Clarkson Power Quotes

One of the marks of a godly woman is that she takes responsibility for her soul's need for joy and delight. A woman is a conductor, who leads the orchestra of her surroundings in the songs and music of her life. God is a God of creativity and dimension, and so He is pleased when we we co-create beauty in our own realm, through the power of His Spirit. It was a profound realization when I understood that I could become an artist with my very life.

This is what should be meant by people power. The power for people to choose which of the government’s petty, silly, pointless laws they want to obey. And which they don’t.

What we need is the healed capacity to imagine and believe the profound goodness of the future, to stand in the light of a happy ending whose power reaches into our present and draws us forward in hope.

A woman who reads is a woman who knows she must act: in courage, in creativity, in kindness, and often in defiance of the darkness around her. She understands that life itself is a story and that she has the power to shape her corner of the drama.

We’ll listen to old-school Kelly Clarkson power songs and sing until we lose our voices.” “That is not a good plan.” Celeste turned and peered into the back of the car.

heroism begins with a challenge and a choice—to fight the dragon, to pay the debt, to tell the truth, to act rightly when the cost is high.

My parents read to us morning and night, we read novels before bedtime, we read devotions in the morning, and we read picture books or adventure tales in the afternoon.

There is nothing like companionship in the reading journey, people with whom to share the delight or puzzlement or challenge of new bookish horizons.

Reading is the road you walk to discover yourself and your world, to see with renewed vision as you encounter the vision of another.

Next to Scripture and the influence of my parents, great books have formed my worldview, developed my moral imagination and shaped my idea of virtue.

Stories shape our existence because we recognize in a deep part of ourselves that life itself is a story. The tale of the world opens with a sort of divine "once upon a time" or "in the beginning... The gospel itself comes to us in narrative form and one of its great tenets is that we have the chance to join the story of the Kingdom come in this world, to be agents in the ongoing story of redemption, what Rowan William call the "freedom of a sort of authorship.

Book Girl is meant to last you beyond a first read. By theming the chapters and their accompanying lists to different seasons of experience or growth, I hope you will find this a continuing resource.

To know yourself as an agent in the story of the world, one able to bring light and goodness in the midst of suffering, is a profoundly empowering knowledge, one that I believe comes to every woman who reads.

I felt like half a heretic to admit that The Lord of the Rings kept me believing in redemption or that Aslan made God real to me when I was sick of church. I felt guilty when a novel made me feel closer to God than a psalm.

Our humblest moments are the spaces in which God's reign returns to earth, and I believe that the beauty we claim and create in response to that in-breaking life can be a radical defiance of evil. We are called to courageous creation, for the making of beauty is our gentle and holy defiance of the forces of disintegration and the powers of darkness.

The feel of my mother’s warmth behind me as she read is one of the first things I can remember—the safe anchor of her body and the music of her read-aloud voice the ocean on which my small consciousness sailed into power through stories of music and brave maidens, feasts and castles, family and home.

I think all young women should read Anne. But that’s just the beginning. I think pretty much every woman should go on to read Jane Austen and George Eliot, Marilynne Robinson and Wendell Berry, Thomas Merton and C. S. Lewis, because these authors really do help us to understand what it means to be a woman of life and grace.

I usually turn to books first in times of distress, discouragement, or general disillusionment with life.

Even as the tiny, temporary lights of city streets, cars, and signs seem to snuff out the powerful stars, so the false lights and values of this world can darken our minds to the grandeur and brilliance of God.

Way leads on to way,” wrote the poet Robert Frost, and I hope that you’ll discover that book leads on to book and that the titles in these lists will lead you beyond, into the book lists of other writers and the best beloveds of other friends.

A book girl is STORYFORMED, shaped in her very concept of self by the characters the has encountered on the written page, by the narratives that teach her what it means to be a woman. A book girl is one who has looked through imagined eyes vastly differences from her own so that her view of the world is broad and bright with countless varied perspectives. But a savvy book girl also knows that she who walks with the wise becomes wise, and the view points she inhabits imagination will shape the woman she becomes.

English minister David Clarkson preached one of the most comprehensive and searching sermons on counterfeit gods ever written.113 About idolatry he said, “Though few will own it, nothing is more common.” If we think of our soul as a house, he said, “idols are set up in every room, in every faculty.” We prefer our own wisdom to God’s wisdom, our own desires to God’s will, and our own reputation to God’s honor. Clarkson looked at human relationships and showed how we have a tendency to make them more influential and important to us than God. In fact, he showed that “many make even their enemies their god . . . when they are more troubled, disquieted, and perplexed at apprehensions of danger to their liberty, estates, and lives from men” than they are concerned about God’s displeasure.114 The human heart is indeed a factory that mass-produces idols.

