Quotes About Struggle

Some prisons don't require bars to keep people locked inside.

What if we could actually get to the place where we thanked God for letting us face this battle because of the rich treasures we discovered on the battlefield?

And I keep on marching as if this is the way a Christian woman is supposed to live, as if this is the call on my life, as if this is all there is.

I picture myself standing between two boxes. From one the stench is unbearably brutal, bellowing out dark wisps of death. And the other box is full of white lilies. Their angelic blooms are fully stretched and sending out perfume, sweet and pure. A box of bitterness. A box of grace.

We must invite God into our pain to help us survive the desperate in-between.

C. S. Lewis said it best: "We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.

We see that all those harsh realities aren't the end, but rather a temporary middle space. Not the place where we are meant to wallow and dwell. Rather the place through which we will have to learn to wrestle well.

Secret worship is all about something in this world that seems so attractive on the outside but will devour you on the inside.

For, as I have often told you before and now say again even with tears, many live as enemies of the cross of Christ.

Everything in me wanted to just cross out that ridiculous 3.5-hour scheduled writing appointment and go eat fries in the midst of colored plastic tubes and screaming kids.

I'm not equipped to handle what she has, both good and bad--and what she has is always a package deal of both.

lion looking for someone to devour.

This wasn't really about the scale or what clothing size I was; it was about this battle that raged in my heart.

I had to get honest enough to admit it: I relied on food more than I relied on God. I craved food more than I craved God. Food was my comfort. Food was my reward. Food was my joy. Food was what I turned to in times of stress, sadness, and even in times of happiness.

If Satan can use our everyday experiences, both big and small, to cripple our true identity, then he renders God's people totally ineffective for the kingdom of Christ.

I'm no longer at the first cliff where the ground fell out from beneath me. But I'm also not all the way across to solid ground where everyone exhales, exhausted but relieved. No, I'm in the middle, which honestly might be the scariest of all places. Moving ahead and turning back are both equally terrifying.

which also makes me feel powerless to change.

Trauma isn't just something that happens to you. It happens in you

Today's rejections, big or subtle, are like stealth bombs that zing straight to my core, locating hurts from my past and making them agonizingly present all over again.

We must be aware that desperation breeds degradation. In other words, when what is lacking in life goes from being an annoyance to an anxiety we run the risk of compromising in ways we never thought we would.

Happy is the man who hath never known what it is to taste of fame -- to have it is a purgatory, to want it is a hell.

Labour is the purgatory of the erring.

What, after all, is Heaven but a transition, from dim guesses and blind struggling with a mysterious and adverse fate, to the fullness of all wisdom.

And so the Red Army, squeezed between two of the most brutal dictators in human history, fought on. - Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad