Road Trips & Coffee Sips

When a person tells you you hurt them, you don’t get to decide you didn’t.

You don’t know anyone at the party, so you don’t want to go. You don’t like cottage cheese, so you haven’t eaten it in years. This is your choice, of course, but don’t kid yourself: it’s also the flinch. Your personality is not set in stone. You may think a morning coffee is the most enjoyable thing in the world, but it’s really just a habit. Thirty days without it, and you would be fine. You think you have a soul mate, but in fact you could have had any number of spouses. You would have evolved differently, but been just as happy. You can change what you want about yourself at any time. You see yourself as someone who can’t write or play an instrument, who gives in to temptation or makes bad decisions, but that’s really not you. It’s not ingrained. It’s not your personality. Your personality is something else, something deeper than just preferences, and these details on the surface, you can change anytime you like. If it is useful to do so, you must abandon your identity and start again. Sometimes, it’s the only way.

If it gets awkward, let it be awkward. That awkwardness is something they created. You don’t owe anyone a performance of being okay when you are not feeling okay so that they can feel better about themselves.

It’s been said that love finds you when you’re ready.

If you want to know what it’s like to survive hell and still come out shining brighter than the sun, just look into the eyes of a woman who has survived intense damage and refused to allow it to destroy her softness.

Let people feel the weight of who you are and let them deal with it.

God says, “Be still and know.” He doesn’t say, “Be still and do.” God wants you to relax, rest, and trust. He’s got this. He’s got you.

We must take our troubles to the Lord, but we must do more than that, we must leave them there.

Christianity isn’t church attendance, it’s Christ-likeness. It’s being so in love with who God is in you, that you wouldn’t want to be like anyone else.

We can’t hate ourselves into a version of ourselves we can love.

I want to reach for God the way I reach for my phone. When I’m bored, when I’m uncomfortable, when I need answers or entertainment, when I’m lonely and need someone to talk to.

You’re allowed to miss the people who were bullets to you, but you’re not allowed to let them shoot you again.

I won’t glorify or romanticize heartbreak, for me it was a kind of death and I was forced to keep living.

She had a strange feeling in the pit of her stomach, like when you’re swimming and you want to put your feet down on something solid, but the water’s deeper than you think and there’s nothing there.

My grandmother once told me, ‘Relationships are work, honey, and they aren’t 50/50. Some days when I get up I only feel like giving 10%, then your granddaddy has to give 90% that day. But there is always 100% love.‘”