Dan B Allender Quotes

Hope is not mere optimism; rather, it is moving forward in anticipation of redemption in spite of the improbability of rescue. ~ Dan B. Allender

But the part of ourselves we hate the most is our longing to be wanted and enjoyed. ~ Dan B. Allender

Most people want to grow, but the price of growth is pain. ~ Dan B. Allender

Disillusionment takes us to the question: what does it profit a man if he gains this world and loses himself? And disillusionment exposes that while we were supposedly serving the kingdom, we somehow became the king, and when we thought we were following Jesus, we inexplicably made him a servant of our dreams. The only real tragedy is the leader who never allows disillusionment to wear him to a nub and expose the godlessness of his busyness. ~ Dan B. Allender

The reluctant leader doesn't merely give accolades to others. It is her true joy to see others awaken to their potential and exceed their greatest dreams. It is the hope of every good teacher to have students who take their work further than the teacher was able to do. To be surpassed is the ideal. To be replaced is the goal, not a sign of failure. ~ Dan B. Allender

Beginning with the first day of life outside the womb, every child is asking two core questions: 'Am I loved?' and 'Can I get my own way?' These two questions mark us throughout life, and the answers we receive set the course for how we live. ~ Dan B. Allender

Speed is the ultimate defense, the antidote to stopping and really looking. If we really saw what we were doing and who we had become, we feel we might not survive the stopping and the accompanying self-appraisal. So we don't stop, and the faster we go, the harder it becomes to stop. ~ Dan B. Allender

Desire lies at the heart of who God made us to be, who we are at our core. Desire is both our greatest frailty and the mark of our highest beauty. Our desire completes us as we become One with our Lover, and it separates us from Him and brings death as it wars against His will. ~ Dan B. Allender

Christ never intended to cover up the dark side of life, but rather to illuminate a path through it. ~ Dan B. Allender

How do we hold the paradox of giving up our life in order to find it? I believe Chesterton is saying that the more we open our heart to both heartache and hope, the more we can look death in the face and say, "Where is your sting?" (1 Cor. 15:55). We must love all that bears the mark of life: the sound of an owl finch and its call that sounds like the meowing of a kitten. We must love Bach, Ethiopian berbere, and the smell of freshly baked bread. Life is teeming with goodness. We must also experience death and powerlessness, but darkness will not win. Life and love will have the final word. ~ Dan B. Allender

The absence of tumult, more than its presence, is an enemy of the soul. God meets you in your weakness, not in your strength. He comforts those who mourn, not those who live above desperation. He reveals Himself more often in darkness than in the happy moments of life. ~ Dan B. Allender

Buzyness, however, is moral laziness because it involves refusing to live with courage and intentionality. ~ Dan B. Allender

God wants us to relieve suffering, pursue justice, facilitate reconciliation, and free the heart to love, but He desires for us to do so in a way that reveals His Character. It is not enough just to do well for others or to do things well. We must do well in our unique way in order to reveal the vast creativity of a God who loves to bring change through the most unlikely channels. ~ Dan B. Allender

A reluctant leader is highly suspicious of people who work to accumulate and hoard power. ~ Dan B. Allender

A denouement is not a complete or fully resolved ending but a satisfying closure to a story. [in French translates 'an untying, a relaxing of a knot of complexity']
Denouement is the rest that comes when all the disparate plot lines of a story, gnarled and taut, have been untied and an order has come about that brings a new moment of shalom. ~ Dan B. Allender

You may obey a leader who has power and authority, but you will not strive to serve her or the cause of the organization unless you respect and care for her in addition to the ones with whom you serve. ~ Dan B. Allender

In those moments of unnaming when we have lost ourselves, we must remember to return to our past redemptions to find God's mark of glory on our abandonment, betrayal, and shame. We wrongly believe that we will be happy if we can escape the past. But without our past we are hollow and plastic beings who have only common names and conventional stories. When we enter into our story at the point we lost our name, we are most likely to hear the whisper of our new name. ~ Dan B. Allender

