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.