Katie Davis Majors Quotes

When we cannot find joy in our circumstances, we can find joy in God who is unchanged and unchanging. We can rejoice, not in what is going on around or within us, but because God is our strength and He will continue to be.

Sometimes the things we would never pick for our lives gives us opportunities to receive God's provision, to see Him working in ways we otherwise might not experience.

And the more I knew my feebleness, my flaws, and my shortcomings, the more I knew His gentleness toward me, His tender glance, His strong and loving shoulder that was always available to lean on.

Slowly, I was beginning to understand that it wasn’t my productivity that God desired; it was my heart. It wasn’t my ministry God loved; it was me. God was glorified, is glorified, when we give Him our hearts, give Him ourselves, and faithfully do the thing right in front of us, no matter how small or trivial.

It is a brave thing to hope, to continue in hope, knowing that God might say yes but that He could say no, and choosing to praise Him anyway.

This is the sin of the Israelites, of all humankind really, this slowness to remember all that He has done as we stare intently at what He hasn't done yet, what He might not do.

God sees you and me in our pain and our brokenness. He sees you walking a difficult path when the sun goes down and your life is a far cry from that which you expected or dreamed up. He sees you, dear friend, when the ending of the story is not the one that you yearned for and your prayers seem unanswered and it all just feels like a bit of a mess. He wants to name these places The Lord Will Provide. In the places where you thought life might be easier, when you thought things might be different, when you thought you might be better, be more, God provides His Son who meets you and provides grace for your gaps and light in your darkness.

Our hope is our offering to Him, our sacrifice. And in our hope, He is shaping us, molding us, drawing us to Him. We will now Him here, friend.

Hope is a crazy thing, a courageous thing. Faith is a bold, irrational choice.

God, who did not spare His own Son, will provide what we need, when we need it, even when we do not know what we need or that we need

I think that as humans, each of us just as lacking as the next, the most powerful thing we can do for another person is not to try to fix his or her pain or make it go away but to acknowledge it.

At the end of time, all that will count is that we lived the Gospel with our very lives, that we paid attention to the people God gave us and dwelt knowledgeably and hospitably in the place to which He called us.

The angel had said to Mary, "Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her!" And this blessing isn't always what we think- the happy ending we wanted and the desires of our hearts fulfilled.

As time passes, I realize more and more how conditioned I have been to be ashamed of my weakness. Somehow it is okay to attend to the brokenness in the lives of others, but to admit to brokenness in our own homes, even in our own hearts? We have been told that this is downright embarrassing. What we know to be true, though, as we dig into Scripture, is that God is not ashamed of our weakness. He is not ashamed of it, because He can use even this to glorify Himself.

I think of the privilege it is to be able to speak life over these hurting people and believe in new life for them as we strive to love them the way we've been loved by Christ, the privilege it is to watch His faithfulness unfold in their stories.

I want to be a steady, unanxious person of prayer not just for my own mental, emotional, and spiritual health but for my family, my community, and all those who might catch a glimpse of Christ through me. I want to live out of the place of peace that Jesus promises.

He may move you somewhere across the world. Or he may move you to believe again, to dare again, to reach out again. But if the steadying love of Christ moves you, it will move you out into the world with the bravest hope. He will move you to hope for what seem like impossible things, because His closeness is your most cherished thing.

Why had I believed my whole life that ease and success, gifts and miracles, smiling faces and my plans fulfilled, meant the Lord’s blessing and favor? The blessings also abound in the darkest night and the deepest valley, if we have eyes to see them. The invitation to experience sorrow and doubt and all those long nights with Him—that is favor.

You are doing something great with your life—when you are doing all the small things with His great love. You are changing the world—when you are changing one person’s world. You aren’t missing your best life—when you aren’t missing opportunities to love like Christ.

As I’m tempted to wallow in guilt over all that I am not for my children, gently He points out that I was never meant to meet all their needs anyway. It isn’t me who can make up for all their losses and hurts. He reminds me that I cannot be what they need Him to be: Savior.

It is a bit of a mess, this business of love. As more and more people enter our lives, we are left with not choice but to enter theirs as well. Even more so, over time their pains become our pain and their joys become our joy and this sharing of the Gospel becomes a sharing of life. This, at first glance, seems so burdensome, so overwhelming, but somehow I have found it not to be any longer. Something about shouldering the burdens of another brings a lightness to our own affliction. We are in it together, and Christ is in it with us.

As I’m tempted to wallow in guilt over all that I am not for my children, gently He points out that I was never meant to meet all their needs anyway.

I am so thankful that God, in His grace, does not allow me to win.

We both look at that leg and see so much more than new skin. We see Jesus. He met us right there on the cold, hard cement floor of my sunroom with our festering wounds and our messy hearts. He took two broken people and showed us the scars on His hands and whispered that it was okay if we had our scars too, because the scars were always meant to draw us into His glory.