Strength is found in weakness. Control is found in dependency. Power is found in surrender. ~ Dan B. Allender

Courage never takes away fear; courage simply redistributes fear to get the job done. ~ Dan B. Allender

Healing comes when our story is raw, bone-deep and full of hunger for what only Jesus can offer. ~ Dan B. Allender

We live in a culture where the acknowledgment of wrong or the ownership of risk and failure is paramount to forfeiting the game. ~ Dan B. Allender

Perhaps a better explanation for why it's so difficult to feel our feelings is that ALL emotion, positive or negative, opens the door to the nature of reality. All of us prefer to avoid pain -- but even more, we want to escape reality. ~ Dan B. Allender

Repentance is an internal shift ~ Dan B. Allender

One of our greatest failures in our busy, driven culture is that we don't celebrate the temporary untying of a complex narrative...What is your style of celebrating an ending? Do you only throw large parties after someone graduates, gets married, or dies? If so, then all the other endings in your story are lost in the wake of another day's busyness. Perhaps one of the reasons you and I don't party well, is that we don't know what to do with the tragedies that linger in our life...Can you imagine receiving an invitation "JOIN ME IN A CELEBRATION OF NO LONGER BELIEVING I'M STUPID"?

We don't allow endings to be noted, let alone celebrated. Therefore we never allow denouement to be invigorate the upward movement of a new story. ~ Dan B. Allender

Sane, reasonable, play-it-safe people are not sufficiently engaged in life to generate great stories. Instead, they sit back and wait for a leader-storyteller to come along and get them caught up in a life worth living. ~ Dan B. Allender

God's passion is to rig the world so that we are compelled to deal with whatever blocks us from being like His glorious Son. ~ Dan B. Allender

Our story will gain momentum and depth only to the degree that we honestly embrace both loss and fear. ~ Dan B. Allender

If we enter our story in heartache, we will hear the whisper of the name that will one day be ours. ~ Dan B. Allender

Idealism may get us into the fray, but it is the loss of all we cherish that begins to form in us a heart capable of leading others reluctantly and humbly. ~ Dan B. Allender

Fasting from any nourishment, activity, involvement or pursuit - for any season - sets the stage for God to appear. Fasting is not a tool to pry wisdom out of God's hands or to force needed insight about a decision. Fasting is not a tool for gaining discipline or developing piety (whatever that might be). Instead, fasting is the bulimic act of ridding ourselves of our fullness to attune our senses to the mysteries that swirl in and around us. - Dan B. Allender, PhD ~ Dan B. Allender

The more we walk the path first while becoming last and least in our organizations, the more we become like the Alpha and Omega whom we long to serve. ~ Dan B. Allender

So take seriously the story that God has given you to live. It's time to read your own life, because your story is the one that could set us all ablaze. ~ Dan B. Allender

But if we honestly name the passionate desires of our heart, and if we risk seeing those desires come to be, the plot of our life story will begin to move with greater intentionality. Yet the only way we can keep walking on that path is to allow our self moments to rest and celebrate the temporary climax of a story in denouement. ~ Dan B. Allender

If we want to create a different future, we must have the courage to look at the past. ~ Dan B. Allender

We are not to work on the Sabbath because it takes us out of the play of joy. It is as bizarre as making love to your spouse, but getting out of bed during the process to cut your lawn or wash dishes. Such an offense would do far more than spoil the mood; it would be a direct assault on the integrity of joy, announcing that a mundane chore is more pleasurable than sexual joy with your spouse. ~ Dan B. Allender

Every marriage moves either toward enhancing one another's glory or toward degrading each other. ~ Dan B. Allender

So we grow up in a sea of stories told in a way that fits what we want others to know about us. The stories told in most families are a kind of propaganda. The tragedy is that often these stories are simply a form of dis-information...
But our families name us without knowing the consequences. So our life is a journey to discover our true name, though; sadly many of us never choose to begin that search. ~ Dan B. Allender