...and I am convinced that great children's books, in their clarity language, in the disciplined simplicity of their themes, bear as much insight into the workings of the human heart and its desires as the great adult classics. But they manage to do all that while being accessible to a a child's wonder and innocence.

Fairy land arouses a longing for [a child] knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted. C. S. LEWIS, OF OTHER WORLDS

The prime minister is a Labour Tory. There’s a mosque at the end of your street and a French restaurant next door. We are neither in nor out of Europe. We are famous for our beer but we drink in wine bars. We are not a colonial power but we still have a commonwealth. We are jealous of the rich but we buy into the Hello! celebrity culture. We live in a United Kingdom that’s no longer united. We are muddled.

I knew how to make noise for a cause. It was natural, I understood, for Americans to feel disconnected from the struggles of people in faraway countries, so I tried to bring it home, calling up celebrities like Stephen Colbert to lend their star power at events and on social media. I'd enlist the help of Janelle Monae, Zendraya, Kelly Clarkson and other talents to release a catchy pop song written by Diane Warren called "This is for my Girls" the proceeds of which would go towards funding girls' education globally.

God’s goodness comes to us amidst the battle and dust of our own suffering, our own long defeat. God always arrives with healing. But he is humble and meek, a king who comes in through the back door of our hearts not to conquer and raze our imperfections away but to hold and heal us by the intimacy of his touch, his presence here with us in the inmost rooms of our suffering. The power of God is radically gentle, never rough with our needs or careless with our yearning. God is fixed upon the restoration of our whole selves and souls, not just the bits that everyone else can see. Yet the very tenderness of his power is something we sometimes treat as his weakness or cruelty because we crave a more visible result. The healing kind of power is not the sort we’ve been taught to respect by existence in a fallen world where power just means brute force. We want the swift and the visible: illness zapped away, money in our hands, brilliant doctors, prosperous lives, and conversion stories by the thousands. We crave visibility and approbation and health and big crowds that make us feel important enough to forget the frail selves we used to be. When we pray for God to come in power to save us, we often picture a scenario in which God invades our lives as the ultimate mighty man to banish our frailty and make us something entirely other than we are, capable of the will and force whose lack we so deeply feel. But God cradles and cherishes our frailty, and that is where the true power of his love is known. I always think it intriguing that in the Gospels Jesus seems far less interested in the faith and hope at work in broken people than merely the healing of their bodies. For I think God knows there is no real healing until our hearts are healed of their fear, our minds cleansed of doubt. Broken bodies, shattered hopes, suffering minds, terrible pasts - they leave us deathly ill with the twisted belief that love can never be great enough to encompass the whole of the story. We feel that we must subtract or conceal part of ourselves if we are ever to win the love of other people or God himself. We are diminished in our own eyes by our suffering, taught to despair of our dreams, to give up our hope that God will come with goodness in his hands. So God creeps in, gentle, and we know his touch because we are not discarded or dismissed, but healed. He comes to unravel our self-doubt, to untangle the evil we have believed, to call us back from the dark lands of our insecurity. He calls us by name and wakes us from sleep so that we rise to ask what this kind and precious King commands, and so often his command is simply to open our hands so that they may be filled with his goodness. For when God arrives as the healer, we learn anew that the anguished hopes we carry are held within God’s hand like the hazelnut of Mother Julian’s vision. The story he weaves for us may look radically different from what we thought we desired, but when it arrives, we will recognize it as the intimate gift of a love whose will for us is always so much greater than our own.

Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials

Words are like food to our hearts, minds, and souls. They have the potential to shape destinies, inspire courage, and instill character. Words can express assurance of love, shape our emotional health, and lay foundations of truth that hold us fast our whole lives. Words have the power to pass on a legacy of faith.

