I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
I finished this book on January 23, 2017. This wasn't a book that I even had on my radar. But as it often goes, sometimes little gems like this fall into your lap. I was walking around the bookstore one evening, mostly just sipping a latte and passing the time, and something about the title of this book really got my attention. I didn't even have to get to the first chapter before I was hooked. To open up part one was one of my favorite Scripture verses. "You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart." (Jeremiah 29:13). I ended up reading the first chapter while I was still at the bookstore and I felt like I was reading my own story. It was so personal, colorful, and honest, and I immediately felt a connection with the story, and more importantly I felt something about it was drawing me closer to God. The rest of the book was just as intimate and revealing. Whether you've already started a relationship with Jesus or not, we've all got messy lives, and this book really helps identify how we react to unanswered prayers, less than ideal circumstances, and how to fully surrender to God to find our true fulfillment, joy and peace.
"It's hard to trust the intimate details of our lives to a God we don't know intimately."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"This is where our lameness can become the best gift we've ever received, if we'll stop and let it say what it needs to say to us. It can change our lives, our dreams, for the better. If we can stand in that hurt and feel it deeply for what it is — all the deep lacerations, the hollow hunger, the raw scars, and the crevasses filled with salt — it will whisper truth to us."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"Our edgeless God — as infinitely perfect as He is big — wrapped Himself in flesh and came here to live among imperfect humans just so we could see how big His love for us really is. Through His Son, Jesus, He brought a bigger-than-the-universe love down in an ocean-size form so we could see Him, walk around Him, dip our toes in who He is. He is perfect, as the Father is perfect. All-knowing. All-powerful. All-loving. All here."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"He didn't come for us to wrap our minds around Him; He came to wrap His arms around us, to show us the heart of the Father, to give us a taste of what's to come."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"This no man's land wasn't good enough anymore. I was exhausted. So I swept the dust from my faith and made my choice. I knew He was pursuing me. I could feel it in the restlessness in my heart, the desire I had for more, the way my mind churned when I lay in bed at night awake."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"I no longer needed an answer from Him for peace. He was peace. He became real like nothing had ever been real before; everything else faded away in His light. His Word swept through the corners of my heart, rattled the truths buried there, and aired it out."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"He loves us right where we sit, in our own hurt and shame and brokenness and disappointment."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"There's got to be a grand delineation between the kingdom of God that is on earth and the kingdom that's still to come. And it's got to be strong enough to pull our hearts up from our broken dreams here with an insatiable draw toward what will be. There's got to be hope. We've got to know He desires good for us. Here on earth, sure. He fills us up to the brim with His peace, His joy, His love. He hurts when we hurt. And He knows how we hurt. He's been there too. But there's got to be real hope that transcends our broken world and longs — really longs — for the real life He is preparing for us in the world to come. He has to be worth it. Worth fixing our eyes on. Worth trading everything here for."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"A blank slate becomes a whole different deal when we realize the pen that's writing this wild and beautiful story is in the hand of a God who loves us and is creating a plot with huge payoff at the end."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"The new dreams He starts to write for me are the ones that lead me straight toward Him. And they start with His Word. It's love and discipline working together that draw me to meet with Him in the morning, to read the Bible, to study, to meditate, to memorize His Word and write it on my heart."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"It really does feel different when God gets in your heart and replaces your dreams with Himself. Our hearts become blank canvases where He can paint pictures of His love, fill us up with His Spirit, and change our desires and hurts from the inside out. It feels different. We begin to see Him write a new story. One with a whole lot of freedom."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"Do we still struggle? Of course. We're still living in these bodies of flesh, sinful cages that wage constant war against our soul. And the more of God we get, the more we realize just how weak we are. That's why He shines through the cracks in our vessels, why His strength is made perfect in our weakness. That's why we are told we have this treasure of His presence and love and salvation in our “jars of clay,” our earthly tents, “to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us” (2 Corinthians 4:7)."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"When we see the fullness of God's glory and the fullness of His love radiating through Scripture, the vastness of who He is and how trustworthy He has been since before the beginning of time, we know we can trust Him. We haven't been forgotten. We haven't been overlooked. We haven't been mistreated. We've simply been loved overwhelmingly by a God who can write our stories much better than we can — for our good. And when we know Him and we see the story He's already written, we know we're in good hands."