Shannon L. Alder Quotes - Page 4

I think more people would stay active in church, if they didn't get so offended by the actions of members. Sometimes, you have to view places of worship as free mental health clinics, in order to deal with the piety or hypocrisy. Parishioners are a wounded souls in various stages of healing, who are being treated by angels, with credentials from the University of Hard Knocks. Some take their therapy seriously and try to practice what they learned. Yet, others down the sacrament like a healing dose of Prozac, with no other effort required. When you keep this in mind, you won't feel so annoyed by the personalities you encounter.
Shannon L. Alder
Don’t ever let your spouse or partner blame an outside person or persons for the ruin of your relationship or their past relationships. If two people are committed to one another then no one can change that.
Shannon L. Alder
Some people can’t be in your life because they don’t have the power to help you improve it. That doesn’t mean you don’t wish them well, it just means that you are on Chapter ten of your life, when they are on Chapter five. Maybe, it is just enough to meet at the crossroads in life and agree to take separate paths, then with a cheshire grin you both look back and shout, “Beat you to the top of the mountain”, followed by the funnest sprint of both of your lives.
Shannon L. Alder
Tough love and brutal truth from strangers are far more valuable than Band-Aids and half-truths from invested friends, who don’t want to see you suffer any more than you have.
Shannon L. Alder
Who gets to be the judge of reality? If it was deeply felt, believed, spoken about often or altered your life course, then it was real enough. Faith doesn't get the luxury of all those things one hundred percent of the time, but we call that normal behavior based on a gut feeling.” I said. I looked at his wife and she busted out laughing. Her husband was trying to catch invisible butterflies above his head—dementia. My patients teach me the most sobering of truths: Why wreck his smile. If I could see them, I would want to catch them too.
Shannon L. Alder
If they keep coming back to you, it isn't love. It is because you made yourself and easy option. The moment the thing they truly want becomes less difficult to obtain is when you will realize that your worth was on sale.
Shannon L. Alder
Words don’t have the power to hurt you, unless that person meant more to you than you are willing to confess.
Shannon L. Alder
The only real difficulty with becoming disciplined is when you buy into the notion that happiness comes at the price of sacrifice. The reality is this: Discipline becomes freedom when you are doing what you love.
Shannon L. Alder
Live in such a way that when you die you leave God in your will for your children.
Shannon L. Alder
God has a way of picking a “nobody” and turning their world upside down, in order to create a “somebody” that will remove the obstacles they encountered out of the pathway for others.
Shannon L. Alder
Truth was never meant to make you comfortable, unless you stand in the middle of it with acceptance.
Shannon L. Alder
You have two choices in life when it comes to truthful observations by others that anger you: You can be ashamed and cover it up by letting your pride take you in the extreme opposite direction, in order to make the point that they are wrong. Or, you can break down the walls of pride by accepting vulnerability as a strength, not a weakness. As you walk through your vulnerability, you will meet humility on the way to courage. From here, courage allows us to let go of shame and rise higher into the person we are meant to be, not the person that needs to be right. This is the road to confidence and self worth.
Shannon L. Alder
Be the hero of your children’s story. Never let them believe for a minute that honor, courage and doing what is right is only reserved for other fathers and mothers.
Shannon L. Alder
Always do good for others because when people try to drag your name through the mud, God will always bring a storm to wash it away.
Shannon L. Alder
Only a demon would prevent a person from saving lives or fulfilling their life mission. There is no reasoning with the devil. Stand with pride because your heart is filled with the goodness of helping others, while theirs is filled with helping themselves.
Shannon L. Alder
You might lose battles in your life time. However, every person that stands bravely on the side of justice, for people that have no voice, wins the true battle---Gods.
Shannon L. Alder
Money isn't the solution to your problems. It only lets you carry your unhappiness around in style.
Shannon L. Alder
If you want to be happy you have to study people who are happy. You have to hang out with people that are happy. Life won't go in the direction you want, by simply trying to stay positive in a life you're not happy with. You have to know what you want and why you truly want it so badly. When you figure that out then you need to change your current identity, in order to fit the type of person you envision would make those dreams come true. Happiness is not reliant on the actions or inactions of other people. It is your “courage in motion” toward your dreams.
Shannon L. Alder
Settling is not a destination, rather a vacation rental staring at an endless sea that dares you to cross its waves.
Shannon L. Alder
You have to have more than hope to get what you want in life.
Shannon L. Alder
Life will either shrink or expand based on your decision to have courage.
