Recently, I read It’s Not Supposed to Be This Way: Finding Unexpected Strength When Disappointments Leave You Shattered and loved it. It is such a powerful book, especially if you are struggling with disappointment, resentment or regrets in life. 

I’ve since recommended this book to countless people, men, and women.

Here are 19 quotes that stood out to me and were powerful:

• This is how the formula should calculate: hard time plus healing time plus staying faithful to God should equal the exact good outcome we were counting on.
• We cannot control our outcomes. We cannot formulate how the promises of God will take shape. We will never be able to demand any of the healing from all the hurt to hurry up.
• Sometimes to get your life back, you have to face the death of what you thought your life would look like.

• Disappointment. It’s that feeling things should be better than they are. People should be better than they are. Circumstances should be better than they are. Finances should be better than they are. Relationships should be better than they are.
• If the enemy can isolate us, he can influence us.

• To deny my feelings any voice is to rob me of being human. But to let my feelings be the only voice will rob my soul of healing perspectives with which God wants to comfort me and carry me forward. My feelings and my faith will almost certainly come into conflict with each other.
• Disappointment isn’t proof that God is withholding good things from us. Sometimes It’s His way of leading us Home.
• If I want His promises, I have to trust His process.
• Feeling the pain is the first step toward healing the pain. The longer we avoid the feeling, the more we delay our healing. We can numb it, ignore it, or pretend it doesn’t exist, but all those options lead to an eventual breakdown, not a breakthrough.
• The longer we avoid the feeling, the more delay our healing.

• God longs to help us.
• Obedience is the daily practice of trusting God.
• God doesn’t want you or me to suffer. But He will allow it in doses to increase our trust. Our pain and suffering aren’t to hurt us. It’s to save us. To save us from a life where we are self-reliant, self-satisfied, self-absorbed, and set up for the greatest pain of all … separation from God.
• The enemy uses disappointments to cause so much trouble in an unsettled heart.
• If we are going to be true to ourselves, we’d better make sure we are true to our most surrendered, healed, and healthy selves, the ones God made us to be.
• Fear seems to be a close cousin of disappointment. They are related, because we feel them so deeply, they paralyze us so easily, and the pat answers so many Christians try to place on them trip us up. We are desperate to make things easier than they are.
• If we have a misunderstanding of God, we will most certainly have a wrong understanding of our circumstances.
• To be human is to be vulnerable. It demands trust in God that’s no joke. Trusting God is the hardest lesson to learn but the most crucial.
•  Being hurt isn’t the worst thing in the world. It’s the very thing that makes us closer to Jesus and closer to our fellow humans. In a world of differences, we are so very united when we simply cry together.

Didn’t See it Coming: Overcoming the Seven Greatest Challenges That No One Expects and Everyone Experiences by Carey Nieuwhof was one of my favorite books of 2018 and one that I think every leader should read. Everyone will see themselves in one (or more) of the seven struggles he talks about.

My favorite chapter was the section on cynicism, which I’ve written about here.

Here are 22 quotes from the book that stood out to me and will hopefully encourage you to get it:

In leadership circles, especially Christians circles, it is challenging to balance power, influence, and humility. If you’re a Christian leader, you feel this tension. You have enormous amounts of influence and some level of power. What often got you to that place is humility, but humility is what will keep you there (or the lack thereof will take you down from there). The authors of The Way of the Dragon or the Way of the Lamb lay this out well: Unfortunately, the things that make leaders dangerous are the very things that earn them affirmation. 

What I found most helpful about The Way of the Dragon or the Way of the Lamb, were the examples of leaders who seek to live and lead in the way of Jesus.

I think too often as leaders, especially young leaders; we forget that leadership and living is a long time. A marathon, not a sprint. The world has not passed you by at 35; you have not missed your chance at 45. Even though it might feel like it, leading like Jesus keeps this in mind and sees that what you do for all of your life is what counts.

Here are 11 quotes from The Way of the Dragon or the Way of the Lamb that I found helpful & convicting:

I’m working ahead to get ready for our relationship series that we’re kicking off in a couple of weeks called #RelationshipGoals and one of the books I read was John Ortberg’s I’d Like You More If You Were More like Me: Getting Real about Getting Close. There are so many things I enjoyed about this book, that I thought I’d share some favorite quotes:

