Christie Purifoy Quotes

We must plant our dreams in real earth. We must dirty our hands. It's the only way. Whether we dream of planting flower gardens or churches, ever dream needs a place in which to take root and grow. Every dream needs a home.

God does not erase our losses, those empty places in our lives, but he does something almost more miraculous. He fills the loss with a sign of his presence.

If I want to abide in this day, to make my home in it, I must only tear my eyes from tomorrow and look around. For there is a wholeness to this day that I do not want to miss.

Our lives are stories built of small moments. Ordinary experiences. It is too easy to forget that our days are adding up to something astonishing. We do not often stop to notice the signs and wonders. The writing on the wall. But some days we do.

That our lives are not defined by what we’ve lost but by all that returns, fresh and new.

I am uncertain whether I took my first steps on clay soil or sand, but I know I have long wondered if home is the place from which we come or the place we are headed.

When something breaks down or does not go as planned, we are given a glimpse of our great need.

I want to observe the ordinary things of earth—the moon, the stars, the rainbows, even the yellow leaves of the old cherry trees—and receive their messages. To hear them say what every weary traveler, every earnest seeker, longs to hear. Welcome home.

Homecoming is a single word, and we use it to describe a single event. But true homecoming requires more time. It seems to be a process rather than a moment. Perhaps we come home the way the earth comes home to the sun. It could be that homecoming is always a return and our understanding of home deepens with each encounter.

We speak frequently of our fear of the unknown, but it is our known fears that often make us stumble.

Gardens are a place of encounter with the God who draws near. In a garden, we find Christ, who is our peace. I

As humans, we roam the entire world. We even venture beyond it not space. The whole planet is ours, but the whole planet is not our home. Instead, home is the ground we measure with our own two feet. And home is the place that measures us. Home is the place that names us and the place we, in turn, name. It feeds us, body and soul, and if we are living well, we feed it too. Home is the place we cultivate with our love.

Our lives are stories built of small moments. Ordinary experiences. It is too easy to forget that our days are adding up to something astonishing. We do not often stop to notice the signs and wonders. The writing on the wall.

During Advent, we prepare room in a new day for an old story. Through our attentive waiting, we participate in the story of the season and make it new again. And we are made new by it. We emerge at the other end of Advent’s tunnel, and we are not as we were when our journey began.

What is God doing in my life? In the mornings, I wake to find that he has traced the world in silver. Every blade of grass. Each pumpkin on the porch. In the afternoons, I find him washing these fields with the mellow sunlight of autumn. He has gilded every rail in the fence and the sheet metal roof of the old red barn. He has transformed familiar trees into something otherworldly.

Two years before our arrival at Maplehurst, we had left the Midwest eager for new jobs, milder weather, and a house of our own with a real backyard. We were unprepared for the enormity of our losses. Good friends. Close-knit community. A meaningful connection with the work of our minds and our hands. There was one lost thing, in particular. It was such a natural part of our prewilderness lives that I only ever recognized it after it was gone. In our northern city, we had lived a seasonal rhythm of summer festivals and winter sledding, spring baseball games and autumn apple picking. Our moments and our months were distinguished by the color of the trees, deep red or spring green, and the color of the lake, sparkling and playful in summer, menacing and dull in winter. These things were the beautiful, sometimes harsh, but always rhythmic backdrop in our days. Time was like music. It had a melody. In the wilderness, the only thing that differentiated one season from the next was my terrible winter asthma. Without time's music, I became aimless and disconnected, like a child's lost balloon.

It seems that we, like Jesus before us, will know trouble and displacement. We will be called away from so many great loves: love of family, love of our familiar fields. But we will also be tasked with the work of cultivating new homes and new fields and new relationships. We will wander. We will come home. But always we will follow.

When we begin from a place of belief, no matter how small or insubstantial, we can see what was always there, hidden in plain sight.

