12 Quotes That Help Us To Embrace Stillness And Navigate The Journey Towards A Quiet Life.

Through this blog, I have started the journey towards a quiet life by studying Paul’s timeless wisdom to lead a quiet life which was written to the Thessalonian followers of Jesus in 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12. In recent posts, I have begun to wrestle with the way busyness and consumeristic living have derailed us from understanding the contentment and significance of a quiet life. I have also explored how Paul’s idea of quiet is a Sabbath-like living of stillness. Without a doubt, living stillness is a more fruitful way upheld by the scriptures, but it is also a prophetic and countercultural way of living in a world defined by their pursuit of affirmation, consumption, and achievement. In this post, I want to offer 12 quotes that help us to embrace stillness and navigate the journey towards a quiet life.

Over the years I have collected many highlights and quotes from books that I think represent what it means to lead a quiet life. These quotes have come from many perspectives and subjects. Though I have hundreds of quotes that beautifully represent leading a quiet life, in this blog I am going to highlight twelve quotes that I think characterize the way a pastoral leader should model the downward mobility of a quiet life and stillness. These 12 quotes that help us to embrace stillness and navigate the journey towards a quiet life may not be my top 12, or some super inspired list, but I think these 12 quotes do carry the character of the quiet living that was envisioned for the Thessalonian Church (and us) from Paul, Silas, and Timothy.

12 Quotes

I believe these 12 quotes can be inspirations that will help us to embrace stillness and navigate the journey towards a quiet life as individuals, but especially as leaders and pastors.

“I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self. That is the way Jesus came to reveal God’s love.” – Henri J.M. Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus
“The leaders of the future will be those who dare to claim their irrelevance in the contemporary world as a divine vocation that allows them to enter into a deep solidarity with the anguish underlying all the glitter of success, and to bring the light of Jesus there.” – Henri J.M. Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus
“The way of the Christian leader is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross. This might sound morbid and masochistic, but for those who have heard the voice of the first love and said yes to it, the downward-moving way of Jesus is the way to the joy and the peace of God, a joy and peace that is not of this world…It is not a leadership of power and control, but a leadership of powerlessness and humility in which the suffering servant of God, Jesus Christ, is made manifest.” – Henri J.M. Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus
“There is an old Jewish saying that the “sabbath has kept the Jews more than the Jews have kept the sabbath.” – Robert Fryling, The Leadership Ellipse
“There is profound satisfaction in just resting.” – Robert Fryling, The Leadership Ellipse
“Thomas Merton says the most pervasive form of violence in the modern world is busyness…not drugs, not guns, but busyness. The Chinese character for busy…combines the pictographs for heart and death, suggesting that busyness kills the heart.” – Ken Shigematsu, God in My Everything
“Sabbath reminds us that God invites us to stop.” – Ken Shigematsu, God in My Everything
“Instead of complaining about our busyness or assuming it’s just a fact of life, we need to ask ourselves why we are so busy. Sabbath helps us to question our assumptions.”- Ken Shigematsu, God in My Everything
“On Sabbath, choose to ignore the “oughts” and attend to what brings life.” – Ken Shigematsu, God in My Everything
“Stillness, especially in a culture as frenzied as ours, amounts to nothing less than a counterintuitive act of defiant trust in the sovereignty of God. The deceptively simple act of pausing, even just for a few minutes each day, can be a form of peace-making with our own battle-weary souls. Those rare people who learn to do this – who carry a quality of stillness with them through life – are attractive and authoritative because they are modeling something, whether they know it or not, of God’s own nonanxious presence in the world.” – Pete Greig, How to Hear God
“Learning to say yes to Jesus may lead you into the limelight, but it’s just as likely to lead you out into the twilight of quiet service. It can look like failure or success, fame or anonymity.” – Pete Greig, How to Hear God
“Learn to cherish the ordinary.” – Matthew Kelly, Life is Messy

I love the wise way that an unhurried and quiet way of living is inspired in me by these quotes. Each of these twelve quotes communicates a way of quiet living that I want to see experienced and exemplified in my own life. These books are all that I have read and are much deeper than these quotes, but these confiscated quotes can be inspirations that will help us to embrace stillness and navigate the journey towards a quiet life as individuals, but especially as leaders and pastors. You can find more notes from these books on my personal website.

Progress has left me wanting.

I also think these quotes communicate an aspect of the quiet living Paul called the Thessalonians to experience and exemplify in 1 Thessalonians 4:11. The older I get, the more I realize that I am tired of pursuing, hungering, and achieving. The busy, and noisy, way of living around me has me echoing Kurt Vonnegut in A Man Without A Country when he confesses that “progress has beat the heck out of me.” I can attest that progress has been a slave master that has driven me and many others towards discontentment in hopes that our discontentment will redefine our identities and desires. The truth is our discontent in life has become shared by many because our consumeristic culture “demands that we be dissatisfied,” as the authors of the Advent Conspiracy share. In stillness we find contentment and satisfaction, in busyness, we find discontentment and dissatisfaction. We need sabbath at play in our lives.

“…progress has beat the heck out of me” – Kurt Vonnegut

The lack of stillness cannot be ignored.

We cannot ignore the way discontentment and dissatisfaction are marketed to us and the way it has invaded our relationships and sacred spaces. We must allow these quotes, and the testimony of the scriptures to inspire us towards a more holistic way of living. It is discontentment that keeps us distracted and derailed in busyness and noisy pursuit. The authors of the Advent Conspiracy remind us that it is consumerism that has become the fastest growing-religion in the world and that “It’s now clear that the primary threat to true Christianity in America is consumerism,” a faith represented by “a dollar sign.” Consumerism, the result of our acceptance of discontentment, “promises transcendence, power, pleasure, and fulfillment even as it demands complete devotion” as we believe that the “thing we want most will elevate us above our current circumstances.” Such a pursuit for elevation creates idols and redefines who we are. It is the lack of stillness that creates a belief in us that we need something bigger, better, or different.

It’s now clear that the primary threat to true Christianity in America is consumerism” – Advent Conspiracy

We have become scarred.

The insatiable hunger and pursuit for affirmation, consumption, and achievement has become a prolonged way of living that has scarred our souls, bodies, minds, relationships, sacred spaces, and even the natural world around us. These scars remind me how quickly we as followers of Jesus can be distracted and misled. Musician and prophetic voice, Keith Green, told us decades before that “each of us must take responsibility before God to keep our eyes on the gospel. We can’t allow anything or anyone to distract or mislead us.” The more stillness we practice, the less we will be distracted and misled. First, we have to be willing to abandon the false promises of the busy, noisy, consumeristic world around us. Secondly, we have to be willing to take responsibility for becoming distracted and misled.