"Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers."
Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds (via larmoyante)
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"We talk about “biblical families,” “biblical marriage,” “biblical economics,” “biblical politics,” “biblical values,” “biblical stewardship,” “biblical voting,” “biblical manhood,” “biblical womanhood,” even “biblical dating” to create the impression that the Bible has just one thing to say on each of these topics - that it offers a single prescriptive formula for how people of faith ought to respond to them. But the Bible is not a position paper. The Bible is an ancient collection of letters, laws, poetry, proverbs, histories, prophecies, philosophy and stories spanning multiple genres and assembled over thousands of years in cultures very different from our own. When we turn the Bible into an adjective and stick it in front of another loaded word, we tend to ignore or downplay the parts of the Bible that don’t quite fit our preferences and presuppositions. In an attempt to simplify, we force the Bible’s cacophony of voices into a single tone and turn a complicated, beautiful, and diverse holy text into a list of bullet points we can put in a manifesto or creed. More often than not, we end up more committed to what we want the Bible to say than what it actually says."
Rachel Held Evans
"You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked “female”."
Erin McKean, You Don’t Have to be Pretty (via hollabackboston)
"You might be thinking you’re unimpressive and unqualified. That’s good. God performs the most impressive feats through the most unimpressive people. God likes to wet the wood before he sets it on fire. That way, everybody knows who made it burn."
Steven Furtick (via rainydaysandblankets)
"Aren’t we all waiting to be read by someone, praying that they’ll tell us that we make sense?"
Rudy Francisco, “A Lot Like You” (via delicateswans)
"People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice."
Charles Bukowski (via thatkindofwoman)
"
For women who are tied to the moon, love alone is not enough. We insist each day wrap it’s knuckles through our heart strings and pull. The lows. The joy. The poetry. We dance at the edge of a cliff, you have fallen off. So it goes. You will climb up again.
You rare girl, once again, you have a body that belongs to no lover, to no father, belongs to no one but you. Wear your sorrow like the lines on your palm. Like a shawl to keep you warm at night. Don’t mourn the love that is lost to you now. It is a book of poems whose meters worked their way into your pulse. Even if it has slipped from your hands, it will stay in your body.
You loved a man who treated you like absinthe, half poison and half god. He tried to sweeten you, to water you down. So you left. And now you have your heart all to yourself again. A heart like a stone cottage. Heart like a lover’s diary. Hope like an ocean.
"
Letter From Anais Nin to Clementine von Radics (After Marty McConnel)
"It’s so rare and so fantastic when someone loves you so much that they don’t need you to love them back to make it work. And this is the kind of love that God has for you - a love that lets you relax. This is also the kind of love God wants to cultivate within you for other people - one that goes beyond all need for acceptance."
from the June BridgeBox Devotional (via suntanintexas)
"We must nourish a great love for God and our neighbors; a strong love, an ardent love, a love that burns away imperfections, a love that gently bears an act of impatience, or a bitter word, a love that lets an inadvertence or act of neglect pass without comment, a love that lends itself readily to an act of charity."
Blessed Mary Elizabeth Hesselblad (via rainydaysandblankets)
"Sometimes I wish I could go back in time, sit down with myself and explain that things were going to be okay, that everybody loses ground sometimes and it doesn’t mean anything. It’s the way life works. This is hard to understand in the moment. You get to thinking about the girl who rejected you, the job you got fired from, the test you failed, and you lose sight of the big picture — the fact that life has a beautiful way of remaking itself every few weeks. The things that matter right now aren’t going to matter a month from now, a year from now."
Donald Miller (via suntanintexas)
"I like to believe that through years of confirmation and embarrassment with church culture my relationship with God has never really suffered. God has been a patient, steadfast, loyal friend often against His better judgment, I’m sure. My relationship with the church, however, has been akin to the dysfunctional tug-of-war one might have with his in-laws. There is a will to love but with absolutely no natural proclivity. But isn’t this one of the insurmountable conundrums of our faith? To yield ourselves enthusiastically to a belief system that requires participation in a community, the church, a fellowship of believers - often rotten, nasty people.. woefully misled, gossipy, snooty, condescending, weird, wild, culturally inane people; and I am one of them. But there you are worshipping beside each other, regardless of whether or not you love each other. The level we are called to for the body of Christ is unbearably hard not only because of the strangeness of the people who live in that body but also the ways in which the church has assimilated particular cultural characteristics I find unlikeable, uncomfortable, uncool and/or totally un-Christian."
Sufjan Stevens (via fuckyeahsufjanstevens) (via yesdarlingido)
"In friendship…we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another…the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting—any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, ‘Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,’ can truly say to every group of Christian friends, ‘Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.’ The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others."
C.S. Lewis (via mikaylaw)
"Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after."
Anne Morrow Lindbergh (via cureformylandlockedblues)
"I cannot stand small talk, because I feel like there’s an elephant standing in the room shitting all over everything and nobody is saying anything. I’m just dying to say, “Hey, do you ever feel like jumping off a bridge?” or “Do you feel an emptiness inside your chest at night that is going to swallow you?” But you can’t say that at a cocktail party."
The Mental Illness Happy Hour by Paul Gilmartin (via moxie-nation)
