Katie 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.

Vega, you got some major balls harassing my girl.

I think, actually, that none of us understands anyone else very well, because we're all too shy to show what matters the most. If you ask me, it's a major design flaw. We ought to be able to say, Here, look what I am. I think it would be quite a relief.

I consider giving her crap about her lack of organizational skills, but decided not to. It took some major balls to be alone with a punk like me.

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.

In this case, two wrongs made a major right.

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.

Someone must have been in a rush to leave this morning," I told the door, trying to tamp down the major case of the willies the silent street was giving me. "Someone was just late for work, and they didn't quite close the door. That's all. There's nothing foreboding in a door that hasn't been shut all the way. There's nothing eerie in that at all. There's nothing creepy about the street...Oh, crap. Hello?

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

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.

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 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.

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.

I think my zygomaticus major might be major. I smile big and I smile a lot—even my resting bitch face is a smile.

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.

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. 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.

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.

Tucked safely away from the exploits of major artists like Michelangelo and Leonardo, I preferred to study bit characters and forgotten painters who had names like Bembo or Cossa, nicknames like “messy Tom,” or “the squinter.” I studied duchies and courts, never empires. Courts were, after all, delightfully petty and fascinated by the most outlandish things—astrology, amulets, codes

Bashir’s comments were well-planned, typed into a teleprompter, and approved by an entire production team before being broadcast to his millions of few viewers. But the women of MSNBC, including feminist heroine Rachel Maddow, never uttered a word of criticism. Neither did the National Organization for Women, the Feminist Majority Foundation, or a host of other organizations claiming to fight for the rights of women everywhere.

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.

I know every day is a battle for thousands of people out there. For too many, just walking down the stairs, taking a bath, getting public transport or being alone among strangers takes real courage. And the only thing that makes you want to cry about how hard this can be is all the other people out there who do all that without even having to think about it. To them all that stuff is trivial, the reflex of life – the nothing on which you layer your everything. The upsetting bit is not that others take it for granted. They should. I would. You never wish that other people should suffer to make you feel better. This is not about wanting other people to struggle or feel worse. You don’t need someone else to be suffering more… (And if you do then you need to go and sit in a corner and have a bloody word with yourself.) Everyone should take walking down the stairs or having a bath for granted. My kids do, and I couldn’t be gladder for them. The thing that gnaws away at you is the fact that you can’t, and that these ordinary things take up so much head space. So much of what you might usefully apply to exciting stuff, or profitable stuff, or happy stuff is used up with nonsense. You go to bed hoping the night won’t be too dreadful, that you won’t have a major fit, that you will wake up with your arms in their sockets and with a tongue that hasn’t been bitten into such a bloody pulp that you sound like a deaf person when you speak.

No one has ever called for a ban on an entire religion before. Even after the horror of September 11, George W. Bush made a point of standing on the rubble of Ground Zero and soon after imploring people not to take this out on their Muslim neighbors. He made it clear that terrorism was a perversion of Islam, that the vast majority of Muslims were peaceful.

The author's thesis is that the right to free speech is being attacked. He goes over several cases in which he feels this is evident: state censorship, freedom of the press, cancel culture, non-hate hate speech regulations, social media companies, "thoughtcrimes," and a lack of trust among the citizenship, to name the major ones. But despite what he claims and how he frames each of these subjects, it's clear that he's either missing the point or, ironically, criticizing the people who have exercised their right to free speech when it wasn't in line with his own personal ideals. [...] In his acknowledgements, Doyle writes: "I am grateful to all those organisations upholding freedom of speech at a time when there are so many who would see our liberties curbed." This is his fear incarnate. Who are these "so many"? By the end of the text, we still have no clear idea. I'd argue that it's a phantasm of the privileged few, one that signals a loss of social power. This text would then be a dirge for changing times ... the author and those of his station mourning the shift, in denial and desperate to pin the blame somewhere, even while time drags them through the stages of grief. I hope that they turn to each other for this emotional labour.

In my past, I had never aspired to be elected. I didn’t major in political science, serve in the military, lead in student government, or work my way up from local office. But I wanted to do the right things when I got to Washington, and it was this determination that launched my campaign. I was tired of people getting ripped off by corporations that cheated them, and a government that ignored them. And I was tired of not having any power to fix those things. I decided to run for Congress to get power. That is the naked truth about why everyone decides to run for Congress: They want power. The question we should be asking every candidate, every day, is what they will do with the power.

