Reset, readjust, restart, refocus.As many times as you need to.
Just don't quit!
The couples that are meant to be, are the ones who go through everything that is meant to tear them apart, and come out stronger.
MermaidDiagram Comment.
The most critical time in any battle is not when I’m fatigued, it’s when I no longer care.
Real relationships are the product of time spent, which is why so many of us have so few of them.
Intelligence and wisdom are certainly compatible, however they are rarely seen in each other’s company.
Sooner or later I will be faced with the fact that the world is helpless to meet my needs. And at that point, I will be left with two conclusions; that life is cruel or God is real.
It comes down to 'fear' and 'faith'. 'Fear' of what stands in front of me. 'Faith' in believing that the resources I possess can handle what stands in front of me. If I stop at the former, I will change nothing. If I embrace the latter, I can change everything.
Even if yesterday was wildly successful, I still don’t want to repeat it. Rather, I want to build on it.
Yet, he had also learned that when we presume to know something, we likely only know the barest essence of that thing even though we presume the fullest understanding.
Most often, what I don’t know will have a vastly greater bearing on my life that what I do know.
I have both the violent turbulence of the storm and the quiet promises of God in the storm. And what I must work to remember is that something is not necessarily stronger simply because it’s louder.
I pray that I am never so foolishly naive or roguishly pompous to think that I can be the captain of my own ship, for if God is not at the helm my ship will soon be at the bottom.
I am thankful that there are those among us who have sacrificed dearly on behalf of us. And I ardently pray to God that I might be less like myself and more like them.
Truth even in the most whispered tones will always roar.
To be careless in making decisions is to naively believe that a single decision impacts nothing more than that single decision, for a single decision can spawn a thousand others that were entirely unnecessary or it can bring peace to a thousand places we never knew existed.
Why is it that we don’t worry about a compass until we’re lost in a wilderness of our own making?
Vision is not something that’s scared by the fact that what it’s visualizing doesn’t exist. Rather, what it fears is that it does and therefore it’s no longer vision.
Faith acts today on what it is convinced will arrive tomorrow.
With God, brokenness is nothing more than the stage upon which the impossible is about to happen.
Hope crushed is never hope killed.
A horizon on the road of hope is nothing more than a starting point for the next horizon.
Hope is born in simple places to simple hearts that have enough space for a miracle to happen.
Hope waits to be discovered, begging it seems that we believe in its existence sufficiently to pursue it in order to find it to be real in the pursuing.
For life to afford us a truly new road, particularly a road of wonder and hope, we must have any remnants of the old road removed lest we are tempted to take them up yet again. And if they cannot be removed, they must be made so undesirable that nothing would behoove us to ever take them.
Wonder won’t necessarily speak our language, which doesn’t mean that it’s not speaking a language.
We are far too practical, and in our practicality we far too often forget that what is practical is far too limited to open the door to the impossible.
There are those critical crossroads when we find ourselves standing facing certain surrender only being certain that we must refuse such a surrender.
It is not the discouragement in our faith that vexes us, although we often lay the guilt in that place. Rather, it is our discouragement in our ability to hold to our faith that torments us.
If life’s bigger than any of us individually or all of us collectively, then there must be something bigger than us to walk us through it.
Death looks different when you know that death is not an end; when we realize that death is a passage of really the most glorious kind.
Just knowing that God goes with us changes everything about the place that we’re going, as well as the place we were at before we went there.
Obedience that does not have faith in that to which it is being obedient will mouth the words, but it will never walk the road.
Faith steps beyond logic, thereby inviting logic to something higher than itself.
The most difficult thing is not the belief in the infinite. No. The most difficult thing of all is to believe that the infinite would be so grand and gracious as to reside in the smallness of us. That is what requires the greatest faith.
If we stand for nothing, it may be that we believe in nothing. And it may be that believing in nothing is the worst kind of believing of all.
I have been driven to desperation more times than I can count. But it is here that I have been driven to the greatest inspiration that I can contain.
It is in the defeat that we find the ingredients for the next success.
Never having made a mistake is a success that is always inferior to having made a mistake and having learned from it.
Failure is not failure unless we fail to learn from it.
Without hesitation, I can tell you that it wasn’t the ability to get it right that got me here. Rather, it was the ability to learn every time that I got it wrong.
Waiting on the Lord is the decision to abandon my time-table because it only has two legs.
Far too often, the rewards for our efforts seem to be mere pennies as held against the fortune of time and sacrifice spent attempting to earn them.
True greatness does not flaunt itself in long displays. Rather, it comes in the briefest moments to quickly appear and then submerge itself to shape the tides of time from deep places.
