WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of QUOTES

1 " Life is never made unbearable by the road itself but by the way we bear the road. It’s not the hard roads that slay us; what actually slays us is the expectation that this road isn’t what we hoped it to be. "

― Ann Voskamp , WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of

2 " The dream isn’t ever truly about experiencing miraculous things, but about the experience of feeling miraculously "

― Ann Voskamp , WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of

3 " Buy the lie that your life is supposed to be heaven on earth, and suffering can be a torturous hell. But life is suffering, and suffering is but the cross we bear, part of earth’s topography to cross on our way to heaven. I wouldn’t know it for years: Screens sell pipe dreams. Every screen is trying to sell the lie to you—from Hollywood "

― Ann Voskamp , WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of

4 " to Netflix to Instagram—the lie that all you have to do is buy this, work out like this, wear this, style it like this, believe this, pursue this, get a career like this, find someone like this, and you, too, can find the way to a perfect life, just like this. But buy any perfectly filtered and marketing-framed illusion, and you end up painfully disillusioned. Regardless of what Instagram or all the glossy ads are shilling, your suffering isn’t some unique "

― Ann Voskamp , WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of

5 " anomaly; suffering is the universal experience of all humanity. Suffering doesn’t mean you’re cursed; suffering means you’re human. The question isn’t “Why is there suffering in my life?” but “Why wouldn’t there be suffering?” Because such is life in a broken world. The question is “What way will you bear your suffering?” I didn’t know it then, and I am still learning this now: Life is really hard because that is the reality of "

― Ann Voskamp , WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of

6 " being alive. Life is hard in a thousand ways, and what comes the easiest to us is getting lost. "

― Ann Voskamp , WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of

7 " that this road isn’t what we hoped it to be. "

― Ann Voskamp , WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of

8 " Because our fall was detachment from God, our restoration is found only in attachment to God. "

― Ann Voskamp , WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of

9 " Hopelessness rises when the pain of the past floods all of the future "

― Ann Voskamp , WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of

10 " Deserts are not places where God deserts you but a place deserted of noise so you can hear a word from God. Every wilderness holds God’s tenderness, and the driest of deserts can be the holy of holies. Deserts aren’t places to fear: Deserts are trust greenhouses. [...] Deserts are not places of despair—deserts are sacred spaces of divine dialogue "

― Ann Voskamp , WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of

11 " And this peace sacrifice, it is actually eaten by those who sacrifice it, almost like a shared meal, almost like a feast between man and God [...]’
‘Wait—’ I interrupt the guide, touch his shoulder before he moves on. ‘Sacrifice—doesn’t mean give up or lay down or go without or let go of?’
‘No, no, no….Sacrifice doesn’t mean that at all. Sacrifice in Hebrew is korban.’ Aerie flips the pages of his worn bible to show me. ‘See. Sacrifice, korban, comes from the Hebrew root, K-R-V, which literally means to come near, an approach, a moving closer, to move into a closer relationship.’
Sacrifice is not losing something but moving closer to Someone. Sacrifice isn’t about loss—sacrifice is about love. Surrender to love. Sacrifice is about detaching from one thing—to attach to a greater thing. "

― Ann Voskamp , WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of

12 " Therapy is a gym for the mind. Not ashamed to have a membership "

― Ann Voskamp , WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of

13 " It was 1993. I was eighteen years old when I walked into my first therapy appointment in a stifling hot upstairs office with one window, no air conditioner, to see a counselor with teased bangs and a frizzy bleached perm. Mama had just signed herself into a psychiatric ward for the fourth extended treatment, each months long at a time. Dad had fallen into a vortex of depression [...] I tell myself this, try to believe this: no past can earmark you when you’ve heard the divine whisper of who you can still become. "

― Ann Voskamp , WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of

14 " Marriage and adoption have legal implications, but they are more than only a legal reality. Marriage and adoption are meant to be a lived reality, a lived attachment [...] ‘But the marriage is for the sake of a life together, and the adoption proceedings’ for a life together.
And it’s true too: from the moment I first held her photograph and looked into Shiloh’s eyes under that starry Texas sky, I knew she was mine and I’d die for her. She was sealed in my heart as mine long before my hand signed on any dotted line. "

― Ann Voskamp , WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of

15 " And I don’t even know when my days start or end, heartsick babe in arms, waiting for an appointment with the cardiologist, waiting for her next breath, waiting to read some epiphany about attachment in the books that I’m burning the midnight oil to read. Is he tired of me? Maybe I’m tired of being me. Or maybe we’re both just really dog-tired.
As painful as it is, it’s easier for me to bear witness to all of this, if it will spare even one other soul from bearing the weight of what happens next. Keep burying how you feel and you'll end up digging your relationships a pretty big grave. If you don’t speak your fears and questions aloud, they only grow louder in your soul. "

― Ann Voskamp , WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of

16 " I stay quiet all day. Traumas can bend us away from reaching for, or trust taking, any comfort from anyone. Nobody tells you that the shields you throw up to protect your heart end up being more like a prison that leaves you alone. "

― Ann Voskamp , WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of

17 " my heart takes the way of incurvatus in se, this curving in toward self—self-sufficiency, self-protection, self-comfort, self-interest. It’s the bent way of being human: We’re wired for attachment, for dependence on God, but our inclination toward incurvatus in se turns the direction of our dependence towards destructive things, and our attachments go awry. All addiction is an attachment in the wrong direction. Name your pain, name the way you try to make the pain go away, and you name your addiction. Name your default direction. Name the way you turn for comfort—a glass, a screen, a plate, a sweet, a drug, a page, a voice, a click, a hit, a rush, a bottle—go ahead and name what you curve to, to comfort your ache, and you name your Egypt that looks like ease. "

― Ann Voskamp , WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of

18 " There’s a way of life that looks harmless enough; look again—it leads straight to hell’ (Proverbs 14:12-13 MSG), and the only way through is to find the curve and bend of our own hearts and come bend the knee to a realer and better love [...] Bonding or bondage, those are always the two ways to choose in every moment. "

― Ann Voskamp , WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of

19 " The only outcome that matters is that we come to Him. If death is the outcome, we still get to come to Him. If pain, or shame, or flames, or chains, or graves are the outcome, we still get to come to Him. "

― Ann Voskamp , WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of

20 " How in the name of all things good does God work for us and keep us safe when the dreaded phone call detonates, or the shrapnel of shame shreds everything that looks like hope, or the sky lashes round and swallows your dreams whole, or the claw of death guts deep, and how do you stagger forward hiding your bloody entrails? Evil hisses that if God really is love, then we better get roads without any suffering. And we shake off the lie and crush it with truth: Because God really is love, then we get roads with Him, and because God really is love, we are always soul-safe "

― Ann Voskamp , WayMaker: Finding the Way to the Life You’ve Always Dreamed Of