The gift of writing is precious to me. Add to that the gift of publishing someone of my tiny stature on the stage of weighty theologians and influential gospel thinkers . . . well, it feels mind-blowing. All that to say, my second book has officially dropped from the publisher (Wipf & Stock) and below are 25 quotes that seem to embody the theme of the book. So, if you’re thinking about buying it (and you can right here!), perhaps these few blurbs will inspire you to separate yourself from your hard-earned money and move toward a deeper desire for gospel community in this age of isolation.

1. “One of the first acts of God on behalf of his newly created Adam was an act of community. “It is not good for you to be alone” (Genesis 2:18). And what proceeded was the gift, from the hand of God, of another person. Eve, in fact, came from Adam. She was literally part of him. And that is where community begins. We recognize we are part of each other. No getting around the scar. Your wound is my wound. A fence or cubicle may separate us, but when we embrace the gift and calling of community, we are able to touch the scar of our own missing rib and embrace the one who holds it in his hand.” Chapter 1

2. “No one likes begrudging love. Joyful submission to one another means we lay down our rights and preferences because we understand that when we serve others, we are serving Christ—and then we get the joy for it.” Chapter 1

3. “Jesus’ invitation for us to come from the shadows of obscurity into a family is part of what makes gospel life so attractive. No longer are we alone, destined to live in an echo chamber of self-doubt and discouragement. We get to be known. In a family.” Chapter 2

4. “The lists go on and on, and the moat we dig to protect ourselves becomes so deep, so broad, that even our own drawbridge will no longer reach the edge. We end up trapped by our own standards and self-righteous grids. Ironically, the sanitized, sprayed-down expectations do us no good when our homes are empty.” Chapter 2

5. “We like law. Law is clear. Defined. We know who is in and who is out. Law has edges and clean lines. However, as we declare what is expected to those who desire to come close to us, we quickly realize that no one can fulfill what we’re demanding. It’s too steep an edifice to climb. A perfect friendship is unattainable. It’s an illusion.” Chapter 2

6. “It’s helpful early in this process of building and cultivating a community to see your own frailties clearly. Perhaps you already do. Perhaps you are keenly aware of your bent for pressing the self-destruct button on what you need most. Either way, a warning is appropriate for those of us who know Jesus, have logged time in church buildings, have repeated the creeds, sung songs out of a place of abundance, read the bible with hunger, or even served in a place of obscurity. The warning is clear: the gravity of our lives always pulls down and away from intimacy. We drift—always—toward isolation.” Chapter 2

7. “But control doesn’t work in relationships, not in the long-term at least. Emotional bulwarks may protect us from heartbreak, but inadvertently, they keep us insulated from those who might love us. Tall walls and strategic defenses (ironically) become tools in a lonesome self-fulfilling prophecy.” Chapter 2

8. “Ironically, simple conversation, burned chicken fried steak, and open hearts seem too simple a recipe for community. Too ironic a place for God to come. And yet the whole of our Christian experience (and theology) is that what shouldn’t have been the path of salvation became our redemption—supernatural experiences born out of natural moments. Bushes and boats. Fish and loaves. Water and wine. God seems to defy formulas. And yet the one thing we can count on is that he uses normal, earthly things to accomplish heavenly purposes. Things are normal until they’re not. The narrative of God’s story is that he uses borrowed feed troughs to birth salvation. Smelly shepherds to herald good news. A womb of a teenage girl to raise the son of God.”  Chapter 2

9. “Comparison is the death of any good thing, especially relationships. This is where social media is not your friend. For every minute you and I spend online, casually reading the activity of those in our “friend group,” we are unknowingly comparing. And in case you were wondering, you lose. Every time.” Chapter 3

10. “Our lives are built around the push and pull of time and people and food. The bible and our lives are filled with rhythms in which we orbit. Six days of work, one day of rest. Four seasons, 70 birthdays, and 50 anniversaries. More specifically, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. These daily rhythms remind us that much of our life is ordered around eating.” Chapter 3

11. “We’re not after uniformity. Just the opposite. We’re after a celebration of the fingerprint of God on each one of us. We begin to believe that everyone matters. Men, women, children. All matter. Democrats, Republicans, Green Party. All matter. Presbyterians, Pentecostals, and those on the fence. All matter. The child with Down Syndrome. He matters. The broken down drunk and serial Sunday school teacher. All matter. Gathering for a bible study with people who look like us, vote like us, drive what we drive, and live where we live is nothing more than a placeholder on our calendar. That activity requires no faith or trust . . . or work. But when we invite those so radically different around the table to eat, pray, and wrestle through life together, that’s the thing that makes our gatherings unique.” Chapter 3