Sometimes time cannot sweep wonderful places and people into the backwater of our own histories because the preciousness of those places and those people refuses to be swept away.
We equate wisdom with intelligence, which is about the same as equating a can opener with a can. If you don’t apply the first to the second, neither of them matter.
We look around us and we find ourselves confused as to why the world has fallen into such deep darkness. And standing in this descending darkness, what we need to realize is that the farther we move from God, the darker everything gets. And no light of man can illuminate that kind of darkness.
The cause for which I stand is the reconciliation of mankind with God. For if that cause is accomplished, all causes are accomplished.
If you’re going to ignore God, at least be mature enough to take responsibility for what’s going to happen after you do that.
God poses no threat to me other than keeping me from being my own greatest threat.
Some things must be pursued, or they may in fact pursue us.
I will either die at the hands of myself or live in the hands of God.
I can get on my knees and pray all day, but until my attitude is on its knees nothing will be different once I’m back on my feet.
God is always on time. If there’s anything that’s late, it’s our ability to realize that.
Sometimes it’s less about making the right decision and more about not making the wrong one.
We need to pay attention to our decisions, for they will determine the losses that we will experience as well as the losses that we will avoid.
When we choose to stay down, we are in reality confusing wisdom with cowardice. When we choose to stand back up, we are using wisdom to overcome cowardice.
What we describe as ‘plans’ are often the best guess that we have for a situation that we probably don’t understand.
It is nothing more than a mere handful of thoughtful words unfettered by tarnished agendas, tempered by wisdom, ordered by truth, and arranged into simple syntax that have empowered ordinary men to do utterly extraordinary things. And I am thankful that I am an ordinary man who loves words.
If we don’t use our minds, we can be certain that someone else will.
In whatever battle we're facing, we too often lose hope. And once we've lost hope we've not only lost the battle, we've lost everything else as well.
Christmas does not invite you to something that happened in history. Rather, Christmas is God inviting you to something that’s already shaping your eternity.
Christmas is not a story of hope. It is hope.
I believe in Christmas because God is the only Being I know Who is so utterly selfless as to do such a thing, and so incredibly ingenious as to figure out how to do it.
Christmas is opportunity while everything else in life is the hope of opportunity.
I don’t know if anyone really believes that they’re invincible. Rather, I think that it’s a wish that’s been mistaken for a fact.
Don’t pay attention to the size of the mountain in front of you. Rather, think about what the view from the summit is going to be like.
I don’t know that our dreams died. Rather, I think that they were abandoned because that leaves us with the dream that maybe, in some nearly impossible way we can somehow still achieve the dream, for without a dream it us who dies.
God doesn’t want us to focus on what mankind has done, but on what He plans to do.
The size of an ending will never offset the inevitability of a beginning.
Sometimes I wonder if the cost of my dream is less about the efforts to achieve it and more about disappointment I’ll experience if it doesn’t happen. But then I remember that the nature of a dream is such that it is worth dreaming even if it never comes true.
We must always remember that the darkness might hide everything, but it eliminates nothing.
When hope has eluded me and I can see nothing but the pain within which I sit, I remember that a horizon cannot exist without two sides; the one I can see and the one that I cannot.
Does the robin sing because the cold of winter is leaving or the warmth of spring is coming? Or might he be singing because each without the other would lessen both?
While the ferocity of the battle often rises to such heights that we ignore things as small as this, we would be wise to remember that the innately raw power to overcome the obstacles that blunt our hearts and block our paths lay cupped in the tender hands of a few simple words.
Mankind is a mess. But messes are made to be cleaned up.
Reality often holds the facts that we desperately wish to avoid, but at the same time it holds the ingredients of the dreams that we hope to achieve.
I’m not certain that the greatest thrill was actually being rescued. Rather, I think that the greatest thrill was finally realizing that I would be. And the cry of an infant two thousand years ago was that realization.
Might I wish to be all that I can be and not fall victim to all that I fear to be.
There’s plenty of things that are wrong in our world, and we can give them free reign to completely define our view of the world. Or we can focus on the fact that what’s wrong with the world are the essential raw materials from which a person of determination crafts everything which is right.
If it’s all meaningless then why are we discussing that it’s all meaningless, for such a conversation is of itself meaningless. So, maybe the fact that we’re having a meaningless conversation about life being meaningless evidences that it’s not.
If something didn’t happen, it’s probably not that it couldn’t. Rather, it’s more that we chose not to believe that it could.
We squander our souls by giving them over to what makes them feel good rather than surrendering them to what makes them grow strong.
