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Wholehearted Faith QUOTES

Wholehearted Faith QUOTES

1 " we want to fully experience love and belonging, we must believe that we are worthy of love and belonging. "

― Rachel Held Evans , Wholehearted Faith

2 " It is nearly impossible to believe: God shrinking down to the size of a zygote, implanted in the soft lining of a woman’s womb. God growing fingers and toes. God kicking and hiccupping in utero. God inching down the birth canal and entering this world covered in blood, perhaps into the steady, waiting arms of a midwife. God crying out in hunger. God reaching for his mother’s breasts. God totally relaxed, eyes closed, his chubby little arms raised over his head in a posture of complete trust. God resting in his mother’s lap.

“On the days and nights when I believe this story that we call Christianity, I cannot entirely make sense of the storyline: God trusted God’s very self, totally and completely and in full bodily form, to the care of a woman. God needed women for survival. Before Jesus fed us with the bread and the wine, the body and the blood, Jesus himself needed to be fed, by a woman. He needed a woman to say: ‘This is my body, given for you. "

― Rachel Held Evans , Wholehearted Faith

3 " To love oneself well is to regard one’s place in the world with candor and grace, grounded in a humble realization of one’s strengths as well as a clear-eyed understanding of one’s weaknesses. To love oneself well is to be able to distinguish between what one wants and what one needs. To love oneself well means not to diminish the beautiful creature that God made nor to cultivate an outsize image of that same person. "

― Rachel Held Evans , Wholehearted Faith

4 " Acknowledging uncertainty doesn't make a person less faithful; it just makes her more honest. Admitting how much we don't know doesn't make a person less faithful; it just makes him more candid - and perhaps more curious. Anne Lamott has chronicled the meanderings of the heart as well as anyone, and as she famously puts it, " The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. "

― Rachel Held Evans , Wholehearted Faith

5 " I remember the sense of invitation and joy I felt when I learned that the word "disciple" doesn't mean "expert" or "preacher," "lecturer" or "leader." Instead, it derives from the Latin word discere- "to learn." We're learners. We're all in process, all just partway through our studies, all nowhere near the completion of our educations. "

― Rachel Held Evans , Wholehearted Faith

6 " Trying to keep in mind that how I respond to the death of my enemies says as much about me as it does about my enemies. "

― Rachel Held Evans , Wholehearted Faith

7 " live and love fully, to embrace human vulnerability rather than exploit it, to try to make sense of our place in this fragile yet beautiful world, to seek to understand our role in proclaiming God’s love and justice—this has been the work of generations. It’s the quest that creates our greatest works of art and our most profound moments of quiet tenderness. It’s the promise that calls us to greet every sunrise and surrender to every sunset. It’s the best hope of our oldest prayers, both on the days when I believe as well as on the days when I don’t. "

― Rachel Held Evans , Wholehearted Faith

8 " There is liberation in not having to know everything and not having to impress everyone with that boundless knowledge. "

― Rachel Held Evans , Wholehearted Faith

9 " Love is what we were made to do. But even more than that, love is who we were made to be. "

― Rachel Held Evans , Wholehearted Faith

10 " The telos of a human-your telos, my telos, our telos-is to love lavishly and indiscriminately because we have been loved lavishly and indiscriminately. We can be gracious because we are grateful. We can love because we have been loved. "

― Rachel Held Evans , Wholehearted Faith

11 " That’s the alluring and mystical beauty of grace: people are drawn to it, even when they aren’t supposed to be and even when they don’t know why. "

― Rachel Held Evans , Wholehearted Faith

12 " So convinced God lived in the boxes I’d constructed, I failed to look for God in God’s favorite place: the margins. "

― Rachel Held Evans , Wholehearted Faith

13 " Wholeheartedness means that we can be doubtful and still find rest in the tender embrace of a God who isn't threatened by human inconsistency. "

― Rachel Held Evans , Wholehearted Faith

14 " It’s not a story about how humans lost their worth; it’s a story about how humans lost their innocence. And most important, it’s not a story about how God turned away from creation but rather a story about how God, in God’s relentless way, moved toward creation while giving people the freedom to make choices, to test boundaries, to rebel, to wreak havoc, to grow up. "

― Rachel Held Evans , Wholehearted Faith

15 " The groundbreaking writing of Brené Brown has inspired millions to pursue what Brown calls “wholehearted living,” a posture of resilience and compassion that begins with the conviction that “yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging. "

― Rachel Held Evans , Wholehearted Faith

16 " To interpret a piece of writing with the goal of "getting to the point" is to fail to recognize the wealth within and beyond it, because it takes on new life and new layers when it's interpreted through the diverse lens of the many. "

― Rachel Held Evans , Wholehearted Faith

17 " Before we do anything wrong and before we do anything right, God has named and claimed us as God’s own.”6 "

― Rachel Held Evans , Wholehearted Faith

18 " How is it that a mountain goat can find such steady footing on these vertiginous slopes? What map does it read that shows it the way home? Maybe the wilderness seems as forbidding as it does just because we don't have the muscle memory to navigate or the skills to climb and sense.
What does a western hemlock, the grand conifer that can live more than half a millennium, think when a youngster like me comes along? Chanterelle mushrooms got to know this tree, finding ample places to grow at its feet. Native Americans got to know this tree too. They understood that its bark was edible and a good base for cakes, and that its young needles could be brewed into a tea rich in vitamin C. The Coastal Salish peoples of what is now Canada built shelters for menstruating women using western hemlock branches, and this species was said to have particularly feminine energy.
What if the "problem" with the wilderness isn't a problem with the wilderness at all but rather with us, with our lack of knowledge, and with our truncated imagination? The wilderness reminds us that things aren't usually as simple or one-dimensional as they seem. Our stereotypes of such spaces imagine them as places of exile, spaces of lifelessness. That would be a surprise to the creatures that call it home.
Perhaps the real struggle is ours. We don't like knowing. Indeed, we fear it. "

― Rachel Held Evans , Wholehearted Faith

19 " Maybe the call of the wilderness is to ask us to think more deeply, more broadly, more adventurously, more boldly, about the maybes. "

― Rachel Held Evans , Wholehearted Faith

20 " Maybe one of the lessons is that the wilderness is a place where we can't rely on the familiar, which can seem like a hardship but might also be an invitation-an invitation into the reality of our existence, an invitation into the truth of our vulnerability. "

― Rachel Held Evans , Wholehearted Faith