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.

We cannot let the haters of this world define us. Or frighten us into no longer being ourselves.

Worry is a weighty monster with poisoned tentacles. It clutches at us, grabs at our minds, steals our breath, our will. It lurks. It pounces. It colors how we perceive the world.

When the world careens out of control, we can rest in the fact that God spun this world with a simple word. Matter from emptiness. Beauty from void. Community from chaos.

God's heart…is not that we escape our lot, but that we learn to thrive in the midst of it.

Dare to be brave today, and trust that when you extend your wings, you will fly.

Because the culture we breathe and work in rushes against rest. It equates our worth with production and wealth and fame. The more we work toward those goals, the more society assigns us worth.

Growth comes from God, to those with surrendered, yielded hearts.

Jesus often calls us to risk. He asks us to be vulnerable, to be authentic, so others can see Him in and through us.

As I look back over my mountains of growth and compare them to the molehills where I stagnated, community often made the difference.

Our task shouldn't be punishing the villains in our lives, but enlarging the God who heals us from all wounds.

You may be desperate, but never let anyone see you as anything less than a cultivated woman.

Her intention was to make the crowd aware, if they weren't already, that John was the giant whose shoulders Emily stood on.

We will never be more ourselves, with the fullness of our personality and the uniqueness of our gifting, than when we just wholly give ourselves over to our very faithful, faithful God.

I was afraid of not living up to what people expected me to be.

By rights, satire is a lonely and introspective occupation, for nobody can describe a fool to the life without much patient self-inspection.

The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't.

They can't scare me, if I scare them first.

If this religion is true, then there is only one Savior, only one narrow path to life. Christianity cannot live in peace with any other religion.

I always have bananas with me for energy.

Our relationship with places is a close bond, intricate in nature, and not abstract, not remote at all: It's enveloping, almost a continuum with all we are and think.