The damage done through abuse is awful and heinous, but minor compared to the dynamics that distort the victim's relationship with God and rob her of the joy of loving and being loved by others. ~ Dan B. Allender

For most leaders, humility comes only by wounds suffered from foolish falls. ~ Dan B. Allender

God is continually, literally, second-by-second covering our sin under His Son's blood and forgiving us our sins. God cannot love us unless He forgives us and cannot forgive us without a commitment to love us. ~ Dan B. Allender

Every addiction is an attempt to slay hope. ~ Dan B. Allender

Genuine trust involves allowing another to matter and have an impact in our lives. For that reason, many who hate and do battle with God trust Him more deeply than those whose complacent faith permits an abstract and motionless stance before Him. Those who trust God most are those whose faith permits them to risk wrestling with Him over the deepest questions of life. Good hearts are captured in a divine wrestling match; fearful, doubting hearts stay clear of the mat. ~ Dan B. Allender

If you lead, you will eventually serve with Judas or Peter. ~ Dan B. Allender

If you are a leader, it is not possible to be at peace with all and friends with everyone. ~ Dan B. Allender

Every emotion, though horizontally provoked, nevertheless reflects something about the vertical dimension: our relationship with God. ~ Dan B. Allender

Grace. Loss. Fortune. Hardship. Victory. Sometimes the worst seat is best seat in the house and it comes as a result of leading. ~ Dan B. Allender

Because of the way God has made us, it is impossible finally and completely to deaden the soul. The soul will resurrect, in spite of the cruelty used to destroy it. It will pop up and then be slain again, return and be shoved down through contempt. The power to destroy the soul is not in the hands of Satan, another human being, or even oneself. Nevertheless, when we manage to deaden our soul, even temporarily, we open the door to terrible consequences. ~ Dan B. Allender

The triggering event and resulting shame is worse than being rejected because rejection assumes a path by which to return to acceptability. The fear involved in shame is of permanent abandonment, or exile. Those who see our reprehensible core will be so disgusted and sickened that we will be a leper and an outcast forever. ~ Dan B. Allender

What originally led us to serve others by leading them seldom remains our North Star. ~ Dan B. Allender

Elizabeth Turnage is a woman of grit and grace who lives into the stories of those who join her in this odd journey of seeking God. She honors the complexity of life without ever losing sight of the simple glory of the cross. Her grasp of the mundane and miraculous and their interplay gives a depth and honesty to her story that tugs at the heart and gives us hope our story can matter. Her book will be a clarion call to bring our broken, holy, troubled, and glorious life to the author of all stories: Jesus. ~ Dan B. Allender

...you can be assured that the inciting events call for you to sacrifice your comfort and ease in order for your story to move forward. It's easy to ignore such inciting events...It's easy to flee your story. ~ Dan B. Allender

Tragedy always moves our story forward in a way shalom could never accomplish. ~ Dan B. Allender

The desert shatters the soul's arrogance and leaves body and soul crying out in thirst and hunger. In the desert we trust God or die. ~ Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path

emotions are not amoral - they vocalize the inner working of our souls and are as tainted as any other portion of our personality. ~ Dan B. Allender

Let us adopt a symbologist approach to our subjects and see whether there are any invisible connections buried just beneath the surface. One anagram of "Herman Melville, Moby Dick" would be "Hmm-- a credible milky novel." Shuffle the letters of "Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code", and we uncover this message: "B. was a contrived, hidden con." And rearranging "Andy Miller-- The Year of Reading Dangerously" proves what we have suspected for a while: "I am only a greying fatheaded Surrey nerd-- LOL."
Dr. Langdon may be onto something. ~ Andy Miller

When we bemoan the lost golden age of music, it's worth remembering that mainstream radio listeners of the '60s and '70s, particularly in Canada, missed out on an outpouring of brilliant R&B music. ~ Dan Hill

