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The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Natalie Brenner

Natalie Brenner

…when I decided to be fully honest about whatever my heart undergoes, I found immense peace among the chaos of uncertainties. In my honesty and by acknowledging our big, big God, I found peace.

god, healing, honesty, memoir

Natalie Brenner

Wholeness is birthed through vulnerability and sensitivity, which is often conceived in brokenness. Jesus taught me this.

birth, broken-heart, brokenness, jesus, jesus-christ, jesus-the-christ, vulnerability, vulnerability-quotes, vulnerable, wholeness

Natalie Brenner

I love them both as though I birthed them both, but also as though I adopted them both.

adoption, adoption-infertility, adoption-story, biological, birth

Natalie Brenner

My parents are humans too. This has been one of my greatest awakenings in adulthood: my parents being regular people, too. They have baggage and losses, grown up in imperfect homes with imperfect families just as I did. Life hasn’t been easy on either of them between the mixture of poor decisions and bad breaks; this world lacks perfection for us all.

brokenness, christian-living, divorce, divorce-quotes, divorce-separation-children, parents, parents-quotes

Natalie Brenner

Jesus came emotional and raw, scandalously gracious. I want to be like Him.

christianity, emotional, grace, jesus, raw

Natalie Brenner

In my gut-wrenching honesty and by acknowledging our big, big God, I found peace.

christianity, grief-and-loss, grief-and-loss-quotes, grief-quotes, grieving, gut-wrenching, honesty, honesty-quotes, peace-of-god, peace-of-mind

Natalie Brenner

Time and time again, I find I cannot skip the night to arrive to the morning. Joy comes in the morning, but the morning comes after the dark night. Sometimes the night lasts longer than we want it to.

Natalie Brenner

I began realizing it was okay to just sit with Him instead of always reading and journaling prayers or hustling off to the next bible study. It was okay to just be still. It was possible to find Him in the immense stillness, the hidden parts of my heart. He was always there in my hiddenness.

christian-living, christianity, encouragement, finding-god, finding-jesus, grief, hiddenness, loss, permission-to-grieve, suffering-quote

Natalie Brenner

I wasn’t there yet, I wasn’t finding joy and gladness in my barrenness, but I believed I would. I believed He would make my barren soul as beautiful as His perfect garden.

barrenness, beautiful, beauty-from-ashes, christian-living, christianity, joy, joy-in-trials, trials

Natalie Brenner

I must acknowledge that though his adoption embodies graciousness, it is also a reminder this world is not as it should be. Brokenness permeates our world. Sure, beauty is born from ashes, but the ashes don’t just magically disappear. Suffering and all that is wrong in this world still exists. This side of heaven, tragedy remains and the moments of her son becoming ours is a representation of joy and suffering deeply intertwined. Our son, the living proof and blessing that love is what makes a family, reminds us that adoption is born out of undeniable loss. Irrevocable loss of wholeness, of what was meant to be.To only acknowledge the beauty without giving voice to the tragedy, is to detract from adoption. In diminishing the tragedy of adoption, I decrease my son’s story, along with others a part of the adoption circle. I would be choosing to ignore a massive portion of who he is.

adoptee, adoption, grief, suffering, tragedy

Natalie Brenner

Loss of any sort should stir up emotion; if it doesn’t, it’s because we’ve trained ourselves to be numb. We’ve bought into the great societal lie that emotional and sensitive is bad, is shameful, is weak, and worse yet is unlike Him.

emotional, grief, jesus, lies, loss, shame, weakness-and-strength

Natalie Brenner

Something significant in me snapped when I miscarried; that something hadnt unsnapped yet. It hadn’t been put back together and I was afraid it never would. I knew Jesus was with me, but my insides twirled threatening to take me down from the inside out. I knew He was with me, giving me permission to be in the broken parts of my story…

grief, infertility, losing-a-baby, loss, miscarriage, pregnancy, suffering