The rushing world has convinced us that beauty is something extra, not the thing itself. Page 22

It seemed like the ideal kind of hospitality for an introvert like myself. Prepare a place, then step back and let the place itself be the welcome, the embrace, and the conversation. Page 53

Before Virginia, I had not known that the prize for enduring a real winter, with its occasional wonderland days and its regular misery days, was an awakening so astonishing it felt as if I learned that the word spring meant for the first time in my life. Spring wasn't simply a pleasant interlude; it wasnt merely the change to catch one's breath between the ice storm and the heat wave. It was a fulfillment. It was a promise kept, though I had not even realized a promise had been made. Like winter, the wilderness is always a promise. God leads us in and, one way or another, he leads us out again. page 62

The wavy panes of glass that remain in our windows now look to me like miraculous survivors. How is it that something so fragile has endured for so many years? The old glass reminds me that the distortions and imperfections inevitable in human creation don't always detract from beauty. Sometimes they enhance it. Page 103

Instead, the best gifts, like gifts of my sons and daughters, and like the gift of ever one of our homes, are those that invite participation, our prayer, our desire, and only then, when we have so much more to give, our gratitude. Because "a longing fulfilled is a tree of life".Proverbs 13:12 Page 117

Instead, the best gifts, like gifts of my sons and daughters, and like the gift of ever one of our homes, are those that invite participation, our prayer, our desire, and only then, when we have so much more to give, our gratitude. Because "a longing fulfilled is a tree of life".Proverbs 13:12 I believe beauty reflects the truth about who God is and what this world is all about. Page 117

Thought the past is unavoidable here [at Maplehurst], no place is a blank slate, and a memory may be just as necessary for placemaking as vision. If it is possible to cultivate peace on the earth, it may be that this is only possible by cultivating memory. One of the greatest promises of Scripture is that even the very ends of the earth will remember and so return to the Lord (Psalm 22:27). We cannot make a place new without attending to what it has been. We need history books. We need to listen to our older neighbors. We need to open our eyes and seek out the traces of what remains. Page 148

The creation story of Genesis is unlike the creation myths of other ancient religions because it states that we are made of the same raw material as the world around us. We are not offspring of the gods. We are made of dust. We may bear the image of a creator, but we also share kinship with stars and starfish, with turtles and, yes, with trees.

As humans, we roam the entire world. We even venture beyond it into space. The whole planet is ours, but the whole planet is not our home. Instead, home is the ground we measure with our own two feet. And home is the place that measures us. Home is the place that names us and the place we, in turn, name. It feeds us, body and soul, and if we are living well, we feed it too. Home is the place we cultivate with our love.

Is it possible to care for a place with open hands, always ready to give it away like so many fishes and loaves?

Without limits, our purpose in each place we plant our feet is more difficult to discern. Our life’s current, and those good works God prepared

this is the way, walk in it.1

Thought the past is unavoidable here, no place is a blank slate, and memory may be just as necessary for placemaking as vision. If it is possible to cultivate peace on the earth, it may be that this is only possibly by cultivating memory. One of the greatest promises of Scripture is that even the very ends of the earth will remember and so return to the Lord.

The wavy panes of glass that remain in our windows now look to me like miraculous survivors. How is it that something so fragile has endured for so many years? The old glass reminds me that the distortions and imperfections inevitable in human creation don't always detract from beauty. Sometimes they enhance it.

Perhaps most dispiriting, the elegant top curve on each of the original windows was covered and squared off with a trip of wood in order to make those flat-topped storm windows fit. The curve of the windows is still visible from inside the house, but, for sixty years or so, no one has seen that once elegant curve from the outside.

The wilderness is not necessarily a desolate place. It has its own unique beauty, and that beauty is enough. It does not need us. It does not ask for our participation.

a common mistake we make is to assume that the right thing will be an easy thing. Even the Promised Land was full of intimidating giants. God may choose places for us, but he invites us to participate in the making of them, and this participation requires the kind of faith and courage that can look a great deal like foolishness.

If we waited till we saved up enough for air conditioning, if we waited for Bill to finish repairing the brick walls, if we waited till our children were less in the way or our energy levels less depleted, we would lose out on that glimpse, that foretaste, that reflection of the long-desired day when God’s coming kingdom has fully come. We might forget that life’s sweetest moments are not so far off, nor so difficult to achieve.

I loved silver trees. He loved salty waves. We looked at both through eyes of love, which means, I think, that we each saw what God sees.

If peace is a state of harmony, if it is a kind of wholeness or completeness, then we will never find it by running away from broken things and messy places.

When we felled the trees, did we lose forever those places capable of touching the very depths of our God-given capacity for wonder?4 Or can we remake such places today?

Quite often, the right place is, for a season at least, the place where everything is harder, the place where we feel least at home.

We often discover “the right place” only through trial and error, wandering and waiting, following and believing. Quite often, the right place is, for a season at least, the place where everything is harder, the place where we feel least at home.

