God is inviting you on a journey to find meaning, beauty and joy in the challenging places of your story. To discover hidden knowledge in your heart and a purpose far greater than you can imagine for your life.
Come with me on a path to discover the inspiration you need for the Journey!
“The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. The LORD is my portion," says my soul, "therefore I will Hope in him. The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him.”
-Lamentations 3:22-25
“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”
- Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, Psychiatrist
“The dark does not destroy the light, it defines it. It’s our fear of the dark that casts our joy into the shadows.”
-Brene Brown
from A Liturgy for Embracing Both Joy & Sorrow
…So give me strength, O God, to feel this grief deeply, never to hide my heart from it. And give me also hope enough to remain open to surprising encounters with joy, as one on a woodland path might stumble suddenly into dapplings of golden light.
Amidst the pain that of these days, give me courage, O Lord; courage to live them fully, to love and to allow myself to be loved, to remember, grieve, and honor what was, to live with thanksgiving in what is, and to invest in the hope of what will be.
Be at work gilding these long heartbreaks with the advent of new joys, good friendships, true fellowship, and unexpected delights. Remind me again and again of your goodness, your presence, and your promises.
For this is who we are: a people of The Promise—a people shaped in the image of the God whose very being generates all joy
in the universe, yet who also weeps and grieves its brokenness.
So we, your children, are also at liberty to lament our losses, even as we simultaneously rejoice in the hope of their coming restoration.
Let me learn now, O Lord, to do this as naturally as the inhale and exhale of a single breath:
To breathe out sorrow, to breathe in joy.
To breathe out lament, to breathe in hope.
To breathe out pain, to breathe in comfort.
To breathe out sorrow, to breathe in joy.
In one hand I grasp the burden of my grief, while with the other I reach for the hope of grief’s redemption.
And here, BETWEEN the tension of the two, BETWEEN what was and what will be, in the very is of now, let my heart be surprised by, shaped by, warmed by, remade by, the same joy that forever wells within and radiates from your heart, O God.
Amen.
by Doug McKelvey, Every Moment Holy, Volume II
“Character, like a photograph, develop in darkness”
-Yousuf Karsh
“O God, grant that I may understand that it is You who are painfully parting the fibers of my being in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance.”
— Teilhard de Chardin, Jesuit Priest
“The hope God offers us is this…he will keep close to us, even in the darkness, in doubt, in fear, and vulnerability. He does not promise to keep bad things from happening. He does not promise that night will not come, or that it will not be terrifying, or that we will be immediately tugged to shore. He promises that we will not be left alone. He will keep watch with us in the night.”
— Tish Warren, Prayer In The Dark
“We are always called to the paradox:
Sojourners on the Way, we are called to be these strange pilgrims who live the paradox of an interior soul stillness, waiting on the Lord, while we keep putting one step in front of the other, following the Lord, wherever He leads.
On one hand, we wait—and with the other, we work.
And the Lord tells us what belongs in the waiting hand and what belongs in the working hand.
Stillness is a posture of the soul, not a paralysis of one’s life.”
-Ann Voskamp
“God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait. When you do get into your room you will find that the long wait has done you some kind of good which you would not have had otherwise. But you must regard it as waiting, not as camping. You must keep on praying for light; and, of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and panelling.”
-C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity
“Ultimately, we don’t heal, transform or create ourselves. We posture ourselves in ways that allow God to heal, transform and create us.”
-Sue Monk Kidd
“ Humility is not thinking less of ourselves but thinking of ourselves less.”
-CS Lewis
“ You can’t stop birds flying over your head but you can stop them from making nests in your hair.”
-Martin Luther
“Nobody escapes being wounded. We are all wounded people, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually….When our wounds cease to be a source of shame and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers.”
-Henri Nouwen
“Let all that you do be done with Love”
1 Corinthians 16:14
“Everyone has Inherent Value and Worth”
-Fred Rodgers
“We have to be braver than we think we can be because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are.”
-Madeline Engle
“Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.”
- Henry David Thoreau
“It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work,
and when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
— Wendell Berry, The Real Work
“Christianity has tended to focus on right beliefs and right choices as the key for personal growth. But biblical evidence and modern brain science show that our character is shaped more by whom we love rather than what we believe.”
— Jim Wilder, Renovated: God, Dallas Willard & The Church That Transforms
“Beauty hovers over all of us, in our darkness and our light, in the withered frailty of life, in the breathless triumph of death. Beauty is in our sleeping and waking, our innocence and tragedy. Beauty is found in small, unseen gestures of love, humming softly in every act of kindness.”
— John Sowers, Say All The Unspoken Things
“In Christian spiritual transformation, the self that embarks on the journey is not the self that arrives. The self that begins the spiritual journey is the self of our own creation, the self we thought ourselves to be. This is the self that dies on the journey.
The self that arrives is the self that was loved into existence by Divine Love.”
— David G. Benner, The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call of Self-Discovery