Hannah Brencher

Good-byes hurt. And they happen too much. The only thing I know for certain about this whole good-bye thing? You have to say it sometimes. You have to get real brave, and bite your bottom lip, and let people go sometimes. Fully, fully. Whether you feel ready or not, you're still going to grow up and use that word a lot more than you ever expected to.

A life well lived is just a collection of small gestures and people you love the best you can and stories we tell back to one another when the moment has passed.

I think we would rather skip the parts of our story where God feels absent or where or bodies are riddled with illness or where our brains don't feel like our own, but I think God uses the winters and the dark nights to do something he cannot do when everything is good and fine and beautiful. He has our attention, He's on the move.

It's like he expected the hard stuff to come and yet he never gave himself an option to stay angry at the world. I still don't know how he did that. I think it's easy to stay angry at a world that never promises you invincibility but still manages to break your heart with the way some moments can make you feel so infinite.

God is not a runner. Abandonment is not a word in his vocabulary.

Agape" is loving a person for exactly who they are - not who we hope they'll become with enough fixing. It's this idea that every person has their layers, so you can never confine a person to only what you know about them from the first glance. It's stacked on the premise that to love anyone is to hope in them always.

I cried because sometimes no matter what you try to hide behind— letters or texts or emails or a busy schedule— life still finds a way to barrel through all the distractions. And life still hurts. Even though it's beautiful.

God is kind. He isn't standing in the center of your issues with his arms crossed and a look of disdain on his face. He does not shame us, and so if you ever feel the shame seeing into the corners of your heart, you need to know that isn't Him.

I learned vulnerability is a bit like those Russian nesting dolls, the ones that get smaller and smaller in size when you twist the top off and pull another one out. In the end, you’re left with the tiniest doll, that one nugget. No more layers to take off. Nothing left but a surprise, the surprise of finding out the littlest doll is the most solid of them all. It doesn’t hide inside of itself.

Yet sometimes victory is sitting still when your heart is broken and you cannot find the words, trusting that God knows how to fight for you in realms you cannot see with your own two eyes!