Mike Yaconelli Quotations

Pretending is the grease of non-relationships. Pretending is how you and I get through the day without ever having to know each other. When I walk in the room, you say to me, 'How are you?' Well, you don't want to know. And, frankly, I don't want to tell you. So I just say, 'Fine,' and you go, 'Fine.' And off we go.

Our world is... longing to see people whose God is big and holy and frightening and gentle and tender... and ours; a God whose love frightens us into His strong and powerful arms where He longs to whisper those terrifying words, 'I love you.'

Play is an expression of God's presence in the world; one clear sign of God's absence in society is the absence of playfulness and laughter.

Just because we believe the gospel is a life-and-death matter doesn't mean we have to act as if we're dead.

For God so loved the world, that whosoever believes in him will, from that point on, be considered weired by the rest of the world, which means the church should be more like a zoo than a tomb of identical mummies.

Spiritual growth thrives in the midst of our problems, not in their absence. Spiritual growth occurs in the trenches of life, not in the classroom.

Children live in a world of dreams and imagination, a world of aliveness… There is a voice of wonder and amazement inside all of us; but we grow to realize we can no longer hear it, and we live in silence. It isn’t that God stopped speaking; it is that our lives became louder.

Speed is not neutral. Fast living used to mean a life of debauchery; now it just means fast, but the consequences are even more serious. Speeding through life endangers our relationships and our souls.

Jesus cares more about desire than about competence

Think about how many of us have wondered why we don't fit, why our faith doesn't stabilize us, why we seem so out of sync with most of the world. Genuine faith is the isolating force in our lives that creates tension wherever we go. To put it another way, faith is the unbalancing force in our lives that is the fruit of God's disturbing presence.