Present Over Perfect: Leaving Behind Frantic For A Simpler, More Soulful Way Of Living Quotes
"I’ve learned that if I hustle fast enough, the emptiness will never catch up with me."
"I’m committed to a particular, limited amount of things in this season, and if what’s being asked of me isn’t one of those, then it stands in the way."
"My prayer is that this book will be a thousand invitations, springing up from every page, calling you to leave behind the heavy weight of comparison, competition, and exhaustion, and to recraft a life marked by meaning, connection, and unconditional love."
"I’ve been so committed to prove (as though anyone cares) that I can handle it all."
"What I ache for these days is space, silence, stillness. Sabbath."
"You can make a drug—a way to anesthetize yourself—out of anything."
"It’s as though God, in his graciousness and wisdom, pressed his thumbs into the twin wounds of my life, the desire to prove and the desire to escape, and in that pressing is the invitation."
"But here’s the good news: you get to decide who you’re going to disappoint, who you’re going to say no to."
"You don’t have to damage your body and your soul and the people you love most in order to get done what you think you have to get done. You don’t have to live like this."
"And it does get easier. The first few times I had to say no were excruciating. But as you regularly tell the truth about what you can and can’t do, who you are and who you’re not, you’ll be surprised at how some people will cheer you on."
"When you say, This is what I can do; this is what I can’t, you’ll find so much freedom in that."
"My knee-jerk answer is yes. My default setting is yes."
"A friend I don’t know well asked for help with something recently. And all the old impulses kicked in. Of course! I’m your girl! Anything for you!"
"This story begins and ends on the water, and our life at the lake is a theme threaded throughout."
"It’s at the lake that I realize how far I’ve come, or how far I have yet to travel."
"Part of the magic of the lake is that it isn’t home—it’s away."
"The lake gives me something to aspire to—a reminder, a rhythm, a pattern."
"You have to start with the outsides—it’s the only way to begin."
"A friend of mine told me I was pulling the ripcord on my career by being so outspoken about how badly I didn’t want to travel and speak anymore."
"Some of being an adult, though, is about protecting and preserving what we discover to be the best parts of ourselves."
"The perfect weather for writing: gray, cool, windy."
"We stayed on the beach for hours, because there’s something about the beach that just brings out the best in little kids."
"The glass of cool water is more lovely and sustaining than the firehose will ever be."
"Here’s what I know: I thought the doing and the busyness would keep me safe. They keep me numb. Which is not the same as safe."
"The stillness feels sort of like walking on the ceiling—utterly foreign."
"Lake life has those invitations to rest and slowness woven right into the fabric of our days."
"It’s raining now, and I love the sound of the drops falling on the awning outside my window."
"But this is what I’ve learned the hard way: what people think about you means nothing in comparison to what you believe about yourself."
"The crucial journey, then, for me, has been from dependence on external expectations, down into my own self, deeper still into God’s view of me."
"In seasons of deep transformation, silence will be your greatest guide."
"It’s where you will nurture that fledgling sense of authority, like a newborn deer on spindly fragile legs."
"For the first time in my life, it’s when I’m alone and quiet that I feel my strength."
"I don’t want to miss the actual fabric of the interior of my life and the beautiful children growing up right this second in my own home because I’m working to please people somewhere out there."
"You can get this right. It’s not too late. You can start again, right now."
"As ever, the invitations to remake your life come from every corner if you’re looking for them."
"The legacy I care most about is the one I’m creating with the people who know me best—my children, my husband, my best friends."
"Only love feeds us. And love happens over years, repetitive motions, staying, staying, staying."
"And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good."
"Present over perfect living is real over image, connecting over comparing, meaning over mania, depth over artifice."
"These are the terms! Now what’s the invitation?"
"Friendship carries all this mess together, so that you don’t have to hide, so that you carry it together."
"There is nothing in all the world more attractive than a man who is tender with his small son, who washes his hair and gently wipes the water out of his blue eyes."
"The journey of these years have been toward quiet—toward creating quiet around me, but more than that, toward creating quiet within me, which is much more difficult, and much more profound."
"Just because you have the capacity to do something doesn’t mean you have to do it."
"You don’t have to sacrifice your spirit, your joy, your soul, your family, your marriage on the altar of ministry."
"I’m learning to silence the noise, around me and within me, and let myself be seen and loved, not for what I produce, but for the fact that I have been created by the hands of a holy God, like every other thing on this earth, equally loved, equally seen."
"This is what I’m finding, every day, every hour: there is a way of living that is so sweet, so full, so whole and beautiful you’ll never want to go back once you’ve tasted it."
"I want to look back and remember all the times I threw candy, even when it didn’t make sense. Especially when it didn’t make sense."
"God’s voice thunders in marvelous ways; he does great things beyond our understanding. He says to the snow, 'Fall on the earth,' and to the rain shower, 'Be a mighty downpour.'"
"You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level."
"I’m never going back there. I’m done with that kind of responsible. I don’t want to get to the end of my life and look back and realize that the best thing about me was I was organized."
"Saying yes means not hiding. It means being seen in all your imperfections and insecurities. Saying yes is doing scary things without a guarantee that they’ll go perfectly. Saying yes is telling the truth even when it’s weird or sad or impossibly messy. Saying yes is inviting chaos, and also possibility. Saying yes is building a new future, regardless of the past. Saying yes is jumping in anyway."
"What kills a soul? Exhaustion, secret keeping, image management. And what brings a soul back from the dead? Honesty, connection, grace."
"The soul’s worth, though, doesn’t come from earning or proving. Image doesn’t matter. Outrunning the emptiness doesn’t work for long. Each soul, every soul is worthy, because God made every soul, and because of his love, his Son came to earth and walked among us, because God’s love for us is so deep and wide and elaborate that he wants to be with us, to walk with us, to teach us how to live in that love and worthiness."
"You can’t prove it or earn it or compete for it. You can just make space for it, listen for it, travel all the way down to the depth of your soul, into the rhythmic beating of your very own heart, where the very spirit of God has made his home, and that’s where you’ll find it."
"Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you’ll recover your life. I’ll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won’t lay anything heavy or ill-fitting on you. Keep company with me and you’ll learn to live freely and lightly."
"The love you’re looking for is never something you can calculate. It’s not something you can buy or earn or hustle for. It’s something you discover in the silence, in the groundedness, in the sacred risky act of being exactly who you are—nothing more, nothing less."