We trust many things that can't be trusted because at some fundamentally primal level we desperately wish that there was, so we settle for what we cannot when right in front of us there's a God that we can.
I think that bravery comes when the conviction to the principles that we hold dear takes our focus off the ferocity of the challenges that stand before us and instead directs our focus to the ferocity that is unleashed when a conviction is let off the leash.
The impossible is not the place where we ran out of possibilities. Rather, it’s the place where we ran out of faith.
I want to have a robust vision for what God can do, but I want to have an equally robust passion to get out of His way so that He can do it.
Prayer is lifting something up to a God Who had the answer before I knew I had the problem.
It was in learning to pray for you that I finally began to discover the richness that I missed for all of the years that I wasn’t praying for you. But the prayer of my prayers is not that this richness would rest with me, but that it would be transferred in the fullness of it to you.
Faith is understanding that what we can be and what we can know is far too small to be the end of anything, much less what we can be and what we can know.
I don’t want to say that I believe in God. Rather, I want to live out my life like I believe in God because that takes the words that I choose not to say and it shouts them without ever saying them.
Any refuge other than God is probably something that I should seek refuge from rather than seek refuge in.
The battle is never fought alone even though we might feel alone in the fight, for with God the feeling of being alone never supersedes the fact of His presence.
If I place any challenge into the hands of God, all I can see are hands.
If we want to build our faith in God, maybe we should start by understanding His faith in us.
When circumstances ‘take the wind out of us,’ we would be wise to turn to the God Who can take the wind out of the circumstances.
It is not the gravity of the moment. Rather, it is the faith of the man who stands in the gravity of the moment.
Fear is the absence of faith, while the presence of faith leaves us with the absence of nothing.
That which is possible is only the seedbed for that which is impossible. And therefore, if we neglect to plant liberally we might live lives full of the possible, but we will never hold the harvest of the impossible.
They say that believing in God can be hard. But from where I’m standing, that’s nothing compared to having to believe in myself. Yet, the oddest thing of all is that God believes in me even if I don’t believe in either of us.
The greatest evidence we have that God does matter is all of the time and energy we put into telling ourselves that He doesn’t.
If we are to believe in a future that we cannot see, we must learn to believe in many things that we cannot see. The first thing would be God. And the second would the bit of Himself that He placed within each of us.
I make messes. God makes masterpieces. And the difference is found in surrendering what I think I know to the God who knows without having to think.
I admire animals, for they don’t question life. Rather, they just live it. And on that rare occasion when I reach that enviable place, I realize that I’ve been living a ‘task’ rather than living a life.
When I come to the end of myself it’s probably because God is teaching me how to find the beginning of Him.
How in the world are we supposed to engage life when we spend all of our life building walls to protect ourselves from the very thing that we say we want to engage? The answer is, I think, understanding that God doesn’t need walls but we need Him.
It has nothing to do with what the mountain in front of us is. Rather, it has everything to do with what God is going to do to it.
Having the eyes of a child does not mean that we are naïve. Rather, it means that we’ve become brave enough to believe in a great good while simultaneously embracing the reality of a great evil.
Life is precious regardless of how you choose to think about it.
The utterly frightening thing about great things is that we don’t know where they’re taking us, we can’t control them, and we’ll never be able to return to what we left. And are those things not the things that make great things great?
If God believes in you, then it doesn’t matter if anyone else does. And God has never not believed in you.
Change begins with ‘one person’ who so inspires others that they themselves can do nothing other than change. And no matter the dismal state of the world or the gravity of the situation, don’t ever think for a moment that that ‘one person’ is not you.
Dreams were meant to be born, not just dreamt about.
History is wonder of the greatest sort.
Behind the mask of pessimism there is nothing more than this pathetic fear that spends every waking moment of its day fearing that we might actually succeed.
Most of the maps that I create go from the nowhere of where I am to the nowhere of what I think is a somewhere. For without God, my nowhere and my somewhere will not take me anywhere.
It’s not that mankind is failing. Rather, it’s that mankind has failed to understand that failure is most often a choice based on the belief that we cannot succeed.
My prayer is that none of us would ever find ourselves at the bottom of a hole looking up, but if we happen to find ourselves there my prayer would be that God would be at the top of the hole reminding us that He’s also at the bottom.
The only place that a defeat becomes a defeat is when I make it so in my mind.
When it comes to life, I would much rather have run the race well than have run the race fast. For if we understand life, we would realize that the first one to cross the finish line is not necessarily the one who actually won the race.
Fear tells us to stay down so we won’t get knocked down again. God says to get up because while we might get knocked down again, at least it’ll be up the road from the last place where that happened.
