Life doesn’t always unfold how we intended. What do we do when the unexpected life circumstances or emotions take over?

In WayMaker by Ann Voskamp, Biblical stories and verses are woven in with Voskamp’s personal life stories to show how the WayMaker, Jesus, makes a way to us and leads us through life’s suffering. Voskamp’s vulnerable, artful truth-telling will resonate with anyone who has experienced detours from the “Plan A” you penned for your life.

“God has always been a WayMaker, making more than merely a way through. The WayMaker is making a way to you.”

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“You can’t waste your days waiting until things are painless to finally be joyful. You have to find a way to believe: Love lives at peace with pain, and the two will never divorce. Because to love is to be tender enough to know suffering, to be vulnerable enough to know hurt, and the only way to divorce your way from any pain is to divorce yourself from any love. The way to love always knows roads of pain—because there is no other way to ever know love.”

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“When you feel special, the whole world becomes special to you. Chosenness isn’t about being better—it’s about making everyone know they belong. Know your chosenness—and you choose to make everyone know they’re chosen too.”

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“Welcome to life, where Plan A transforms in Plan Z to transform you.”

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“When you know you are fully known and still fully loved, nothing can still scare you.”

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“The only way to avoid heartbreak is to grow so hard you become unbreakable. The only way that’s completely pain-free is a way completely free of love. The way of love is always the hard, heartbreaking way; real love never takes the easy way that ends up being far more heartbreaking in the end. And maybe when we most desperately wish there was a way out of the heartbreak for someone is exactly when we need to enter into their heartbreak, to be a witness, giving withness, in it.”

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“Waiting is a letting go to let something grow. The waiting need not destroy the soul but grow the soul. Waiting is a kind of expecting—expecting to have the capacity for hope and pain and love and life to expand. Farmers know what the mothers do: Waiting isn’t loss; it’s enlarging. The longer the heart waits, the larger the heart expands to hold the largeness of a different way of life.”

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“There is always something to be worked up about if you want. But the reality is that God is always at work, and there is always something to be thankful for, which is what makes you joyful if you want.”

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“Driven and motivated to always feel okay is not a steadying way to navigate your one life. If your only way to navigate your inner landscape is to manipulate, control, and dominate your outer landscape, you’ve lost the map to joy.”

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“Dependence on God is what deepens attachment with God, and dependence is nothing less than a trusting that knows it can depend on the bridge to hold, for the arms to take our whole weight, for the heart to always open, for our person to be the One we can count on to take care of us the whole way through.”

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“God doesn’t keep us from suffering; He keeps us through it.”

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“What has the final say in a life, and in our days, is whether we say to God, “Thy way,” or we demand He say to us, Thy way. One is trusting. The other is terrifying.”

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