This weekend, I’m pleased to share some beautiful excerpts from the bestselling book Untamed, written by the faith-driven author Glennon Doyle, who lives in Florida with her wife and three children.

“Let’s rethink the stories we’ve been telling about God. Let’s dare to imagine that God is less like the powerful men who run the world. Let’s imagine God is actually like the person those rulers just killed. Let’s imagine that God is a vulnerable baby, born to a poor single mother, among the group most despised by the religious and political elite…”

“You refer to God as ‘she’ – why do you believe that God’s a female? I don’t. I think it’s ridiculous to think of God as anything that could possibly be gendered. But as long as the expression of God as female is unimaginable to many while the expression of God as male feels perfectly acceptable – and as long as women continues to be undervalued and abused and controlled here on Earth-I’ll keep using it.”

“Had these wise storytellers lived modern America, they might point to a poor, black transgender women or an asylum-seeking toddler alone in a detainment center and say: God is in this one.”

“The point of this story was never that This One is more God than the rest. The point is that if we can find good in those we’ve been trained to see as bad, if we can find worth in those we’ve been conditioned to see as worthless, if we can find ourselves in those we’ve been indoctrinated to see as other, then we become unable to hurt them. When we stop hurting them, we stop hurting ourselves. When we stop hurting ourselves, we begin to heal.”

Happy International Women’s Day!

Celebrate who you are, and remember, God’s love surrounds us all.