How full the cup of my life might be is based largely on the degree to which I’m willing to risk failure, with the degree to which I’m willing to risk success following at a close second.
There is no doubt that you will touch a life today. It's just the manner in which you choose to do so, and how that will leave both yourself and everyone you touched once it's over.
I think we fear that if we give ourselves away we are certain to lose ourselves in the giving. And I would suggest that you cannot lose yourself in ‘giving yourself away.’ Rather, you lose yourself when you ‘squander’ yourself away.
Even though you left, I am grateful that I was able to leave a part of me with you. And rather than being selfish and somehow hoping that this part will always remind you of me, I hope that it’s less me and more the good things that I carried with me that might now help carry you.
It’s not ‘time’ for God, for there was never a time that was not a time for Him. What it’s ‘time’ for is our realization that we’ve needed Him all the time and we just never took the time to realize that.
I love sunrises and sunsets. But what I really love is the space that I have in-between them to do something incredible.
I spend a whole lot of time in a whole lot of places that don’t do me a whole lot of good, when God has spent a whole lot of time inviting me to spend the whole of eternity with Him.
The man who waits to know everything is the man who never does anything.
In walking with God it’s not about knowing the facts. Rather, it’s about knowing the God Who knows the facts.
If you've been foolish enough to underestimate the power of prayer then you've probably been naive enough to overestimate the power of everything else.
Impossible’ is the rumor that dies when God shows up.
We think that digging the well means that we don’t need to rely on the God Who created the spring. Either way, He created the water in both.
We would be wise to remember that the world’s definition of us will always diminish God’s design within us.
May we as father’s pray that God would transform the men that we are in order to heal the wounds that we have caused. And might we kneel before this God every day so that the transformation never stops, but the wounding does.
Maybe finding ‘peace of mind’ begins by realizing that ‘peace’ will never begin in my ‘mind.’ And if I spend my life paying such a thought ‘no mind,’ never-mind finding ‘peace.
Sacrifice is the pinnacle of our humanity. Yet, so many of us stay in the basement of our greed.
Have you ever stopped to consider the absolute absurdity of paying good money for a lamp that wasn’t built to be lit? Yet, in our lives we do that every day and then we wonder why it’s always dark.
To be broken means that the best of my resources lay shattered and strewn about. And it is then and only then that I am at my peak, for it is at these times that there is less of me to get in the way of all of God.
Have you ever dared to consider that perhaps the greatest story ‘never told’ is the story that God is waiting to tell through you!
We dig wells that are less than a stone’s throw away from bubbling springs because we think that digging the well means that we don’t need to rely on the God Who created the spring. Either way, He created the water in both.
While the wise person does not invite hardship, the first thing that they see when it shows up is opportunity.
Doing ‘nothing’ is often cowardice that we’ve dressed up to look like discretion.
It’s not that we get bad answers. Rather, it’s more likely that we ask bad questions.
Any dream that is all contemplation and no initiation is only a wish.
The darkness might keep us from seeing the hope around us, but it does not have the power to remove the hope around us.
Could it that the impossible is compelling because we have just enough God within us to know the impossible to be achievable, and just enough of ourselves within us to know that we have to rely on Him to do it?
As I stand cloaked in some seemingly perpetual darkness desperately hoping for a scant ray of light, I ask, “Why has the sun never risen?” And I realize that it rose a long, long time ago. I just refused to open my eyes sufficiently to see it.
God’s faith in me always dwarfs my faith in Him.
f all we see are cinders and ashes, all we see is ‘what was’ at the expense of what the cinders and ashes are preparing to be.
Hope sees what we can’t. And because we can’t, hope asks us to believe that it can.
If I take into consideration the scope of my sorely limited vision, I slowly begin to realize that the less I can see something the greater it actually might be. And maybe that’s what vision is all about.
For many, their dream is simply to survive until tomorrow. And in these situations, my prayer is not that God would alter their circumstances nor change their heart. Rather, it is that they would invite God into both.
I don’t define darkness as the absence of light. Rather, I define it as the absence of God. And in that sense, it’s never dark.
Should all the hoards of mankind assemble as one and bring the full force of their numbers against us, we must remember that one man standing alone with God remains an immovable majority.
I don’ know if we believe that things can’t be done. Rather, I think that we’re too fearful to believe that maybe they can.
God takes the impossible and makes it the inevitable.
When we lose the belief in ‘something better’ we’ve embraced the belief in ‘all things worse.’ And such a perspective is based less on things being worse, and more on our inability to believe that we can make it better.
I am not ashamed of my God. But I am deeply ashamed of the fact that we have created a gospel that is far more of ‘us’ and far less of God. And more of ‘us’ is not anything that any of us need, but more of God is everything that we all need.
