Quotes from Jen Hatmaker

If you are drowning in a sea your regular people are not equipped to swim in, if what you need is deeply rooted and requires the care of a professional, nothing is more courageous than saying this out loud and moving toward your own healing. As I mentioned earlier, the failure to ask for help when needed tends to perpetuate self-neglect much more than self-reliance.

Serving together revolutionized our marriage. If one is ahead, prioritize patience and nag-resistance. God isn't a wedge between spouses; if you aren't walking side by side, I believe God will wait for you both. Press Pause. Don't give the spiritual depth to your church or friends and leave housekeeping leftovers for your man. Grow together, learn together, seek together, serve together. This is the most eternal portion of your union; treat it with utmost care.

There is something so marvelous about women comfortable in their own skin.

Loneliness can be a prison, but we have keys. You needn't wait for someone to open the bars. If you can make a pot of chili and use a cell phone, then you can create community.

Thank you, Facebook Quizzes, for helping me identify my Disney princess spirit, my old-person name, my mental disorder, and the color of my soul. All in one evening. Best, Ariel Harriet Schizophrenic Mauve.

If i bought something that didn't warrant more than three wearings, I did not need it.

Most primary alliances can survive even the most brutal honesty; silent complacency is the kiss of death. When there is no fight left, no urgency to tell the truth or hear it, not enough self-respect to act with agency nor enough respect for others to respond to theirs, that is the real problem. More relationships drift into indifference than capsize from conflict. Practicing honesty and not overfearing confrontation is the mark of healthy people and their subsequently successful partnerships.

Honestly, I love Jesus but sometimes His followers give me a migraine.

I really handled your pain poorly. I was scared and ashamed, and I blew it. Please forgive me. If I could do it over, I would respond like this ____." (Relationships mended by forgiveness are powerful things.) When we model honesty and apologies, our kids learn in real time how to construct a life on truth. We interrupt the toxic trajectory of pretending before it becomes rooted and thus a thousand times harder to pull up. Perhaps

I may just be one shade of one color of one strand, but I'm part of an elaborate tapestry that goes beyond my perception.

Theology is either true everywhere or it isn't true anywhere. This helps untangle us from the American God Narrative and sets God free to be God instead of the My-God-in-a-Pocket I carried for so long.

Cloud and Townsend suggest two questions to regularly ask the closest people in your life: What do I do that draws you toward me? What do I do that pushes you away?

I want a legacy dripping with human connection, up to its eyeballs in memories and adventures and weathered storms and gladness. I hope to leave a wake of victory, a life of full integrity. I want to say it all, risk it all, own it all.

I manage to feel guilty one way or another, no matter which purchasing priority wins the day. I've either spent too much, bought cheap processed junk, or I've subsidized the sweat shop industry. Even simplifying can be complicated. GAH!

the beginning of time, creation encountered its first problem: "It is not good for the man to be alone." Thus history began with human connection. Two are better than one, and togetherness is always superior to loneliness.

Truth is the front door to the life we've always wanted to build. It

I marvel at how out of place simple, humble Jesus would be in today's American churches.

This kind of woman also wants this freedom for everyone else; I cannot overstate this important correlation and how necessary it is right now. She craves a genuine world, a more honest and sincere community, relationships based in truth telling, to be refreshing to a parched world. She is not afraid of herself, so she is unafraid of others. She is fierce. She is free. She is full of fire.

When the worship of God turns into a "worship experience," we have derailed as the body of Christ.

A good parent prepares the child for the path, not the path for the child. We can still demonstrate gentle and attached parenting without raising children who melt on a warm day.

You are 2 Corinthians 4, because although this darkness pressed you so hard, it did not crush you. Perhaps it struck you down, but look at you: You are not destroyed. You see that in the light. You are still standing. If you are still breathing, there is still hope.

When Jesus' followers asked what to do about the weeds in the harvest field, He said to treat them the same as the wheat, 'because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them' (Matthew 13:29)... We are only qualified to administer mercy, not judgment, because we will pull up many a beautiful stalk of wheat, imagining him a weed.

A heart warmed with zeal for God, and breathing after the salvation of men, will not plead and insist upon rights and privileges in bar to this design. Those manifestly

The church the Bible described is exciting and adventurous and wrought with sacrifice. It cost believers everything, and they still came.