I was learning that, ultimately, our hidden reach for God counts so much more than our public one. Some people might look at my life and say how amazing I am or what a radical Christian I am, just as some people might praise you because you appear to have it all together, but what really counts will be the quiet devotion practiced in our own homes. What will matter most at the end of our lives are these people right in front of us who get to see all of it, the happy stories and the tragic ones, the pretty-good parts of us and the ugliest parts of us. At the end of time, all that will count is that we lived the Gospel with our very lives, that we paid attention to the people God gave us and dwelt knowledgeably and hospitably in the place to which He called us.

It is a bit of a mess, this business of love. As more and more people enter our lives, we are left with no choice but to enter theirs as well. Even more so, over time their pains become our pain and their joys become our joy and this sharing of the Gospel becomes a sharing of life. This, at first glance, seems so burdensome, so overwhelming, but somehow I have found it to not be any longer. Something about shouldering the burdens of another brings a lightness to our own affliction. We are in it together, and Christ is in it with us.

God is who He says He is, and when we cannot hold on any longer, He will not let go.

Even when we couldn’t see it, even when we felt sure the rapids of life would pull us under, we were safe in His hands. “My flesh and my heart may fail,” says the psalmist, “but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”[3] When my strength, my heart, my faith, my whole life seemed to fail, God held me safe.

It is a bit of a mess, this business of love. As more and more people enter our lives, we are left with no choice but to enter theirs as well. Even more so, over time their pains become our pain and their joys become out joy and this sharing of the Gospel becomes a sharing of life. This, at first glance, seems so burdensome, so overwhelming, but somehow I have found it to not be any longer. Something about shouldering the burdens of another brings a lightness to our own affliction. We are in it together, and Christ is in it with us.

that God writes the better story. God sends the manna, all that we need, even when we do not understand it.

There is a common misconception that I am courageous. I will be the first to tell you that this is not actually true. Most of the time, I am not brave. I just believe in a God who will use me even though I am not.

As much as we sometimes might want to, we can’t just quit our lives, abdicate our responsibilities, and head to the beach or the bathtub.

We all have scars, and by them we remember the hard times we've endured. So much hard and so much pain......The scars whisper of His glory. The scars mean that we are growing, and the biggest scars prove His faithfulness all the more.

hope is a daring seed that you plant with prayer again and again, because this is the way your life yields more joy.

Real life, large love, doesn’t happen when you arrive in a certain place. It happens when your heart arrives in a certain place.

Directly above the oven are painted these words of Acts: “They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts….And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.”1 This is my deep desire.

Christ is all that remains constant and He is the only One who is sufficient. He holds my hands. He cups my face. He is near, and He whispers of a day when the pain is gone and I can fall on my face and worship Him forever.

My grief was His grief and my joy was His joy. In my darkness, I knew Him and He knew me. In the midst of pain I would not have chosen, He was real and undeniable and true. When life was not what I expected, where hope was not what I thought, He carved a space in my heart for Him. This didn’t make the pain easy. Some days, prayers seemed to go unanswered and loss overwhelmed our lives. I still lay prostrate on the bathroom floor and beat my hands against the hard tile and begged the Lord that I would not have to bury yet another friend. I still cried tears that threatened to take my breath away as I realized the depth of the suffering of the people around me, grief that would never end, not until Jesus comes back. No, He didn’t make the pain easy. But He made it beautiful. He held me close and whispered secrets to me and revealed things about Himself that I had not yet known. He scooped me into His big loving arms and held me in tenderness unlike any I had ever experienced.

And so I invite you in to join us, dear one. Not because we have any answers, but because I know the One who does. The kitchen isn’t big, but we will make room. Come on in. For a glass of cold water, for a friendly smile, for a story of redemption, for a place to belong. My most daring prayer is that you would find the Lord here,

You and I both know the truth of it: loving people is hard. It brings us to the very end of ourselves. And as much as we are trained to avoid it, the end of ourselves is such a very sweet place to be. The truth rings as clearly as it does for Mary in that moment at His feet: I am not sufficient. My parenting cannot be sufficient. Only He is sufficient and only He can fill up these holes, for all of us.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.

I think of the words of Proverbs that had caught my eye earlier this morning as I sipped coffee in the still-quiet house before life began: “To the hungry even what is bitter tastes sweet.”1 Could it be? This is what He had been teaching me, even though I didn’t have the words yet. When I hunger always for Him, even the hard satisfies. Even the grief gives way to

I had determined that in order for myself and my family to be okay, in order for my children to grow strong and healthy and love the Lord, in order for things to go well, I needed to be in control. I had begun to trust my ever-fluctuating emotions over the Word of God. I had begun to believe in what I could see rather than the truths of God’s promises that I could not see. I was trusting in my feelings and my own experiences over trusting in the security of my savior. My thoughts were racing ahead to try to control the future instead of living for today and trusting that my loving Father would take care of the future for me, for all of us.

