The amazing thing about love and attention and encouragement and grace and success and joy is that these things are infinite. We get a new supply every single morning, and so we can give it away all day. We never, ever have to monitor the supply of others or grab or hoard.Collection: Morning
A safe life includes following your dreams with the full knowledge that doing so is not, in any way, shape or form, safe in the traditional meaning of the word. Because living safely means dying without too many regrets. That is safe.Collection: Knowledge
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.Collection: Parenting
When in doubt, I choose love above any particular ideas offered to me about faith.Collection: Faith
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.Collection: Courage
We are all trained by Disney to believe that the wedding is the finish line, but the wedding is just another starting line. In light of this fact, we should quit the huge, fancy, debt-inducing weddings.Collection: Wedding
Young people: marry simply, start your life, and party later. Think of how much babysitting for your future colicky baby you could buy with that wedding budget. Think of how much marriage therapy you could buy. Invest in your marriage, not your wedding.Collection: Wedding
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.Collection: Travel
We all have this misunderstanding about heartbreak, which is we think we should avoid it. But what I think is that heartache is a clue toward the work we're supposed to be doing in the world. What breaks each person's heart is different - be it racial injustice, war, or animals. And when you figure out what it is that breaks yours, go toward it.Collection: War
Compassion does not just happen. Pity does, but compassion is not pity. It's not a feeling. Compassion is a viewpoint, a way of life, a perspective, a habit that becomes a discipline - and more than anything else, compassion is a choice we make that love is more important than comfort or convenience.Collection: Love
I just think that if we are going to call ourselves pro-life, we must also agree that starvation and poverty and disease and immigration and health care for all and war and peace and the environment are also pro-life issues.Collection: Peace
When people express opinions that differ from yours, take it as a chance to grow. Seek to understand over being understood. Be curious, not defensive. The only way to disarm another human being is by listening.Collection: Chance
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.Collection: Marriage
I ask only child-free pals for parenting advice because they're the only ones sane and well-rested enough to have any real insight.Collection: Parenting
To me, full-time mothering felt like way too much and yet not nearly enough. Lost in a landslide of diapers, birthday parties, and others' needs, I ached to reestablish myself.Collection: Birthday
It makes no sense to me that my gay friends cannot get married to each other because a certain slice of Christianity doesn't believe in gay marriage.
We should live out our particular brand of faith, sure - but we should never force our brand of faith upon anyone else. All violence starts with the desire to change others and then never, ever ends.
I believe in people because I believe in God. I think God knew what God was doing when God made each of us.
I am not bound to spend my precious days on Earth trying to keep up with the Joneses - because the Joneses are really just a bunch of folks in conference rooms changing 'trends' rapidly to create fake monthly emergencies for us.
I'm nothing if not a tangled, colorful ball of contradictions.
It is suggested to us a million times a day that our bodies are projects. They aren't. Our lives are. Our spirituality is. Our relationships are. Our work is.
Habits are learned. And children learn their habits by watching what we do, not by listening to what we say. So we have to stop talking and teaching and preaching and just go do.
The most important thing on Earth is for all of us to make this sentence true: Compassion is what people do.
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.
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.
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.
Do not measure your marriage by how much love you feel today: measure it by how much love you've offered today.
I snap at people I love all the time, and that makes me feel bad about myself. I want to be Zen. I am so not Zen. Whatever Zen is, I'm the opposite of it.
If we are going to ask for our daily bread, we've got to take the time to receive it and eat it. God provide, but we've got to slow down long enough to taste and see.
Being a mother is a little like 'Groundhog's Day.' It's getting out of bed and doing the exact same things again and again and yet again - and it's watching it all get undone again and again and yet again. It's humbling, monotonous, mind-numbing, and solitary.
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.
Nothing separates a woman or a family from God's love. Not death, and certainly not divorce.
You can be shattered, and then you can put yourself back together piece by piece. But what can happen over time is this: You wake up one day and realize that you have put yourself back together completely differently. That you are whole, finally, and strong - but you are now a different shape, a different size.
Over time, I have come to believe that 'brave' does not mean what we think it does. It does not mean 'being afraid and doing it anyway.' Nope. Brave means listening to the still small voice inside and doing as it says. Regardless of what the rest of the world is saying.
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.
Your body is not your art - it's your paintbrush. Whether your paintbrush is a tall paintbrush or a thin paintbrush or a stocky paintbrush or a scratched up paintbrush is completely irrelevant.
We need to make friends with ourselves. We are stuck with our self all day, so let's be kinder, gentler, more amusing company. Let's take our own hand and say, 'There, there, sister. You're doing a good job. I'm proud of how you're handling all this craziness down here. Don't give up. Carry on, warrior.'
Life is not safe, and so our task is not to promise our kids there will be no turbulence. It's to assure them that when the turbulence comes, we will all hold hands and get through it together.
The hardest part of living without social media was remembering that my little life was enough, so I could just stay there and live it without asking for anyone else's permission or validation. I realized that for me, posting is like asking the world, 'Do you 'like' me?'
The Internet has become my enabler. It keeps me from stillness and discomfort, and this keeps me from growing.
Rock bottom is a crisis... and everyone wants to avoid crisis. But what 'crisis' means literally is 'to sift' - like a child who goes to the beach, lifts up the sand, and watches all the sand fall away, hoping that there's treasure left over. That's what crisis does.
We can be shiny and perfect and admired, or we can be real and honest and vulnerable and loved. But we actually do have to choose.
If grace isn't shocking and countercultural and scandalous and a little ridiculous, then it's not Grace.
Life is a conversation. Make it a good one.
I don't think that I'm broken at all. I no longer think that I'm a mess. I just think I'm a deeply feeling person in a messy world.
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.
When we shrug and say we don't care, it's usually a lie. Every girl cares. We've just been taught not to expose ourselves by showing it. What the world needs now is girls and women who aren't afraid to care - who are done saying, 'Whatever.'
The fact that we define ourselves by our roles can be an admirable thing - it's how we build a life and make a living. But it's also precarious. Roles change. Sometimes overnight.
Many of us spend the first part of our adult lives becoming - stepping into the roles we take on so that they come to define our lives. But I've learned that we don't really grow up until we unbecome.
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.