12. “In the early church, it appears that community was developed, honed, cultivated, and multiplied around a meal. Around the table. Not in rows, but circles. Day by day they were in each other’s homes, eating and celebrating God’s goodness. And then God did a strange thing—more people kept coming. More people were added to the church. More people were attracted to gospel living.”  Chapter 4

13. “But God shapes his people with a new dialect, new syntax, new linguistic ability. And like any language, gospel language is best learned and mastered around others who are practicing this language themselves.” Chapter 4

14. “This is how all of us who pray have learned to pray—alongside others. We don’t learn to pray primarily out of a book on prayer. We pray because we have watched and heard and learned from those next to us. Hearing their faith gives us faith. Agreeing with their prayers gives us words to pray our own prayers. We have heard others voice prayers of faith and hope and pain—all rooted in the gospel. We have heard them quote promises and lay on hands and cry unintelligible words, and it was in the watching that we learned to cry out ourselves. Never has someone learned to pray alone.” Chapter 4

15. “But specifically, what are we shepherding? Transitions mostly. With each stage of life comes new (or very old) challenges to face. We need to be careful not to minimize the power of a painful transition to ruin a life. When a single man or woman moves into marriage, we shepherd them in this transition. We gently ask how life has changed now that there is another person in the house. What has it been like for them not to get their way 100% of the time? Are they learning to forgive and communicate and argue in a way that truly honors the other person as an image bearer of God?” Chapter 5

16. “If we are only present in the big moments of others’ lives and not in the small moments, we misunderstand our capacity for real love. We would turn into the weekend parent who only shows up for Chuck E Cheese and the amusement park but has no idea what is really happening in the day to day of his child’s life. The admission price for the memories we hold dear is paid in very unmemorable car rides and weekly coffee dates.” Chapter 5

17. “The “unimportant” parts of ministry, the things that we do when we don’t think we are doing anything significant, might make the most difference. There is no such thing as small talk. What exists is talk. And it was by talk, words from God, that the world was created.” Chapter 5

18. “Rest isn’t simply the absence of activity. Rest is a person. Jesus is the only one who can give us sustainable respite in the deep places. He is the only one in whom the burden of performance and the pride of success gets muted.” Chapter 5

19. “Community is soul-wearying, even on good days. Friendship is hard. It requires the best from us. I remind myself that it is fully normative to be tired and often fatigued in this work of reconciliation. Joy is still present. This is how I know we are doing something that matters.” Chapter 6

20. “Correction doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Catching someone in a sin implies policing the people of God. Big brother replacing a loving father is not what we are after. Correction happens only after seeing the arc of a behavior over the long run.” Chapter 6

21. “Drifting has become the acceptable form of sin—the gray area of sin perhaps. If only those we were walking with were making black tar heroin in their spare bedroom, we might have an open-and-shut case to call them to repentance. Instead what we notice, what becomes most evident, is a hardness of heart. A cooling of affections to the things of God. An indifference to who they were made to be. Drifting is a dangerous sin. Maybe the most dangerous.” Chapter 6

22. “Deep gospel community is first a covenant with God who makes and keeps his promises to us.” Chapter 7

23. “We live in a timeline marred by this curse. And yet community, this ancient covenant, is often forged in the furnace of pain. Pain is a gift in that way. The ancient theology of suffering causes our minds to drift to the stories of Job and Jeremiah. Patmos Island and upside-down crosses. Pain is not something we sign up for. It finds us and grabs us with all its vigor and demands our undivided attention. We prefer other doctrines for sure, knowing this is no feel-good creed. Make no mistake, pain is coming whether we are in community or not.” Chapter 7

24. “Deep and alive community is not a destination. You don’t arrive there. You fight for it. You hope and pray for the right people, spend more time than you can afford, expose the darkest places of your heart, repent in critical moments, allow others to speak truth and direction into your life . . . and then you wait.” Chapter 7

25. “We must learn to leverage our deep gospel friendships. We can no longer sit by and watch as those in the family of Jesus shipwreck their lives on the rocks of this world. Debt, divorce, adultery, idolatry, and pornography are all things we must speak into. We don’t dance around what is most dangerous. We don’t recommend they simply read a book or take a class that will help them deal with their issues. We are their community. So we speak with authority.” Chapter 7