Kids flew B-17s in daylight bombing raids over Germany in World War II. Kids fought in Korea and Vietnam. ~ Dan Jenkins

Heaven to me is percussion and bass, a screaming guitar and a burbling Hammond B-3 organ. It's a soup I love being immersed in. ~ Dan Aykroyd

The first president I met was L. B. J. ~ Dan Jenkins

There are certainly moments in the story room where you watch the movie die on the table. You put A next to B, and suddenly none of it lines up anymore. We feel that all the time. It's a terrible feeling. ~ Dan Scanlon

In dealing with the press, do yourself a favor, stick with one of three responses: (a) I know and I can tell you; (b) I know and I can't tell you; (c) I don't know. ~ Dan Rather

It's something we do every week. Every week kind of has bigger name headliners. It's all just our taste. There's a lot of people like Ian Edwards or Dan Mintz who a lot of people haven't heard of yet, but we know are really great. When we started the show five years ago it wasn't because Patton Oswalt needs another place to play. It was because we had a lot of new friends like BJ Novak or Morgan Murphy, who didn't have any club to play. ~ B. J. Porter

The goal of tattooing was never beauty. The goal was change. From the scarified Nubian priests of 2000 B.C., to the tattooed acolytes of the Cybele cult of ancient Rome, to the moko scars of the modern Maori, humans have tattooed themselves as a way of offering up their bodies in partial sacrifice, enduring the physical pain of embellishment and emerging changed beings. Despite ~ Dan Brown

Jayden laughed grimly. 'Press the attack and hope for the best.'
'Hope is not a strategy,' said Kira
'It's not plan A,' said Jayden, 'and it shouldn't be plan B, but it is every plan C that has ever been made. ~ Dan Wells

That's the problem today: Who is the creator? ~ Dan DeCarlo

I think that casting is probably the most important thing in television production. ~ Dan Harmon

What's your name?'

She planted one elbow on the stretch of counter Zuri had wiped so she could lean closer and draw out both syllables. 'Savine.'

'That's a lovely name.'

'Oh, if you enjoy the tip, you'll go mad for the whole thing.'

'That so?' he purred at her. 'How does it go?'

'Savine… dan…' And she leaned even closer to deliver the punchline. 'Glokta.'

If a name had been a knife and she had cut his throat with hers, the blood could not have drained more quickly from his face. He gave a strangled cough, took a step back and nearly fell over one of his own barrels. ~ Joe Abercrombie

Men go to far greater lengths to avoid what they fear than to obtain what they desire. ~ Dan Brown

That's the kind of friend she was. We were so together that we weren't ever really apart. ~ Dan Gemeinhart

Have I personally ever seen a ghost? Not one. ~ Dan Aykroyd

This is all too important." Aenea smiled. "It's all too important. That's the damned problem, isn't it?" She turned her face back to the stars. ~ Dan Simmons

Dan Spainhour is a terrific coach and educator. I had the pleasure of working several years with him, and I know that his knowledge and enthusiasm are first-rate. ~ Tommy Amaker

If all difficulties were known at the outset of a long journey, most of us would never start out at all. ~ Dan Rather

Forgiveness is God's greatest gift ~ Dan Brown

I'm saying there's plenty of money out there for great consumer entrepreneurs with great consumer products attacking really big markets. ~ Dan Levitan

Nellie's brow furrowed. "The great Mr. Hip-Hop Mogul standing in line with the common peasants? How do you figure that?"
Dan grinned. "I'm starting to dig this 'no cars' thing. It's a great equalizer. ~ Gordon Korman

People love gentle larceny. ~ Dan Aykroyd

He pictures amputated human arms flopping like fish down the center of the road; syringes floating on beds of liposuctioned fat; gelatinous human eyeballs wiggling merrily as they roll down the highway; and so on. He could imagine other such grotesque stuff, but chooses not to. ~ Dan Chaon

You're my home. I will find you. ~ Aleksandr Voinov

We're not making mistakes. We're making experiences. ~ Dan Bergstein

No, Dan."

