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

We don’t like death. We’d rather produce seeds another way. But death to ourselves, our agendas, our expectations, our hopes is necessary to find deep joy that comes when we fully relinquish ourselves to the gospel.

The roadblocks to growth and joy come when we forget the bigness of God & instead make people bigger than He is.

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.

A broken person understands she needs rescue, and she depends on God to resurrect and deliver. And she also understands that even if God chooses not to deliver, His ways are higher and more amazing then what we can fathom.

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.

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.

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

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

The more we love, the more it hurts, and the more we have to let go.

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

To become more like Jesus we must understand that the only growth we can be in charge of is our own.

Money is a cheap but powerful substitute for Jesus, and wielding money is intoxicating, but it won't usher in the kingdom of God, nor will it ensure eternal treasures.

Jesus wastes none of our stories, even our tales of woe. He transforms them into epic adventures where we dare to face our past for the sake of our present.

When Jesus isn’t our everything, our enough, we pursue every other thing that fills.

Pain can either thrust me into the arms of Jesus or make me turn my back on Him. Either way, it's a choice.

My stubborn, self-savvy heart will not reach for the sky if my earth becomes everything I need. If people fill me up then where is my need for the transcendent? If everything is glory and beauty and sweetness and light, will I be the type of soul that reaches to Jesus?

We grow when the walls press in. We grow when life steals our control. We grow in darkness.

I understand true life doesn't happen when I constantly gaze backwards, mulling over all the injustices others have done or I have done to others.

Growth comes in the aftermath of failure, not wild success.

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

He created us for adventure, not ease.

To abandon all is to take our hearts, place them before the One who created them, and dare to believe He can live life powerfully through our surrendered lives.

We’d avoid a lot of insecurity, if we fully, wholly believed in God’s wild affection for us.

We enslave in the manner we talk to ourselves. But the truth is, God already set us free. He secured our release. To constantly hurt ourselves, resting in our inadequacy, is to call Him a LIAR.

With an all-or-nothing mind-set, you tend to judge yourself relentlessly…Eeyore becomes your best friend.

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.

It’s an act of our will to choose to see people simply as wildly loved by God, to assume their beauty before guessing their depravity.

The Gospel isn’t a life management program. It shouldn’t merely be the crutch we fall on when life gets ugly. It should be the legs we walk on, the air we breathe.

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

Why must we cling to those who walk away instead of granting freedom? We must give the same liberty God gives to prodigals-an ability to let them go-or we'll be perennially bound to others for our happiness and effective service.

I wear the word victim like a badge of honor — my own purple heart. I see what others do more than I see what I'm capable of.

Control is the inner disease of those who need stability and order to function.

Sometimes we control our family members because we idolize and idealize our perfect plan over the journey that God has laid out for them. (p. 56)

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

It’s never easy letting go. But if we don’t learn the art of relinquishment, we’ll never move forward to embrace the new relationships God has for us.

I realized that what I feared the most had materialized, yet I survived.

When God wants to do an impossible task, He takes an impossible person and breaks her.

We cannot love our enemies until we see those twin truths: God loves me. God loves them.