“I wince when I write the word father. I am one. It is my proudest calling. It is my deepest failure. There is no joy, no pain, no greater futility or pride, no dream, no nightmare that is deeper than my being a father. There is no forgiveness I long for more, nor accolade that will ever mean more to me than one of my children blessing me as a father.”
Dan Allender
“Most of the time we aim too low. We walk in shoes too small for us. We spend our days shooting for a little burst of approval or some small career victory. But there’s a joyful way of being that’s not just a little bit better than the way we are currently living; it’s a quantum leap better. … [Spiritual] joy is a delicious, if painful, longing. It starts with a taste of something eternal and then the joy consists of longing for that taste again.”
David Brooks, The Second Mountain
“God came down and lived in this same world as a man. He showed us how to live in this world, subject to its vicissitudes and necessities, that we might be changed—not into an angel or a storybook princess, not wafted into another world, but changed into saints in this world. The secret is Christ in me, not me in a different set of circumstances.”
Elisabeth Elliot, Keep a Quiet Heart
