“When we pray for God’s favor, what if sometimes the only way for him to truly bless us is to place us in total obscurity for a season?”- Brian Jones (emphasis author’s) Brian Jones continues Chapter 4 of Finding Favor as he asks a scary question: What if you didn’t get where you currently are […]
“When I listen in hiddenness, God’s thoughts reveal themselves and become precious. My hearing, trained in that hiddenness, becomes attuned to the best kind of sound: my friend.”- Sara Hagerty “How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God! How great is the sum of them!”- Psalm 139:17 (NKJV) Sara Hagerty concludes Chapter 13 […]
“My emotions — the ones that a full schedule and an outwardly productive life can prevent me from feeling — are a road to conversation with God. The hidden places of my heart get exposed and He responds.”- Sara Hagerty Sara Hagerty concludes Chapter 9 of Unseen as she notes that the hidden places help […]
“Meeting Him required quieting my insides enough to hear and respond. The kind of dialogue I was learning to have with God burgeoned when I saw it as an exchange — my mind for His thoughts, my fear for His assurance, my whispers for His response.”- Sara Hagerty “Wherever this gospel is preached in the […]
[God’s] nearness is most brilliant when I am most weak, here at the nexus of hiddenness and vulnerability before God. He redefines my circumstances even without changing them.”- Sara Hagerty “But you, O LORD, do not be far off! O you, my help, come quickly to my aid.”- Psalm 22:19 (ESV) Sara Hagerty concludes Chapter […]
“He [God] hid me so that I would find Him in the hiddenness. So I would come back to my roots, so I would see His eyes on me in the hiding.”- Sara Hagerty In Chapter 3 (“Open Hands: Living a Story We Had Not Planned”) of Unseen, Sara Hagerty talks about God’s winterizing. Just […]
“And that’s where the mysterious beauty of hiddenness comes in. We who live most of our days in and around the people of this world don’t naturally hide ourselves in God. . . . We respond instead to the looks and applause and the direction of others around us. Thus, He hides us. And masterfully.”- […]
“We live for what is right in front of us, while God is ever so gently calling us toward the unseen.”- Sara Hagerty As Sara Hagerty continues Chapter 1 of Unseen, she notes that often most of our attention focuses on obvious accomplishments. Yet, in her quiet time of beautiful waste, Sara realized she must […]
“When you can step into openness and stop pretending, you find yourself coming alive. Hiddenness and pretense are always the enemy of flourishing.”- John Ortberg In Chapter 17 (“Be Human”) of The Me I Want to Be, John Ortberg notes our own need to look better than we are contributes to a culture of superficiality. […]