Perspectives from God’s Word “…for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me” (Isaiah 46:9). “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us” (Ephesians 3:20). Perspectives from God’s People “The sovereignty of God is the one impregnable rock to which the suffering human heart must cling. The circumstances surrounding our lives are no accident: they may be the work of evil, but that evil is held firmly within the mighty hand of our sovereign God.” —Margaret Clarkson

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Stories are unique in their comprehensive power to shape an overarching idea of what life is meant to be. A good story is a special combination of compelling language, vivid imagery, and a riveting plot that engages children on multiple levels of consciousness, inviting them to experience existence through the lens of narrative. Even a toddler can perceive that in a story, actions have meaning, that some characters bring beauty while others cause pain, and that each one is part of a kingdom or world much greater than he or she knows.

The power to imagine, to innovate, or to come to conclusions independent of media influencers is a necessary skill in the process of self-development. The actions of heroes (or artists, inventors, and leaders) come from an inner idea, an imagined picture of what they ought to be and do. Lives of noble ideals, heroic action, or great creativity do not grow out of minds dependent on others to think, opine, and imagine for them. Great lives are first imagined, then lived.

My contention is that in order for children to cope with evil, they need a bone-deep knowledge of what is good. Like the heroes and heroines in fairy tales, they need stories that begin in a powerful picture of joy. They need minds stocked with the imagery of love, beauty, laughter, and song before they can have the necessary hope to shield them in their battle against sin and evil.

Instead of planning vaguely to read “the classics” (which I have planned and failed to do many times), you can identify a single classic to begin with or which three you want to read over the course of a year.

Discussion Questions In the introduction, the author describes how she came to be a book girl. When did you realize you were a book girl? What people or circumstances contributed to your love of reading? In the introduction, the author identifies what she sees as the top three gifts of reading: it fills our hearts with beauty, gives us strength for the battle, and reminds us that we’re not alone. What gifts have you encountered from the reading life? In chapter 1, the author offers some guidelines about how to choose books and how to discern what constitutes good reading. How do you choose what book to read next? Are there people in your life whose recommendations you particularly resonate with? Have you ever found yourself in a reading slump? How did you get out of it? Are there certain books or types of books that help you when you’ve gotten out of the rhythm of reading? In chapter 2, the author gives suggestions for reading in fellowship. Do any of these recommendations resonate with you? Are there any that you’d like to begin to implement? In chapter 3, the author says, “We understand our worlds through the words we are given.” Can you think of a time when a passage from a book gave you empathy for or a deeper understanding of a person or situation in your life? The author gives her “Beloved Dozen” list in chapter 3. What titles would you include on your must-read list? In chapter 4, the author says, “A great book meets you in the narrative motion of your own life, showing you in vividly imagined ways exactly what it looks like to be evil or good, brave or cowardly, each of those choices shaping the happy (or tragic) ending of the stories in which they’re made.” In what ways have books shaped the story of your life? In chapter 5, the author describes the role literature played in making her faith her own: “Tolkien’s story helped me to recognize Scripture as my story, the one in whose decisive battles I was caught, the narrative that drew me into the conflict, requiring me to decide what part I would play: heroine, coward, lover, or villain.” What impact have books had on your faith and your discovery of self? Are there particular books or passages that have been especially meaningful to you on your spiritual journey? In chapter 7, the author describes how books gave her mutual ground on which to connect with her siblings. Have you ever had a similar experience of appreciating someone or identifying with them as a result of a shared reading experience? What mentors fostered a love of reading for you? Who are you passing along the gift of reading to? What books on the author’s books lists do you love too? What additional titles would you include? What books have you added to your to-read list after finishing this book?

Read what is good, cram your imagination with nuanced characters and truth-telling authors, and you will know how to handle books that have questionable content. If you read Goudge and Tolkien and Chaim Potok and Chesterton, you will be equipped to evaluate a just-released novel that deals with more common modern discussions of sex or an ambiguous worldview. Because the soil of your imagination is rich in what is good, you will know how to deal with what isn’t.

All of us, as we read, are like the Pevensie children in Narnia when Aslan sends them back to their own world and tells them, There I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.[3] We grow to know God better as we encounter his reality in stories that richly image his splendor or his power or even his humble presence among us.

the survey made a clear connection between the fact that people who read less were also far less likely to go to a concert or volunteer for charity or even take part in as traditional and common a thing as a baseball game.

good news that imagination brings, the promise of joy that greets us in the happy endings or poignant insights of the novels we love. She has learned to glimpse eternity as it shimmers in story or song, to receive the satisfaction of a happy ending as a promise. She has come to recognize the voice of love speaking in the language of image and imagination and to trust what it speaks as true. But it took

remember the way I could gather myself into myself, draw all my powers inward to some interior room where I could imagine or wonder, where I could rest.