Shannon L. Alder
Family and friends become oppressors the moment they teach you that loyalty is more important than what is done to people outside your social circle. What they are really saying is this: Save yourself because God is more interested in an intact family or social circle that looks righteous, rather than you being a person of integrity that has compassion for others. It is this absurdity that teaches the wrong version of God and creates the next generation of "me" centered individuals.
Shannon L. Alder
Reality is a dream that someone was brave enough to conquer.
Shannon L. Alder
God isn't a place of fresh starts. He isn't a hideout. He is not a destination. He is not a clean break. He is not a cop out for indecision. He is not a straight line. He is a circle. He will take you back to whatever you ran from if he needs you to heal your scars and others. He is a God of justice and compassion. The greatest growth a soul can experience doesn't come from doing service to strangers that have no impact on your life. It comes from doing service to people that have hurt you or you have hurt them. To truly devote yourself to God is to travel down roads that are hard to revisit. However, he will keep taking you there, until you have healed yourself or others.
Shannon L. Alder
The most important gift you can give your children is the importance of standing up to injustice. Children will remember moments spent with you. However, it isn't togetherness that creates humane parents and righteous kids. It is the example of integrity that a parent sets and the on going lessons they teach about compassion toward others throughout their lives. A good father or mother teaches their children that cruelty is not something you cause or ignore, rather it is the moment you suit up for war.
Shannon L. Alder
Your blessings lay beyond your fear.
Shannon L. Alder
Leave a legacy of love, not a legacy of fear.
Shannon L. Alder
A kind word will never replace the conversation that God has prompted you to repeatedly have.
Shannon L. Alder
They said my solution was foreign because I lived on another planet. It required honesty. It required communication. It required kindness. It required integrity. It required compassion. It required empathy. It required a deep understanding of what it meant to be humane. It required courage to be something above the others. It required proving your love of God.
Shannon L. Alder
Sometimes, it is how you shine in the darkness during other people's misery that is remembered more than anything you could have said or done when you have suffered just as much.
Shannon L. Alder
There will be times in your life when you will have to stand alone in your pain and choke back all the injustice done to you. Letting go will be the hardest thing you have ever had to do because it means losing something you wish you didn't have to lose--the person that you care for. However, to be authentic--one person, it requires standing for truth as you know it to be, instead of having your dignity destroyed by another. It is a fire you have to walk through, in order to truly live. Sometimes, practicing faith by letting go is the most painful chapter of your life that will take every bit of courage for you to close, before you can be reborn.
Shannon L. Alder
Forget what hurt you in the past, but never forget what it taught you. However, if it taught you to hold onto grudges, seek revenge, not forgive or show compassion, to categorize people as good or bad, to distrust and be guarded with your feelings then you didn’t learn a thing. God doesn’t bring you lessons to close your heart. He brings you lessons to open it, by developing compassion, learning to listen, seeking to understand instead of speculating, practicing empathy and developing conflict resolution through communication. If he brought you perfect people, how would you ever learn to spiritually evolve?
Shannon L. Alder
One of the greatest regrets in life is being what others would want you to be, rather than being yourself.
Shannon L. Alder
There is always a storm. There is always rain. Some experience it. Some live through it. And others are made from it.
Shannon L. Alder
Your true power is not in your difference, but in your consistency of being different. The world will always adjust to consistency, yet struggle with change.
Shannon L. Alder
Is not the true respect and worship of God the exercising of our power in such a way that we are also respected?
Shannon L. Alder
God is up to something, but you will never know unless you figure out the difference between who is the messenger carrying your future and who is the person holding you back.
Shannon L. Alder
No two persons can learn something and experience it in the same way.
Shannon L. Alder
Your heart will always go where your mind wanders.
Shannon L. Alder
Sensitive people either love deeply or they regret deeply. There really is no middle ground because they live in passionate extremes.
Shannon L. Alder
Tears terrify people more than anger because they attach to your heart and leave angels of mercy to shout in your mind.
Shannon L. Alder
More often than not, people who are obsessed with their desires and feelings are generally unhappier in life vs. people that refocus their attention on service to others or a righteous cause. Have you ever heard someone say their life sucked because they fed the homeless? Made their children laugh? Or, bought a toy for a needy child at Christmas time?
Shannon L. Alder
All roads out of hell lead home.
