well done” based on the quality of my harvest. He wants to tell me “Well done” for my obedience in the planting.”

“A scarcity mindset believes there will never be enough. A Growing Slow mindset trusts there will be more.
A scarcity mindset is about hurrying and hustling. A Growing Slow mindset is about un-hurrying your heart and finding the peace you’ve always longed for.”

“There is so much that happens in the dark, even now, in places you can’t see. The land is alive, breathing, preparing itself for the season to come.
The same is true of us.
We are alive, breathing, being prepared for the season to come.”

“A life of hurry places resumes above relationships, performance over people, and achievement over affection. The most rushed seasons of my life accidentally hardened my heart to the real needs of real people in my life.”

The answer is Jesus.
For every hurt you’re feeling, for every moment you feel obscure, for every second you’ve felt overlooked, for every time you have felt like the fields you’re planting are weedy and unproductive, here stands Jesus, with his arms open wide. That’s the only thing that is going to break this insanity of us feeding our need for love with sorry substitutes.

“We have to intentionally build time into our lives so we can see that God is loving us, right here.”

“Don’t dismiss the gift of small and slow.
Your small, slow progress is still progress.
Your small, slow-growth church is still a church.
Your small, slow faith is still faith.
Your small, slow start is still a start.”

“Let’s stop glorifying the end results, and start embracing the day-byday process of building something beautiful with our lives.”

“You might think that what you’ve built with your life so far isn’t all that grand. But maybe that’s not the point, anyway. It’s not what you’re building; it’s who you are building with.”

“But not everything you build is meant to last. Not everything will produce a measurable legacy. Your best efforts may be washed away, trampled, or run over. Your best work may one day be forgotten. No one but God may know about the most meaningful things you did with your life because they were done in obscurity, when no one was watching but him.”

Quicker is not always better.
There’s nothing wrong with meeting goals swiftly. Some moments really are made for hustling. But the desire to build quickly is dangerous. It can hurt the foundational pillars that hold up our relationships, businesses, and health.

“Intensity does not invite relationship. It also doesn’t communicate my trust in others or give them a chance to rise up and develop their own responsibility or resilience.”

We want to be present for these long days and short years. We want to be able to let go of our worries in a way that keeps us in the moment, instead of imagining the future years based more on our anxious distortions than on reality.

“I want you to hear me say over and over in this book that giving yourself grace is more important than trying harder.”

Deliberately choosing to grow slow means we will be less concerned with the kind of growth that this world fixates on. Numbers don’t define us and won’t rule us when we develop a Growing Slow mindset. Peter tells us the kind of growth that matters most is the growth happening on the inside: “Grow in grace and understanding of our Master and Savior, Jesus Christ.”

“Time is not a commodity to be used but a gem to be treasured.”

It’s time to embrace a different story about everything you’re growing. It’s time to have faith to believe what your eyes cannot see. The most beautiful things in this grand old world began as seeds that waited in the dark.
Every oak was first a buried acorn.