"And you want me to go."

I looked into his eyes. "No. I don't."

He moved closer, encouraged, and put his hand on my shoulder. "Then what do you want, Elle?"

"I want you not to have to settle," I told him.

"Is that what you think I'm doing?"

"I know that's what you'll be doing. Because if you want more from me, you're not going to get it."

He said nothing for a long time. "When I readThe Little Prince, I thought you must be the rose. You with your four thorns, convincing me you're able to defend yourself. But now I know you hate roses. So you must be the fox instead.

So maybe what you really want is for me to tame you."

From a lot of men, that speech would have made me laugh, or roll my eyes. Then again, a lot of men wouldn't have

read Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's classic story ofThe Little Prince, or bothered to try and understand it.

I reached for his hand and held it between both of mine. "The fox tells the Little Prince he is a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. Just like the flower was like a hundred thousand other flowers."

Dan tucked a strand of hair behind my ear with the hand I wasn't holding. "But the fox asked the prince to tame him.

To make it so they'd need each other and be unique to each other. And he did it."

"And then the prince went away, Dan, and left the fox bereft." I looked down at my hands ~ Megan Hart

Opposing sports teams shake hands when the game is over. Dead soldiers just rot. ~ Dan Sheehan

The carved stone sign in front read Building C.
Imaginative title, Langdon thought ~ Dan Brown

I wanted something that would address the strengths and weaknesses of humanity. I wanted a story that could move readers. My Honor Flight is that story. ~ Dan McCurrigan

God Almighty, I love life. Even this vile place, where the trees are shattered stubs and where nothing grows but craters, even the sights, scents, sounds, and stirrings of this place are preferable to the unchanging nothingness of the Great Darkness. ~ Dan Simmons

…We are not so much who we are by what we know, but by what we wonder. So go and seek and you shall find. And once you find that, go and seek some more. ~ Dan Boyle

I want to show you an optimistic sign that things are beginning to turn around. ~ Dan Quayle

The first dishonest act is the most important one to prevent. ~ Dan Ariely

Every morning is a fresh beginning. Every day is the world made new. Today is a new day. Today is my world made new. I have lived all my life up to this moment, to come to this day. This moment - this day - is as good as any moment in all eternity. I shall make of this day - each moment of this day - a heaven on earth. This is my day of opportunity. ~ Dan Custer

So long as they speak your name, you shall never die. ~ Dan Brown

It took me time to realize that the men who won Olympic gold medals in the decathlon are just men, just like me. ~ Dan O'Brien

A lot of people seem nice when you first meet them. Then later you find out that they are evil villains who plan to take over the world. ~ Dan Gutman

When you notice your world exactly as it is - free from judgment and with detachment from anticipated outcomes - that is Zen. ~ Dan Tricarico

Loving my son, building my son, touching my son, playing with my son, being with my son ... these aren't tasks that only super dads can perform. These are tasks that every dad should perform. Always. Without fail. ~ Dan Pearce

Dan watched in awe. "I didn't know you talk Turkey." "I speak Turkish. ~ Peter Lerangis

There is no doubt that the way journalism worked when I was growing up and getting started has changed forever. ~ Dan Rather

People who listen to my records expect the ballads from me. The rock 'n roll is on there because it's another mode of expression. ~ Dan Fogelberg

Determination is the strength needed to succeed. ~ Dan Gable

During job interviews, when they ask: 'What is your worst quality?', I always say: 'Flatulence'. That way I get my own office. ~ Dan Thompson

Many marriages end up failing because the people that start into them over time become different people. What love had found as common ground, time separates into distinct territories. It's inevitable. As intelligent beings we grow by changing. No one stays the same. The person you fall in love with will always be someone different ten years down the pike. The same was true for friendships. Even curious friendships like ours. ~ Dan Skinner