Teach Us to Want Quotes

“We prefer the not wanting and not having to the losing.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“God is the I AM that I AM not the I AM that we wish.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“The Christian story, centered as it is on the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, is the only story for making sense of desire and loss.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“We all have a tendency to use prayer to dictate to God.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Struggle is a prerequisite to surrender.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Sometimes God seems to be killing us when He is actually saving us.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“We want. Life leaks. Desires are disappointed. And God, our Father, remains eternally good.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Without grace, there is fear. And where there is fear, confession will be muted. Confession will always be unwelcome in places where authenticity engenders judgment and where we are pressured to conform and perform. Until we’re allowed to be the mess we are, we will continue the hiding, the lying, and the pretending.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“The author says our prayers are misdirected when we ask God that He help us to love Him more. If we pray to him more, we will love Him more.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“New freedoms surface old habits. I haven't left sin behind, only discovered a new medium for my treachery. My real trouble as a writer isn't trying to mean the words that I write. It's living into the words that I mean. Nonfiction writing can feel like the high art of hypocrisy.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Believing in the sovereignty of God injects courage in the act of desire.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Our small group is committed to getting the biblical text under our skin.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Only he who cries out for the persecuted Jews can sing Gregorian chants. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Sticks and stones may break your bones, and words – can cut your insides.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Blessing and obedience do comfortably and mysteriously coexist.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Desire, if it is to be trusted, is to be inspired by a holy vocabulary.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“After her initial conversion as a teenager, the author writes, "I was sent back into a world that no longer looked familiar to me. I had to relearn how to do everything.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Holy desire can be learned. All prayer is part work and part rest.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Yet the untucked prayers—the prayers of our struggle—prepare the way for surrender, even praise.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“The Gospel writers record their eyewitness accounts of what the kingdom coming to earth really looks like. In the life and ministry of Jesus Christ, we see that our God has both spiritual and earthly preoccupations. Heaven mattered to Jesus, for sure, and proclaiming eternal salvation from sin was essential to Jesus’ message of the kingdom. “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14-15). Jesus was insistent that sin was a very real problem, and because of sin, humans would be eternally separated from God apart from the divine work of atonement. But the stuff of earth mattered to Jesus too. In addition to his concern for the souls of men and women, Jesus also paid a good deal of attention to their bodies: hands that wouldn’t work, backs that wouldn’t straighten, legs that couldn’t walk. The kingdom advanced as Jesus healed physical infirmities and proclaimed forgiveness from sin, took interest in the poor and the poor in spirit.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“God, by his own efforts and unflagging energy, recalibrates our heart’s desire for his kingdom.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“In asking for God’s provision, we’re admitting our inability to self-sustain.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Do we want a master, or shall we have a genie whose command is our wish? This is the tension of desire—and the test of revelation.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“My real trouble as a writer isn’t trying to mean the words that I write; it’s living into the words that I mean. Nonfiction writing can feel like the high art of hypocrisy, and the act of fixing words to a page can be like an inglorious act of self-crucifixion, ink indelibly driving the nails in the space that lies between life as I live it and life as I wish it were lived.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Sticks and stones might break your bones. And words, they gut your insides.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“there is so little of our own maturity and growth that we actually superintend. “I cannot transform myself, or anyone else for that matter. What I can do is create the conditions in which spiritual transformation can take place, by developing and maintaining a rhythm of spiritual practices that keep me open and available to God.”1 We give grace accessibility to our hearts when we engage in intentional spiritual practices. One important spiritual practice is the practice of confession. As Andy Crouch writes, As for Christians, well, we really have just one thing going for us. We have publicly declared . . . that we are desperately in need of Another to give us his righteousness, to complete us, to live in us. We have publicly and flagrantly abandoned the project of self-justification that is at the heart of every person’s compulsion to manage perceptions. . . . This means telling the world—before the world does its own investigative journalism—that we’re not as bad as they think sometimes. We’re worse. . . . If we’re being honest about our own beauty and brokenness, the beautiful broken One will make himself known to our neighbors.2 Confession allows us to be the worst of sinners and yet remain confident that God is committed to us still. Holy desire is best”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“As a word, blessing reconciles ways and means. It is a relational word, a word that incarnates me in my place and commissions me to mend my small corner of the world with acts of kindness and love.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Prayer is a means of bringing our authentic self to God and meeting him in these mysteries. We pray because we hope and believe that surrender can be forged there, on our knees. We pray because sometimes this is all we can do when desire and the undesirable have us knotted inside. We pray because, when the woods have gone dark, when the distance between God’s Word says it and I believe it feels like impossible terrain to travel and our only companions are doubt and fear, we need words as simple as these: Your will be done.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Prayer is the courageous act of bringing our authentic desires before God. Prayer is the place where, in Jesus’ name, we meet a holy God with all of our humanity hanging out. In our bravest moments of unscripted, unedited prayer, we find ourselves telling God what we want, how we’re afraid to want this, how we fear he’ll withhold, how we fail to trust and to worship and to reverence. We allow ourselves to see—and be seen. In this struggle, prayerful and raw, we willingly wait for the mercies of God to deliver us into the abiding belief that he is good. Prayer, bold and beautiful and brave, takes on the quality of our struggle to surrender to the God who is holy, to the God whose holiness produces our surprise. This kind of prayer is courageous because as we pray, we enter the throne room of God, just as Isaiah did in Isaiah 6. As happened to Isaiah, one glimpse of holiness can produce knee-knocking terror. “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!” (v. 5). The threads of Isaiah’s humanity unravel and fall into a clumsy, ugly heap. Standing painfully aware of the gap lying between human and holy, his own reflection in the mirror undoes him. This is the double vision of prayer: we see God and we see ourselves.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith

“Kingdom is a signpost to the holy.”
― Jen Pollock Michel, Teach Us to Want: Longing, Ambition and the Life of Faith