Last Fall I worked through Jennie Allen's STUCK study. It was my introduction to Jennie Allen and I was so impressed. Mostly impressed with "in your face honesty" from a woman who grew up in the church and finds herself a pastor's wife and a mom to four kiddos.
Anything was part of my Winter Reading List. I read it because of my friend Laura's recommendation.
Anything is Jennie's personal prayer to the Lord.
Anything should be our prayer to if we want Jesus to become greater in our lives and everything else smaller.
This book continues the wreckage that God is doing in my life right now. It continues His upheaval of me and magnification of Himself. I've known Jesus for 26 years. It almost seems impossible. Sometimes I wonder....what have I done in those 26 years? What I love about Jesus....He continues to press deep into me and I never "master" Him.
Here are a few of my favorite highlights from the book
{and when looking back, I almost highlighted the ENTIRE book}
"Every sin, at its root, is based in something we do not fully believe about God"
"What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us" ~Tozer
"To risk is to willingly place your life in the hand of an unseen God and an unknown future, then to watch him come through. He starts to get real when you live like that"
"What if the thing we are trying to impress him with was the very thing keeping us from him?"
"God is home to us. He is where we were made to be. He is what we were made for. We just forget all that while we are trying to be good and independent"
"Pretending to be good halts God's movement in our life"
"Love is jealous...especially God's love. He wants me, and I want everybody else"
"We keep spinning. We keep searching, restless. We keep missing all he has for us. He'll always feel far away, drowned out by other louder rivers, until every other thing fades away and He becomes the only thing"
"If we can taste heaven, we live differently"
"If we exalt God to his right place in our lives, a thousand minor problems will be solved at once" ~Tozer
On Mary (The Mother of Jesus)
"With no regard for the way this would impact her short life here, she looked for the big picture. She saw that this was going to save generations of humans. She felt the eternal significance of her life and praised God that she got to be part of his plan, part of his plan to redeem people. No matter the suffering she would have in this life, she was praising God for a chance to participate in eternity."
"God did not seem too worried about what the people in Scripture thought about their callings; he handed them out even if they felt reluctant or unsure about their assignments. Moses and Jonah and Esther all wished their callings away. But, in their obedience, God was changing the world and building his stories."
"Eternity was changed by a few disciples? The entire church age started by fishermen?"
"God's priorities are beautiful, and they trickle down into invisible spaces....into neighborhoods and families and friends and strangers. He will call us to pour our lives into the cracks around us, and sometimes into cracks far from our doorsteps. But wherever he calls us, we pour, not wishing for a larger crack or a more noticeable one, or even the one we were expecting" ~Oswald Chambers
"We don't follow God just because he is God, just because he is boss. We follow God because he builds beautiful stories, even if they are not easy"
"So do your everyday and your ordinary. Godliness is found and formed in those places. No man or woman greatly used by God has escaped them. Great men and women of God have transformed the mundane, turning neighborhoods into mission fields, parenting into launching the next generation of God's voices, legal work into loving those most hurting, waiting tables into serving and loving in such a way that people see our God"