Another major problem is that privilege theory describes the symptoms rather than the cause of call inequalities. For example, being well educated happens because of class privilege. It is not a privilege in itself. By focussing on the end result of privilege, rather than the cause, privilege theory fails to understand the origins of inequality.

themselves

Echo slides off the hood, and her hips have this easy sway as she walks to the back passenger door. Damn, she’s gorgeous—red, curly hair flowing over her shoulders, a pair of cut-offs hugging her ass and a blue spaghetti-strap tank dipped low enough to show cleavage. My fingers twitch with the need to touch. I’m going to have to pull some major groveling to gain forgiveness. If I were smart, I’d find a way to say sorry without opening my mouth. Never fails that half the time I try to apologize, it comes out wrong.

none of this matters to an Electoral College majority of American

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

In Donetsk, a major industrial center, pro-Russian militia in camouflage and ersatz military gear stormed the local legislature, brandishing Soviet and czarist-era banners (with even a Confederate flag for added nostalgia).

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.

All that social justice warriors have succeeded at is losing popular support for left wing policies and politicians, and ultimately, sparking a major pushback on left wing values. The social justice warrior movement has had many serious and wide reaching implications for all of us. It's time for it to finish.

Today, we are finding that the particle physics models we’ve developed through decades of rigorous testing in the best Earthly laboratories are incomplete, and we’re getting these clues from the sky. Studying the motions and distributions of other galaxies—cosmic conglomerations like our own Milky Way that contain billions or trillions of stars—has pointed us to major gaps in our theories of particle physics.

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.

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.

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

TAKING STOCK Imagine that you have been invited to prepare and deliver a speech describing your vision for your career a few years down the road. Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you to step up to the microphone and inspire a roomful of strangers with a stirring presentation, but I do want you to take a sheet of paper or open up a fresh Word document and outline a ten-minute talk about how you see yourself working and living five years from now. Use the four essential ingredients—think long term, serve others, communicate your vision, and choose the right tools—as the major heading in the outline of your speech. Under each heading write at least three or four major points you would make as you present your speech. Under “Think Long Term,” you should list four or five specific objectives you wish to accomplish for your work and life (Carla might begin with “A business of my own that enables me to make a comfortable living using my artistic talent”). Do the same for “Serve Others” (Carla might include “Making people happier by brightening their homes and offices”). Keep going with “Communicate Your Vision” (Carla never stopped talking about her vision with the people she invited onto her virtual team) and “Choose the Right Tools” (Carla stayed abreast of the latest trends for consumer product goods entrepreneurs).

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.

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.

Movie stars didn’t become irrelevant, but they became very inconsistent in attracting an audience. People used to go to almost any movie with Tom Cruise in it. Between 1992 and 2006, Cruise starred in twelve films that each grossed more than $100 million domestically. He was on an unparalleled streak, with virtually no flops. But in the decade since then, five of Cruise’s nine movies—Knight and Day, Rock of Ages, Oblivion, Edge of Tomorrow, and The Mummy—were box-office disappointments. This was an increasingly common occurrence for A-listers. Will Ferrell and Ben Stiller couldn’t convince anyone to see Zoolander 2. Brad Pitt didn’t attract audiences to Allied. Virtually nobody wanted to see Sandra Bullock in Our Brand Is Crisis. It’s not that they were being replaced by a new generation of stars. Certainly Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt and Kevin Hart and Melissa McCarthy have risen in popularity in recent years, but outside of major franchises like The Hunger Games and Jurassic World, their box-office records are inconsistent as well. What happened? Audiences’ loyalties shifted. Not to other stars, but to franchises. Today, no person has the box-office track record that Cruise once did, and it’s hard to imagine that anyone will again. But Marvel Studios does. Harry Potter does. Fast & Furious does. Moviegoers looking for the consistent, predictable satisfaction they used to get from their favorite stars now turn to cinematic universes. Any movie with “Jurassic” in the title is sure to feature family-friendly adventures on an island full of dinosaurs, no matter who plays the human roles. Star vehicles are less predictable because stars themselves get older, they make idiosyncratic choices, and thanks to the tabloid media, our knowledge of their personal failings often colors how we view them onscreen (one reason for Cruise’s box-office woes has been that many women turned on him following his failed marriage to Katie Holmes).

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.

Ezra Callahan: But it gets added and eventually the immediate reaction subsides and people realize that the News Feed is exactly what they wanted, this feature is exactly right, this just made Facebook a thousand times more useful. Katie Geminder: Like Photos, News Feed was just—boom!—a major change in the product and one of those sea changes that just leveled it up. Jeff Rothschild: Our usage just skyrocketed on the launch of News Feed. About the same time we also opened the site up to people who didn’t have a .edu address. Ezra Callahan: Once it opens to the public, it’s becoming clear that Facebook is on its way to becoming the directory of all the people in the world. Jeff Rothschild: Those two things together—that was the inflection point where Facebook became a massively used product. Prior to that we were a niche product for high school and college students.

It hadn’t been enough to keep the majority of her students from failing to launch after high school, but the few she had helped to realize their potential had never forgotten her. Katie had waged war against a broken system, resigning from teaching to tackle the root of the issues directly in her early thirties. Her singular focus was tearing it up from the inside and becoming a thorn in the side of the bureaucrats. She was present at every meeting, every gala, fête, or fundraiser, campaigning

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,

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

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.

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

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

Jess so