The Internet is neither good nor bad. It's neutral - it becomes for each of us exactly what we bring to it.
My greatest fear is that I'll fail my kids.
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.
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.
'Brave' is very specific and extremely personal. It can't be judged by people on the outside. Just can't. Sometimes brave means letting everyone else think you're a coward. Sometimes brave is letting everyone else down but yourself.
Often, we need to ignore the words people say and attend to their underlying, urgent, life or death questions: Am I valuable? Am I loved? The great thing is that the answer is easy: Yes! The answer is always yes. We don't have to think too hard.
If you ask a woman who she is, she'll tell you who she serves and sometimes what she does. But that isn't the whole story.
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.
I think that in order to parent effectively, we are going to have to admit two things: We can't keep our children safe. We can't accept the fact that we can't keep our children safe.
I wrote in my first book that I was broken, and now it just makes me mad every time. This is why writing words in books is so precarious. This is why Jesus only wrote in the sand, right? I just - I hate that I wrote that.
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 am not, at the end of the day, a mother, a wife, a writer, an activist, a friend. I am a child of God. That's who I was when I came into this world and who I'll be when I leave it. No one can take that from 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.
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.
If you're not okay, you might as well not pretend you are, especially since life has a way of holding us down until we utter that magic word: help! That's when angels rush to your side.
We'd better not speak against misogyny if, in the same breath, we're not also speaking against transphobia and homophobia and racism and classism and poverty. This is one fight. It always has been.
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.
You do not have to agree with me to love me.
The closer you get to people who are different than you, the more you learn that we're all same.
We're told that to be successful girls, we have to be small and quiet. Yet to be successful humans, we have to become big and have a voice. There's an inherent contradiction.
I've never believed in or understood romantic love. Love at first sight was always a complete joke to me.
I can't even carpe 15 minutes in a row. So a whole diem is out of the question.
I realized I didn't just want to parent children in my own little home but to mother the whole world. What's the point of gaining influence if you're not going to use it?
I hated writing 'Love Warrior.' It's the hardest thing I've every written. I cried.
Love is kind, right? It's not about calling someone out on every little thing you feel.
It blows my mind when I actually consider that men are as human as I am. How can you possibly be as human and have all of the thoughts and feelings that I have and never be able to talk about it, ever? Guys are in desperate need of truth telling. They are in desperate need of a revolution.
Making sensible family rules around cell phones and driving is a way to love yourself, your marriage, your children, and the world well.
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.
When folks decide they love any institution more than the individual souls inside them, they're missing the mark.
Sometimes when you love someone like a mother loves her child, that love can turn into fear. It happens to me all the time. I am so afraid that the world will not be kind to my children.
I'm not big on faith rules, but if I had to choose one, it would be that every person must choose a faith issue upon which to hang her hat that requires her to change - not somebody else.