We wonder why God waits to step in after it’s too late. That’s because with God there is no such thing as too late.
When we fall to the bottom of the hole that we’ve spent our lives digging, we will find that God was there waiting for us long before we showed up. And in one hand He’s holding all of the shovels that we used to dig it, and in the other He’s got a ladder.
I think that the stories that God has told and the things that He has done seem utter implausible to us only because we lock Him into the tiny rubrics that the stories He has told and the things that He has done invite us outside of.
I think that the stories that God has told and the things that He has done seem utterly implausible to us only because we lock Him into the tiny rubrics that the stories He has told and the things that He has done invite us outside of.
I expend my days relentlessly attempting to design my life in a manner that is designed to meet the needs in my life. Yet, God did not design life to do that. Rather, He designed life to direct us to Him so that He could do that.
My faith is not some pathetic emotional escape from a reality that I am unable to cope with. Rather, my faith is the power to change that reality by changing me so that I can change it. And from that, I don’t need any escape nor do I want one.
Astonishingly, there is in the smallness of me sufficient space for God to insert the fullness of Himself. And because that reality is massive beyond all comprehension, the best I can do is be thankful beyond all measure so that God can use me beyond all restriction.
Once I stare into the face of God, I can stare into the face of anything.
Great writing is about packing a single thought into a handful of words so that your life can be enlarged by a boatload of growth. And if what you’re reading isn’t doing that for you, it’s just scribbling.
To blame my failures on the lack of resources is less about the lack of resources and more about my unwillingness to access those resources.
Real victory is based on surrender to the right things, while failure is based on the unwillingness to surrender to anything.
Without exaggerating the point, the difference between ‘what I should do’ verses ‘what I want to do’ is quite frankly the difference between success and failure.
Today is non-refundable. Therefore, I’d better live it in a manner that a refund is unnecessary.
Has my life been cheated by the shortness of the time afforded me, or is it possible that the greater part of my life has been saved for a time where there is no time?
It is at the moment that we began to pray that the darkness begins to die.
When I surrender to God all of the things in my life that I have surrendered to, I have surrendered to ever having to surrender again.
If you deem me as being a fool because I believe in God, I would only have you look around at the chaos and carnage in the world today and ask what kind of fool would believe in men who don’t believe in God?
It is not ignorance that causes me to follow God, nor is it escapism through some rigorously contrived fantasy. Rather, those are the things that keep me from following the world.
More often than not, it’s not that we don’t believe in God. Rather, it’s that we don’t want to.
It seems that we are not in a state of disbelief regarding the existence of God. Rather, we are in a state of rebellion against His existence. But have we not yet come to understand that in the end, that kind of rebellion is a rebellion against our own existence?
Mankind is on a mission to free itself from a God whose mission is to free us from ourselves. And if our mission prevails, we won’t.
How do I come to believe in God? Immerse yourself in the alternatives.
On that morning, the first rays of a rising sun skipped across the tips of the forested canopy as if to tickle them awake in the anticipation of a day rising. And I will tell you, sitting with God each morning has never ceased to tickle me awake in the exact same way.
If Jesus is in the storm, then there is no need for us to be in the boat. Yet, too many Christians spend all of their time wandering around the marina being in neither boat nor storm.
The only ethics that will effectively guide mankind are those that mankind did not create.
I can tell you that God has repeatedly ‘raised me up’ in the middle of the innumerable situations where ‘up’ had become a hope lost in the darkness of the places to which I had fallen. And while that is the miracle of my story, it sits waiting to be the reality of yours.
There is no depth that exceeds the reach of the God who is, at this very moment, seeking you out in the holes that you have dug for yourself.
When I find a man sold out to God, I have found a rare thing. And I have discovered that God is in the business of creating rare things, of which I someday hope to be one so that I might help you become one as well.
If I have relegated God to a fantasy born of frightened men ill-suited to face life, I would suggest that this is far more the story of frightened men who wish God to be a fantasy because they are ill-suited to face Him.
Do you want to make the darkness around you seize up in fear? Pray. For prayer is the soul turning the dark of a long night into the light of a forever day.
All I know is that if God’s not in it, you can be confident that neither am I.
No waters can rise so high that God doesn’t have a boat for it.
Knowledge Strategy Execution
Motivation is a byproduct of action, not the catalyst for it.
Control your thoughts or your thoughts will control you.
Today is a new day. Stop living in the past.
Focus on the step in front of you, not the whole staircase.
You attract what you are, not what you want. If you want great, then be great.
Your goals should scare you a little and excite you a lot.