1. Why do we fear intimacy so much? For one thing, I think we’re afraid of being hurt. Intimacy means being known by someone – as Nancy knows me, for example. She knows my strengths and weaknesses, my hopes and fear. She can use that knowledge to bond with me and grow closer to me, or she can use it to shame, wound, or betray me. We also fear intimacy because it can set us up for disappointments.
2. Intimacy respects distance but isn’t content with it.
3. In the minds of a lot of people in our culture, the word intimacy got all tangled up with sex. But even though there is a connection between the two words, they are not interchangeable, and one is not necessarily dependent on the other. We don’t need to have sex to be intimate with someone in order to have sex. The vast majority of our intimate relationships have absolutely nothing to do with sex. Intimacy also applies to our relationships with our kids, our parents, our friends, our coworkers – and even with God.
4. To love someone means both to will and to work for that person to become who God created them to be.
5. The Bible never tells us to fall in love. But it has a lot to say about growing in love.
6. One of the most important “awareness” questions we can ask ourselves in each significant relationship is, “How does my connection with this person impact the person I’m becoming?”
7. What makes the miracle of human connection possible is our ability to discern another person’s emotional state, empathize with it, and enter into it.
8. “Feeling felt” is to the human soul what food is to the stomach, or air is to the lungs.
9. Feeling felt requires two gifts that we can give to one another: knowing and acceptance. If you know about my weakness or my woundedness, but you don’t care, you won’t be able to help me. On the other hand, if you accept me as I am, but you don’t know about my breaking heart, you won’t be able to bring healing to my particular situation.
10. We treasure joyful moments because they somehow heal and connect us. What’more, our joy is not just about us. The research is quite clear on this: Joyful people are more compassionate in their actions than less joyful people. They are more financially generous than less joyful people. They develop friendships and deeper friendships than less joyful people. They are more likely to stay married. They are more resilient in the face of hardship. They exhibit greater vitality and a zest for life.
11. Naming an emotion is the first step in healing that emotion inwardly.
12. Commitment gives us what Lewis Smedes calls a “small island of certainty” in an uncertain world: “How strange it is, when you think about it that a mere human being can take hold of the future and fasten one part of it down for another person … I stretch myself into unpredictable days ahead and make one thing predictable for you: I will be there with you.”
13. Commitment is the foundation of intimacy because without commitment there can be no trust, and without trust, there can be no intimacy.
14. When a relationship has intimacy without commitment, there’s a greater potential for hurt.
15. Psychologist Robert Sternberg proposed that marriage involved what he calls a triangle of life: intimacy (by which he means feelings of closeness, connectedness, and bondedness), passion (romance and physical attraction), and commitment (the decision to maintain that love). These elements must be proportional. When intimacy exceeds commitment, there is potential for hurt. When commitment exceeds intimacy, there is a disappointment for the heart. But when commitment, passion, and intimacy go hand in hand, relationships flourish.
16. Lewis Smedes identified three things we surrender when we commit ourselves to another person: our freedom, our individuality, and our control. When we commit ourselves to someone, we’re no longer the only ones in charge. Our time and our heart are no longer our own. Commitment builds an invisible fence around us, and we freely choose to honor its restrictions on our freedom. Once we’ve committed, we’re no longer just me, myself, I; we’ve become part of we.
17. Shame is condemnation – the internalization of rejection. As Lewis Smedes puts it, “Shame is a weighty feeling.” Guilt causes us to feel bad about what we’ve done; shame causes us to feel bad about who we are. Shame – at least the toxic kind – causes us to feel that we will never be acceptable. It touches the very core of our identity.
18. Differences mean that conflict is inevitable. Often friendships, as well as marriages, have an early phase that is relatively conflict-free. Sooner or later, though reality sets in.
19. Intimacy does not mean having a relationship without conflict. Intimacy does not mean having a relationship without any ruptures. Every relationship experiences rupture from time to time. What determines ongoing intimacy is what happens next.
20. One way of measuring the health of a relationship is how quickly a couple moves to repair the connection when they experience a rupture.

According to Daniel Pink in his latest book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, when you do something matters more than why or what.

This is an essential insight because most of the leadership literature focuses our attention on the other two things. Anytime the word when comes up, it is around productivity or time management, but Pink takes a different look at it. He asks if when we do something matters for each person and the answer is “Yes!”

Here are three takeaways:

1. When we do something matters. There is a time for each task. There is a better time for meetings, thinking work, administrative work, etc. If you are a preacher like I am, there is a better time of day to work on your sermon and time that you will struggle.

I found it fascinating that according to studies, 2:55 pm is the least productive minute of the day.

The reason this matter is because many times we are doing the wrongs things at the wrong times.

This is important to if you are a parent. Pink went into multiple studies that showed when students should do math or English, what the impact of taking a test in the afternoon versus taking a test in the morning.

Lastly in this section, the importance of breaks. I try to take a break and stand up, move around (outside is better than inside, with someone is better than alone, and without your phone is best) every 50-55 minutes. Just a short 5-minute break where I move around has proven to be incredibly important for me.

2. The ending is important. Pink points out how many Yelp reviews mention the end of an experience, especially at a restaurant.

This is one that I think has enormous implications for churches in how they end their services. I don’t know what this looks like because I feel like many church services, even at my church, just kind of end.

The end is what people walk away with, what they remember, so thinking through the end of a talk, sermon, class or service is crucial.

3. Understand the impact of the middle on a project. My personality is one that just pushes through something.

As Pink unpacked the beginning and end of something, which is very obvious to me, but he also talked about the importance of the middle and how often things are lost in the middle. Especially the energy of a team.

This was a fascinating book with a lot of implications. One I’d put on your summer reading list.