Best 26 quotes of Jen Pollock Michel on MyQuotes

According to Aquinas, effort may not be the best measure of our virtue.

After her initial conversion as a teenager, the author writes, "I was sent back into a world that no longer looked familiar to me. I had to relearn how to do everything.

All prayers that beseech the mercy of God are finally and fully answered in that suffering Servant Whom God sent, Jesus Christ. We, even our desires, are saved because HE was bruised.

Blessing and obedience do comfortably and mysteriously coexist.

Believing in the sovereignty of God injects courage in the act of desire.

Desire, if it is to be trusted, is to be inspired by a holy vocabulary.

Dinner is a cacophonous exercise of holy sanctification.

Every act of seizure is an act of grace.

God is the I AM that I AM not the I AM that we wish.

Grace has as much to say about endings as it does about beginnings.

His childhood passed in quiet anxiety.

Holy desire can be learned. All prayer is part work and part rest.

How do you fill the space between, "God says it," and, "I believe it,"?

I didn't know how faith felt when it grew incrementally.

New freedoms surface old habits. I haven't left sin behind, only discovered a new medium for my treachery. My real trouble as a writer isn't trying to mean the words that I write. It's living into the words that I mean. Nonfiction writing can feel like the high art of hypocrisy.

Only he who cries out for the persecuted Jews can sing Gregorian chants. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Our moral frailty is a strange consolation.

Our small group is committed to getting the biblical text under our skin.

Part of the practice of modest faith, in times of suffering, is relinquishing our right to answers. God has never promised to explain himself, but he has promised to stay near. I will never leave, he says; I will never forsake. I am the friend that sticks closer than your brother. Do not think me unmoved by your grief. These are the faithful assurances of God as we have them in Scripture, and here is even more hope available to those willing to search it out. But let’s not be fooled to think that God has promised things like: it will get better, you’ll soon see the purpose behind this pain, there’s never more than you can handle. Often it does get better; often we do see purpose; always there is sufficient grace. But lament must practice the modest faith of finding sufficient that which God provides, even if, in seasons of great sorrow, it may not seem like enough.” …

Sticks and stones may break your bones, and words – can cut your insides.

Struggle is a prerequisite to surrender.

The Bible provocatively evokes desire.

The biblical narrative begins and ends at home. From the Garden of Eden to the New Jerusalem we are hardwired for place and for permanence, for rest and refuge, for presence and protection. We long for home because welcome was our first gift of grace and it will be our last. The settings of our first home and our last home will testify to the nature of the embodied story God is writing in human history. Because God's story begins in a garden and ends in a city, place isn't incidental to Christian hope, just as our bodies aren't incidental to salvation. God will resurrect our bodies, and he will -- finally -- bring us home.

The Christian story, centered as it is on the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, is the only story for making sense of desire and loss.

The phrases of the Lord's Prayer, "are words we pray, not always because we believe them, but because we WANT to believe them.

We prefer the not wanting and not having to the losing.