Quotes from Glennon Doyle Melton

Pain is mandatory for all of us. It's what teaches us. Suffering is what's optional. That's what happens when we try to skip over the pain.

When in doubt, I choose love above any particular ideas offered to me about faith.

One of the reasons we stay so alone in our lives is because we're ashamed to talk about the hard stuff. It's as simple as that. We're all in pain in different ways, and we don't get the help we need because we're too ashamed to talk about the pain.

I think of love and marriage in the same way I do plants: We have perennials and annuals. The perennial plant blooms, goes away, and comes back. The annual blooms for just a season, and then winter arrives and takes it out for good. But it's still enriched the soil for the next flower to bloom. In the same way, no love is wasted.

If grace isn't shocking and countercultural and scandalous and a little ridiculous, then it's not Grace.

I don't want to take anything to the grave. I want to die used up and emptied out. I don't want to carry around anything I don't have to. I want to travel light.

We'll tell fear it can come along with us in our minivan, okay? But we'll just tell fear it can't drive. Sometimes we'll tell it to not even talk. Like when we tell our kids, 'Enough. No words.' We're going to play the quiet game with fear. Fear is not the boss of us.

Questions are like gifts - it's the thought behind them that the receiver really feels. We have to know the receiver to give the right gift and to ask the right question. Generic gifts and questions are all right, but personal gifts and questions feel better.

If no pain, then no love. If no darkness, no light. If no risk, then no reward. It's all or nothing. In this damn world, it's all or nothing.

Making sensible family rules around cell phones and driving is a way to love yourself, your marriage, your children, and the world well.

You do not have to agree with me to love me.

One day we will finally see that when we reject any person or group of people, we reject a part of our very selves. All are one. All are in. All are God's beloved children with a place at the table.

You need to remember that being rejected by church is not the same as being rejected by God. God did not kick you out of church, honey. The church kicked God out of church.

I've seen my name on marquees and bowed to standing ovations. I've also been called a fraud, a mental case, a heretic. People all over the country wait in line to hug me or curse me.

I know how I like my house. I like it cute and cozy and a little funky, and I like it to feel lived in and worn, and I like the things inside of it to work. That's all. And for me, it's fine that my house's interior suggests that I might not spend every waking moment thinking about how it looks.

Christianity asserts that God made himself human. Those are two different categories - two different levels of worthiness. God is one category, and human is another. That's a downgrade. After that jump, there are no more categories - no more downgrades. There are no human levels of worthiness. There is no hierarchy in God's eyes.

The truth is that cleaning up socks and trying to get someone to really listen to you is marriage. It's less sweep you off your feet and more sweep the kitchen four times a day. Like everything good in life, it's 98% back-breaking work and 2% moments that make the work worthwhile.

Sometimes the rewards of risk don't leave us wrecked. Sometimes we find our passion, our purpose, courage, connection, and comfort. Every good thing in our lives is a direct result of risk.

Book tours are super hard for me as a raging introvert. I love humanity, but actual humans are hard for me. So something like a book tour - where I'm constantly on the road - scares the hell out of me.

I used to choose friends based on similarity in age and life stage, but I've learned that those were the wrong criteria. Trying to live life exclusively alongside others our own age is like attempting to climb Mt. Everest without a Sherpa. It's a little dangerous.

Integrity means there is not a real-life you and an internet you. The two are one and the same. If you're not kind on the Internet, you're not kind.

I hated writing 'Love Warrior.' It's the hardest thing I've every written. I cried.

Parenting is the most important thing to many of us, and so it's also the place we're most vulnerable. We're all a little afraid we're doing it wrong.

When I was detoxing from social media, I realized that I was thinking in status updates. It seemed I had trained my brain to translate everything I experienced throughout the day into 140 characters or less.