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Jonathan Martin

Jonathan Martin Quotes

American football player

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Famous Jonathan Martin Quotes

“The first discovery of the shipwreck is that we have a higher capacity for pain than we ever could have imagined before we lost, before we failed, before we suffered…The surprise on the other side of the shipwreck is that, while your capacity for pain improved far beyond our wildest reckoning, now you have a capacity to feel everything deeper. You are capable of a depth of empathy and compassion that would have been unthinkable before…And from this new-found capacity for pain, for sorrow, for torment, for agony, for endless waves of grief, comes the biggest surprise of them all—your new-found capacity for joy.”

“Now do you understand why it's so important for you to grasp your belovedness? God won't change the world through angels or through ideas; He will change the world through His sons and daughters. If you don't know who you are, if you don’t know your true identity, you won't touch others on His behalf.”

“I had been moved by John Wesley's line "The world is my parish" and had decided I was the pastor of everyone in my neighborhood, whether they acknowledged me as such or not. I didn't need their permission to love them like mad, listen to their stories, or be their friend. And what else exactly is a pastor supposed to do?”

“In our culture of constant access and nonstop media, nothing feels more like a curse from God than time in the wilderness. To be obscure, to be off the beaten path, to be in the wilderness feels like abandonment. It seems more like exile than a vacation. To be so far off of everyone’s radar that the world might forget about us for a while? That’s almost akin to death…[But] far from being punishment, judgment, or a curse, the wilderness is a gift. It’s where we can experience the primal delight of being fully known and delighted in by God.”

“Obscurity is where God sends all His favorite sons and daughters. Our society tells us that if and when we get ‘there’—the job or position or degree we’ve always wanted, the notoriety we’ve always dreamed of—that’s when all the important stuff will start happening. Not so. All the good stuff happens in obscurity.”

“Our scars reveal who we are. The fact that we have experienced profound suffering in life—the fact that we carry what may seem to be unsightly scars—does not disqualify us from following Jesus. It may be precisely what qualifies us.”