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"This path you're on isn't meant to make you lose the will to live. It isn't meant to see if you can survive the subpar life and make lemonade when life hands you lemons. It's meant to write the best ending to your story. And not the best possible ending you can get with the available resources at this point in the game. The best. Period. Better than you could've ever written for yourself."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"Every step has purpose, because we're headed toward Him. And that strips away the weight we feel to figure out what or why and replaces it with peace and freedom. We start to look forward with joy — not because we're waiting on something earthly, but because we know what God has around the bend for us is more of Himself."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"God, You can have everything. I hold nothing back. I keep none of my own desires for my life. I only want You. I'll go anywhere. I'll do anything. I'll give up anything. Just please write the story You want with my life, the one that has You at the end of it."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"Following Jesus is not just doing something. But it's also not just feeling something. It's both. It's what God tells you to do in that place where His love for you and your love for Him intersect with wholehearted obedience."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"We don't have to agonize over the small stuff — or the big stuff, for that matter. We pray. We live and move and have our being in Him. We can trust Him to know the big picture, even when it doesn't make sense, even when we don't realize the “small” decisions we make are actually the big ones. Like with that almost-relationship. I may not know all the reasons it happened. But I do know this: God used it to grow me. He used it to move me."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"Every day I have a choice. I can focus on how life doesn't look like I wanted it to, how it's moving at a crawl, the way the road's too slippery, the way the outlook on the ground is gross or frustrating or exhausting for miles and miles. I can worry if something much worse is going to happen if I walk on into what's ahead of me. Or I can choose a song. I can choose to sip my coffee slowly and keep my eyes on the goodness tumbling down from the sky, choose to keep my heart in a place of total, unwavering praise."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"There is something holy about the way the most treacherous times are the most beautiful, the darkest times the most full of God's complete covering of love. There's a lot of wonder in the way He shows us Himself in the moments when we don't think we can go another step, when in anxiety we finally tilt our chin up to look at Him. To look at heaven."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"So I have a choice. I can choose to worry. Or I can choose to keep living my life, keep chasing after a God who's never failed me yet, who's only become deeper, richer, fuller with every time, every snowflake, every mile. I think I'll take that one. Today. And again tomorrow. With that choice, I'll take another step into His story."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"God, please let this year and every one after that be marked with You, marked with a different way to live. Please let me see my life, my time, and my choices the way You see them. Through your eyes. And please help me remember that even the most normal day is full of Your story."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"Our whole life is about knowing Him and making Him known. That's what we're here for. That's all we're here for."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"I don't know where the road between here and when I see your face is going to lead, but I want You to determine the steps, for my good and for Your glory. You know what I don't know, and You see what I don't see. It's the story You've written that is playing itself out. It's bigger than I can imagine. It's good. And it's all I want."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"We were meant to follow the thread until it gets us home, no matter what color it is, no matter whether it be dark or light, whether it leaves us in one place for a long, long while, or whether it keeps us on the move. All should be purposeful. All should be forward motion."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"With His love sitting in our souls and writing our stories, we feel His affection through how our lives look, not in spite of it. We don't feel He's forgotten us; instead, we feel He's weaving our narratives with intentionality, taking the bad and turning it inside out, remaking us through pain in the redemptive way that only the loving God of the universe can do."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"Everything in us screams for more. Our hearts long for it. That's why we do what we do. That's why we dream what we dream. We want real love, so we spend our lives looking for it. We want real purpose, so we spend our lives trying to get it. And if we never look up, we never find it. From an earthly perspective, it almost seems like a cruel device hardwired into our hearts — the yearning that can never be satisfied. But God didn't miss a step when He built us lacking, built us to crave. He wanted us to look for Him until we found Him. He wanted our hearts for Himself."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
"Never settle for worry or anxiety, for doubt or discontent, for distrust or frustration when ultimate joy is there for the taking. Here today. And even greater still to come."
― Grace Thornton - I Don't Wait Anymore: Letting Go of Expectations and Grasping God's Adventure for You
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