Shannon L. Alder
You can't fight hatred with hatred and expect anyone to listen to you. You can only try to lessen it with humor, wit, truth and commonsense. If that doesn't work run like hell, while they throw rocks at you.
Shannon L. Alder
You will never know the moon or stars, unless you breathe in their solar system and inspect it from many diverse vantage points as possible.
Shannon L. Alder
When you choose to forgive the same people over and over again you do so because you don't want to believe your time loving them was wasted. Bad relationships over time can become investments, that are hard to let go of. The key to freedom is to realize that love is never wasted. The only thing wasted in life is the time you spend focusing on an unhappy situation that will never change to fit your needs, and not realizing the true investment of time and love are the lessons God wanted you to learn.
Shannon L. Alder
Sometimes, the people that love you the most turn out to be the people you will trust the least.
Shannon L. Alder
When you blame others, what you are really saying is what is inside of you can’t be fixed, so you have no control of your own happiness. Therefore, you have made the conscience choice to give focus and fuel to a bad situation that will take you nowhere and give you nothing, but ignorance and pain.
Shannon L. Alder
Don't waste your time trying to provide people with proof of deceit, in order to keep their love, win their love or salvage their respect for you. The truth is this: If they care they will go out of their way to learn the truth. If they don't then they really don't value you as a human being. The moment you have to sell people on who you are is the moment you let yourself believe that every good thing you have ever done or accomplished was invisible to the world. And, it is not!
Shannon L. Alder
If you never learned to hold onto someone, how could it possibly hurt now to let them go?
Shannon L. Alder
If your love for another person doesn’t include loving yourself then your love is incomplete.
Shannon L. Alder
Nostalgia has a way of blocking the reality of the past.
Shannon L. Alder
Quitters always believe the lies they tell themselves because delusion is easier to live with than the reality that they settled for an easier path.
Shannon L. Alder
And I was your moon because I shined brighter than any other star in your universe and you were my darkness. Without you I could not see the depth of my light and with you I could set the night a glow. So we needed one another—the dark and the light. Your fear. My courage. Connected, but separated. Different, but the same. A synergy that made no sense, but every bit of sense. We were neither a beginning, nor an end. We were somewhere in between our madness at sunset and the reality we awakened to with each sunrise. We were the ghosts of timing and fate. We were neither fantasy, nor reality--- we were a purpose somewhere in between.
Shannon L. Alder
When people want to win they will go to desperate extremes. However, anyone that has already won in life has come to the conclusion that there is no game. There is nothing but learning in this life and it is the only thing we take with us to the grave—knowledge. If you only understood that concept then your heart wouldn’t break so bad. Jealousy or revenge wouldn’t be your ambition. Stepping on others to raise yourself up wouldn’t be a goal. Competition would be left on the playing field, and your freedom from what other people think about you would light the pathway out of hell.
Shannon L. Alder
How can you follow your heart, unless you know why you have allowed it to be empty for so long and didn't have the courage to fix it?
Shannon L. Alder
With dark raven paper and twinkling white ink, I wrote my heart in the night’s sky.
Shannon L. Alder
There is no end to the things you don’t understand. The mind will search for a lie to give it an answer you can understand, but one song at the right time will challenge what you accept.
Shannon L. Alder
Sometimes, we expect life to work a certain way and when it doesn’t we blame others or see it as a sign, rather than face the pain of the choices we should or shouldn’t have made. Real healing won’t begin until we stop saying, “God prevented this or that.” Often in our attempt to protect ourselves from pain, we leave things to fate and don’t take chances. Or, we don’t work hard enough to keep the blessings we are given. Maybe, we didn't recognize a blessing, until it was too late. Often, it is the lies we tell ourselves that keeps us stuck in a delusion of not being responsible for our lives. We leave it all up to God. The truth is we are not leaves blowing toward our destiny without any control. To believe this is to take away our freedom of choice and that of others. The final stage of grief is acceptance. This can’t be reached through always believing God willed the outcomes in our lives, despite our inaction or actions. To think so is to take the easy escape from our accountability. Sometimes, God has nothing to do with it. Sometimes, we just screwed up and guarded our heart from accepting it, by putting our outcome on God as the reason it turned out the way it did. Faith is a beautiful thing, but without work we can give into a mysticism of destiny that really doesn't teach us lessons or consequences for our actions. Life then becomes a distorted delusion of no accountability with God always to blame for battles we walked away from, won or loss.
Shannon L. Alder
When you least expect it is when the person you always dreamt of will finally show up.
Shannon L. Alder