Beauty From Ashes

“God can take what Satan meant for shame and use it for His glory. Just when we think we’ve messed up so badly that our lives are nothing but heaps of ashes, God pours His living water over us and mixes the ashes into clay. He then takes this clay and molds it into a vessel of beauty. After He fills us with His overflowing love, He can use us to pour His love into the hurting lives of others.”

- Lysa TerKeurst

photo via weheartit

Keep Knocking, Baby.

“A door is nothin’ but a hole in a wall. Keep knocking, baby. The door will open for you.”

—Tashion Macon

If equal affection cannot be…

Let the more loving one be me.

- W.H. Auden

The Kind Of Peace That Comes After War

As I was driving, I reflected back over our journey and I realized the kind of peace I meant. It’s not the pansy, pie-in-the-sky, life-is-perfect peace. No, this is the kind of peace that comes after war. It’s the hard-won, show-you-my-scars, didn’t-think-I’d-live-to-tell-about-it, peace. It’s not gentle—it’s wild, fierce, and I’m not giving it up, not ever, because I paid too high a price to get it.

-Holley Gerth

Don’t Settle.

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.” 

-Steve Jobs 

Because We All Need To Hear It

[image via gala darling]

Keep Believing Life Can Be Brighter

I know that life is busy and hard, and that there’s a crushing pressure to just settle down and get a real job and khaki pants and a haircut. But don’t. Please don’t. Please keep believing that life can be better, brighter, broader, because of the art that you make. Please keep demonstrating the courage that it takes to swim upstream in a world that prefers putting away for retirement to putting pen to paper, that chooses practicality over poetry, that values you more for going to the gym than going to the deepest places in your soul. Please keep making art for people like me, people who need the magic and imagination and honesty of great art to make the day-to-day world a little more bearable.

And if, for whatever reason, you’ve stopped– stopped believing in your voice, stopped fighting to find the time–start today.

- Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines

Questions & Answers

photo via weheartit

“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart & to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. & the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

(Rainer Maria Rilke, as translated by Stephen Mitchell)

Whatever You Are, Be A Good One.

Girl,
You are sensational.
What you have to
say is important.
It is relevant.
You are undeniable.
You are capable.
Indescribable.
Revolutionary.
You are beautiful.

-Gala Darling

Don’t Threaten Me With Love, Baby. Let’s Just Go Walking In The Rain.

“The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.”

- E.E. Cummings