To trust Him. To honor Him. Only after I fully trust a good and loving God will I be able to surrender the thoughts and fears that are pulling me apart. I could learn to trust Him more. I could learn to surrender. And He was promising that as I did, I would find the very life and peace I was looking for.

As I shared my anxiety and exhaustion with other women I know and trust, here are some of the things I heard: “I cannot make one more decision.” “I am just always beating myself up.” “I am worried all the time.” “My stomach is tied up in knots just thinking about what is next.” “I don’t think I am really contributing anything.” “I feel like a failure.” “I’m just afraid that nothing is going to work out the way I planned.” “This isn’t how I thought it would go.” “This isn’t where I thought I would be by now.” “I think I have forgotten how to look forward to anything.” “I feel…hopeless.

Pain and crisis had taught my brain and my heart to anticipate more pain and crisis, and without even realizing it, my thoughts were rushing away from today, into the future, trying to predict and then eliminate any hurt that might take me or my family by surprise again.

Or maybe you are grasping for control in some other ways, believing that if you could just get that new job or win the approval of that one person or move to that place, then everything would finally be okay and you could protect yourself and loved ones from the pain that just keeps coming.

In John 13, Jesus the Messiah washes His disciples’ feet and then, in the next chapter, gives them His longest recorded set of instructions. After sharing all sorts of directives and revelations, He looks at those He loves dearly, the ones who have left their lives and families to follow Him, and says, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”[2] In the very last hours of His life, knowing that He will soon face death, undeserved punishment, cruel torture, Jesus is concerned with His disciples’ hearts. My mind and my body cannot be free from anxiety until I fix my heart on Him. “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” Jesus says, and I confess: My heart is all too often troubled, and I know that yours is too. “My peace I give you,” Jesus tells His disciples. But look a bit earlier in the passage or at the verses right after and we see that Jesus is describing His impending death and warning His disciples of all manner of terrible things that are going to happen to them. He has warned them of their own sin and shortcomings and all the persecution and difficulty they are about to face. He says, “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”[

Take heart? John doesn’t record the disciples’ response here, but I know what mine would have been. Jesus has just told them that He is going to be betrayed and killed—that He is “going away.”[4] They have given up their entire lives to follow Him, and He is going to leave? My reaction would have been to panic, but He instructs His disciples to grab hold of the opposite: deep peace and assurance. Jesus isn’t telling them to take heart because it will be easy. The disciples aren’t looking forward to a moment of quiet or a beach vacation, the absence of chaos or trial or the perfect circumstances. They don’t have success, financial freedom, or quiet lives to look forward to. They—we—are to take heart because Jesus, whose peace is not of this world, has overcome this world. There is no chaos or trial or circumstance that does not bow to Him. There is no hardship that we cannot trust Him with. “I am with you always,” He says.[5] As our circumstances change, He does not. This is reason to rest. This is reason to rejoice. This is reason for peace.

A study of the word peace Jesus uses in His final instructions to the disciples reveals the Old Testament Hebrew word shalom. While in a few cases this word could be used to mean “at rest” or “quiet,” which is what comes to mind for me first when I think of peace, much more often it is used to mean “deliverance” or “salvation.” I spent some time letting that sink in after I first read Jesus’s word to the disciples. When He says, “My peace I give you,” He—our deliverance and salvation—is also saying, I will be with you. He is Immanuel, God with us. He is with us in the rapids. He is with us in the boat. Peace is ours because our deliverance and salvation come from Him. He Himself is our peace. In Greek, this same word is translated eiréné and most often is assigned the meaning “complete” or “whole.”[7] When Jesus gave peace to His disciples, to you and me, might He have been saying that He was making us whole and complete by inviting us into salvation and delivering us from sin and death? Whole and complete, the very opposite of pulled apart and divided?

Jesus says: Do not let your hearts be troubled, because I am your peace. Do not let your hearts be troubled, because in Me, you are whole and complete. Do not let your hearts be troubled, because I have overcome. Do not let your hearts be troubled, because I am your salvation and deliverance and you are sealed for eternity with Me. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not be afraid, because no matter what comes, you are safe all along.

That’s enough. Abigail knows who she is because she knows whose she is. I want to say that, and to believe deep in my bones that it’s true. But I come from a place and a culture where we always reach for more, always look for better. Where accumulation and achievement are valued far more highly than God’s presence and provision, even if we aren’t willing to admit it.

Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Florence Welch—acknowledged Stevie as a major influence on their careers, and Stevie allowed that this was flattering. A