Day Four: Favorite Quote(s)

I can’t quite bring myself to choose just one favorite quote. I enjoy an appropriate quote quite frequently, so I have lots of favorites. I used to do a quote to a specific group of coworkers every Thursday when I was working. I called it my Happy Thursday.

One of my all time favorite quotes from a book has to be from Emily Climbs, by L.M. Montgomery. Emily is an aspiring writer and she writes in her diary:

“Everything is so lovely – ‘the eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear with hearing.’ Sometimes I think it really isn’t worth while to try to write anything when everything is already so well expressed in the Bible. That verse I’ve just quoted for instance – it makes me feel like a pigmy in the presence of a giant. Only twelve simple words – yet a dozen pages couldn’t have better expressed the feeling one has in spring.”

If you know me even a little bit, you know that I am a huge Jane Austen fan. The quotable Austen! I would be remiss if I didn’t include a quote from my favorite book, Pride and Prejudice:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

I can’t even type the words without a smile. Teehee.

There are so many great movie quotes that I could share, but the movie quote that I most often post on my sister’s facebook wall is probably this one from When Harry Met Sally:

“Harry, you’re going to have to stop expressing every emotion that you have every moment that you have them.”

(Can you not just RELATE to that? Oh, man!)

My dear friend recently wrote this to me in regards to motherhood, and I copied it down because it resounded with me:

“It is humbling, and it doesn’t look like the wonderful things we’d wish... It looks bloody and poopy and exhausting and messy. It looks like the cross, and that’s why it is so glorious.”
- Sarah Stefanic

Oh, my. Reading those words brought tears to my eyes. It is so real. Being a mom is the hardest and best thing possible.  I can laugh (and I do!) about the irony of a baby filling a freshly-changed diaper right before we are trying to leave the house, or the inevitability of dirt being tracked on my freshly-cleaned floor, but in the daily grind it can be exhausting and discouraging. I constantly have to remind myself not to get lost in the days of the mundane, repetitive tasks and exhaustion. I constantly have to remind myself that those mundane, repetitive tasks can actually bring glory to God. My friend gets it. Oh, how she gets it!

Okay, one more and then I promise I’ll stop! This is a new one from a devotional my mom gave me:

“We cannot help conforming ourselves to what we love.”

        -  St. Francis de Sales

When I read this particular quote, I was challenged to ask myself, “To what (or whom!) are you conforming yourself?” When I’m struggling to be Christ-like, it probably means that my affections are not entirely Christ-ward.  It’s certainly some food for thought…