“Strength comes from choosing to fully trust, pray, and praise. Our circumstances may not change, but in the process we change.”

God also allows suffering so that we might learn what it means to depend on Him, not on our own strength and resources.

When you accept the fact that sometimes seasons are dry and times are hard and that God is in control of both, you will discover a sense of divine refuge, because the hope then is in God and not in yourself.

Because God gave you your makeup and superintended every moment of your past, including all the hardship, pain, and struggles, He wants to use your words in a unique manner. No one else can speak through your vocal cords, and, equally important, no one else has your story.

God often does His best work in us when He catches us by surprise and introduces a change that is completely against our own desire.

Focusing intently on Christ naturally results in a lifestyle of increasingly greater selflessness. And it has another benefit. Gazing on Christ gives us greater ability to look past life’s trials and remain calm in the midst of what others would call chaos.

Hope is like an anchor. Our hope in Christ stabilizes us in the storms of life, but unlike an anchor, it does not hold us back.

I’m here today to warn you: I want you to watch out for the adversary. Guard yourself from any spirit of entitlement. Restrain any and all subtle temptation to gain attention or to find ways to promote yourself.

God will never adjust His agenda to fit ours. He will not speed up His pace to catch up with ours; we need to slow our pace in order to recover our walk with Him. God will not scream and shout over the noisy clamor; He expects us to seek quietness, where His still small voice can be heard again.

When you accept the fact that sometimes seasons are dry and times are hard and that God is in control of both, you will discover a sense of divine refuge, because the hope then is in God and not in yourself.

All he asks is that we trust Him, that we stand before Him in integrity and faith. God is just waiting for us to trust Him.

I’m here today to warn you: I want you to watch out for the adversary. Guard yourself from any spirit of entitlement. Restrain any and all subtle temptation to gain attention or to find ways to promote yourself.

Jesus kept it simple. The lesson wasn’t complicated. ‘I speak; you believe My word; your son will be fine.’ We complicate what God has made simple by seeing the world through human eyes. We want to see in order to believe and presume that our limitations are His.

Envy is one of the great enemies of active spirituality. It keeps us from loving our neighbours, from functioning with others in community, and from affirming people’s unique worth. It also steals contentment from the heart. Is there anything or anyone you are envious of?

We can’t solve modern problems by going back in time. Retreating to the safety of the familiar is an understandable response, but God has called us to a life of faith. And faith requires us to face the unknown while trusting Him completely.

God is a specialist at making something useful and beautiful out of something broken and confused.

No pressure is greater than God’s power.

Even if we didn’t know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.

How we grind make the weather change for us.

I have over a hundred wigs, I like to change them damn near every hour.

I wasn’t going to let one person’s opinion dislodge everything I thought I knew about myself. Instead, I switched my method without changing my goal.

Life was teaching me that progress and change happen slowly. Not in two years, four years, or even a lifetime. We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.

No matter who you are, no matter what you did, no matter where you’ve come from, you can always change, become a better version of yourself.

Nothing happens while you live. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that’s all. There are no beginnings. Days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable, monotonous addition.

Just as a prism refracts light differently when you change its angle, each experience of love illuminates love in new ways, drawing from an infinite palette of patterns and hues.