Heather Choate Davis Quotes & Sayings

In our post-everything culture, obey has become a four-letter word. Obeying is for wimps. Obeying is for people who didn't do well enough on their SATs to write their own rules. Only the weak and the feeble and the young - -well, not even the young anymore - -need to obey. Funny, because the root of the word obey is from the French verb meaning "to listen, or to give ear to." It was never intended as a militant word, but one of hearing, of understanding. Of getting it. For a world obsessed with staying in constant communication, we aren't really very good listeners. — Heather Choate Davis

If, being cowardly, conceited and slothful, you have never yet done a fellow creature great mischief, that is only because your neighbor's welfare has not yet happened to conflict with your safety, self-approval, or ease. Every vice leads to cruelty."[109] — Heather Choate Davis

We love Christmas presents but not Christ; Easter baskets but not crosses. We want to tell our friends with cancer that we will pray for them (we don't) and our puddle-eyed children that their goldfish have gone to heaven (doubtful). When we lose our jobs we want to take comfort in the idea that God doesn't give us more than we can handle, but really, how can we? We have absolutely no idea what God has given us or what it might be for. We haven't talked to Him in ages. — Heather Choate Davis

When God says hold up, wait, pray, it's not your time yet, our entire bodies rebel, legs kicking and flailing like some overturned dung beetle certain that if we try hard enough we might be able to gain a little traction on our own — Heather Choate Davis

Vigilance is the proper, constructive concern for the well-being of others and for the advancement of God's Kingdom.[136] Anxiety, then, is vigilance that has lost sight of God.[137] — Heather Choate Davis

Our own egos are so fragile we cannot bear to give our lives to the raising of children only to have them become ordinary people. There, I said it. The worst thing a 21st-century child of interesting parents could be: ordinary. Like us. — Heather Choate Davis

We have noted that anxiety is the disordered state of God-given vigilance. What then are we to make of depression? What God-pleasing good is the flipside of this suffering? "Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair."[174] — Heather Choate Davis

Did you notice there aren't any average kids anymore - only Gifted and Disposable? — Heather Choate Davis

America is a young country, young and brash and prone to errors. Like teenagers. For all our inherent goodness, we've been cursed with bright, shiny object disease and we don't want a cure. Not now. Not till we get our little taste, till our kids get theirs. — Heather Choate Davis

The attempt to prevent our kids from struggling for fear it might scar their permanent records is, instead, scarring them for life. — Heather Choate Davis

I can't hear God's voice for my kids, but I can watch and listen and pray and adjust and try not to screw up whatever He has planned for their lives. And although I can't make them listen to God, or even want to, I can plant enough seeds to swing the world in their favor. That said, as I navigate my day surrounded by the parents of gifted children (did you notice there aren't any average kids anymore - only Gifted and Disposable), here's where I get confused: if a person believes in gifts but not in God, then where - as they stand in daily admiration of their child's emergent uniqueness, their heart swelling with pride and joy and, yes, gratitude - where, then, do they send the thank-you note? — Heather Choate Davis

Even if we've never been inside a synagogue or a mosque or a church - even if we have, and vowed never to go back - deep down in our striving hearts, beneath all the ambition and the fear, we suspect that we were made for a different sort of life. — Heather Choate Davis