Addie Zierman Quotes

I was at the part of self-exploration where you have to be surrounded with miscellanea in all of its diversity in order to figure things out.

[His faith] was a hundred small perfect steps that in the end can never add up to dance ... not the kind I wanted, anyway. Not the tango of Argentina, of the Spanish birthday party.

Your life AFTER Christ is not static or an end result. You are not suspended in grace above the fray of life. You are looking at God through a kaleidoscope. Your life moves, and the beads shift, and something new emerges. You are defining. Redefining. Figuring it out all over again. You are in motion, in transit, in flux. You will be sad. You will be happy. You will love and doubt and cry and rage, and all of it matters. You are human, and you are beloved, and this is what it is to be Alive.

Reform suggests that you have already been solidified into a self. You were not. You were barely fifteen. You learn that the brain is not fully formed until you're twenty-five years old, and you wonder, then, what becomes of the mind commandeered before it has learned to follow paths of logic. You were soft as clay straight from the earth. You were reformed before you were formed.

If I had to do it over again, I would have danced like Buenos Aires.
I'd be a helicopter leaf, a snowflake falling. I would have stayed there spinning wild and lonely across the dark, lonely sky.

Faith spans years, generations, millenia. God's silence marks the pages of the biblical narrative more than I ever knew.
His silence stretches over years, over countries over generations. but its not an abandonment, it's an invitation.
It asks for our trust, for our hope, for us to stay as the night darkens around us and we can't hear a thing.

Without a circle of protective love around us, we are no match for the shadows that stalk toward us in the night

These days, faith is a lot like Wisconsin: a series of repetitive ups and downs, the natural rise and fall of the road that stretches before you. Boring. Beautiful. Ridiculous sometimes, as when the road eases into the Wisconsin Dells and there are suddenly giant plastic animals and water slides and a huge haunted mansion tilted along the road.

He laughed, and he made me laugh, and it was because his relationship to his faith was not a do-or-die mission but something life-giving and fluid. Like a river. Like a fountain. It was in the generosity of his faith and his love that I found the rest I'd been hoping for when I filled out the applications and packed my bags for Minnesota.

You'd been in Sunday school long enough to know how the story goes: the voice of God comes down from the sky and asks you to go where you don't want to go, to do what you don't want to do. And you have to do it anyway.

The "new evangelical" wears skinny jeans and earrings made from recycled beer caps. After all, she is acquiring a taste for Blue Moon and Chardonnay. She lives in a loft in the city and grows organic vegetables on her balcony because the earth belongs to God, and she wants to take care of it...She tries to keep things clean, language-wise, but she knows that sometimes the right word is f***.

When people confide their deep hurt to you these days, you are at a loss for what to say. A long time ago, you used to say, "I'll be praying for you," and you always meant to do that, to take those heavy burdens off their shoulders and hoist them up to the Lord. But the truth is, you usually forgot. Usually, this was the thing you said to end the conversation, a nice way to say, "I'm sorry. I can no longer handle the depth of your pain. I don't want to talk about this anymore.

You have learned that it is impossible to divide things neatly, and that the second you begin to define something, you limit it. There is no such thing as "cut and dried" in a world of broken humanity. Gray bleeds into gray bleeds into gray, no matter how you slice it.