IVP

I’m here to walk this path with you, showing you what I’ve both learned and then unlearned. Helping you—so you don’t have to repeat my mistakes.

breathing is an invitation to live.

our lives are sequences of invitations and our responses to them.

It hurts to live after someone has died

is difficult, and we experience that difficulty in different ways and to varying extents,
but we always experience it in our hearts and minds.

Mental suffering takes many forms, only some of which have roots in disease.

If you take away one truth, the one thing in this book I know with certainty, let it be this: your life is a good gift from a loving God, even when subjectively it doesn’t feel good or like a gift, and even when you doubt that God is loving. Please get out of bed anyway.

What’s the bravest thing you ever did? . . .

Getting up this morning.

C ORMAC M CC ARTHY, THE ROAD

I didn’t believe that I was owed this normal life. But my sense of the world and of Christianity was that if I put in the work and honored God with my time, none of these good things were out of reach. They were normal, reasonable expectations. It wasn’t like I had grandiose visions of fame or riches. I just expected things to be nice if I took care of my business. And so I did.

The few people I met who had difficult lives seemed to choose their suffering. I could trace their problems back to a flaw in their character or intelligence. They also tended not
to be Christians, or at least not good Christians. From what I could see, they had decided to be miserable or depressed or a failure or whatever. And I would think, You know, if they just made better choices, if they were just disciplined and stopped making excuses, they wouldn’t have to suffer this way.