Choices are always powerful. It does not matter that we rarely understand exactly what we are choosing. Perhaps that is precisely where the power lies: not in the choosing but in the learning how best to live with our choice.

Poison ivy is a native not only to the American wilderness but to the wilderness of halfway places that grow up around every new housing development and shopping center, highway and train track. Such wilderness is the shadow cast by our collective progress. Studies have shown that poison ivy is especially sensitive to the levels of carbon dioxide in our air. The higher the concentration, the more vigorous the plant, and the more virulent its poison. Since the 1960s, the poison in poison ivy has doubled its strength.4

The wilderness is a place without paths. Its geography is unknown and unmapped. Wandering is what one does in the wilderness because nothing else is possible. To walk a straight path through the wilderness requires outside assistance, such as a pillar of fire—or GPS. If the metaphorical wilderness serves some purpose in our lives, that purpose is found primarily in waiting and in stillness. We may move in the wilderness, but we never arrive. Like the lines of our patio, we drift away from true, though in my experience such drifting often returns us to a deeper truth we could not have received before our wandering began.

The in-between can be purposeful. Sometimes, it is exactly what we need.

And God continues to lead each one of us in and out of wilderness places. Sometimes these wilderness places are metaphorical; sometimes they are places we can point to on a map.

The places we call home sometimes need protection from our inexperience and our selfishness. The places we call home are almost always enriched to the extent that they are shared. Is it possible to care for a place without hurting it, through ignorance or arrogance? Is it possible to care for a place with open hands, always ready to give it away like so many fishes and loaves?

Is life anything more than a litany of the things we lost in winter?

But remaining is not such an easy thing to do. To remain requires a stillness and a steadfastness in spite of the many things that will make us want to pick up and run.

If peace is a state of harmony, if it is a kind of wholeness or completeness, then we will never find it by running away from broken things and messy places. We will find it, in truth we will make it, when we draw near to the mess with shovels and paint cans. We may have a dream of peace that looks like a country porch or an isolated mountaintop, and we may receive peace in those places, like deep breaths of fresh air, but we realize our dream of peace only when we come down to that place where mountain meets valley town, country meets suburbia, city meets garden, or our past meets our present.

waiting is endless as long as you wait.

Gain precedes loss, and loss precedes restoration, but most stories begin even before that; most stories begin with emptiness.

When we felled the trees, did we lose forever those places capable of touching the very depths of our God-given capacity for wonder? Or can we remake such places today?

the best gifts in life don’t simply drop from above. Rarely, if ever, do we pray a simple prayer then watch as the desire of our hearts falls neatly into our hands. Instead, the best gifts, like the gifts of my sons and my daughters, and like the gift of every one of our homes, are those that invite our participation, our prayer, our desire, and only then, when we have so much more to give, our gratitude. Because “a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.

But what if beauty is one of the greatest gifts I give my neighbors and my guests? What if my own choices give others the permission they need to forgo the plastic jug, to light the special candle, to sit quietly in the afternoon with milky tea in a bone china cup? I believe beauty reflects the truth about who God is and what this world is all about. What could be more important than cultivating beauty in little ways and large, however I am able?

Dead things are risk-free and easy to manage, but can they feed the soul? If I want a home that is alive, I think I must accept the chaos of its living.

Like winter, the wilderness is always a promise. God leads us in and, one way or another, he leads us out again. Or, if he doesn’t lead us out, he does something almost more miraculous: he plants trees in the desert, and he causes rivers to flow there.

The wilderness is not necessarily a desolate place. It has its own unique beauty, and that beauty is enough. It does not need us. It does not ask for our participation. This may be one reason why wilderness wandering is such a harsh experience, but this is certainly one reason why time in the wilderness is a gift. Our cultivation and our care are not required. God himself plants trees in that place; God himself draws water from dry rocks. The gift of the wilderness is that this is the place we go simply to receive. This is the place we go to listen. In the wilderness, we are given the opportunity to lay down the burden of our desire to make and remake so that when some other place invites our participation and our creative efforts, we are ready to offer those things with humility. The trees—even in the wilderness—are singing a song, but if we plunge ahead in accompaniment without first stopping to listen, and without letting ourselves be changed by the song, we may find ourselves leaving not beauty but crooked patios and poison ivy and heartbroken tears in our wake.

Dreams ask for commitment. They require a running leap. They require patient waiting.

When we pray for guidance, perhaps God’s answer is every way he hems us in, like a river.

When I stop trying to fill my empty places, I leave room for glory.