Book Quotes: Forgotten God by Francis Chan and Danae Yankoski

 Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit 

I want to be different today from what I was yesterday as the fruit of the Spirit becomes more manifest in me. I want to live so that I am truly submitted to the Spirit’s leading on a daily basis. Christ said it is better for us that the Spirit came, and I want to live like I know that is true. I don’t want to keep crawling when I have the ability to fly.

Joni Ereckson did not end her life the day she was paralysed, instead, she chose to surrender it to God. Little did she know that the Spirit of God would transform her into one of the godliest women ever to grace this earth? God gave her a humility and a love that enables her to look beyond her own pain and to see others’ hurts. She is a person who consistently “in humility count[s] others more significant” than herself (an embodiment of Philippians 2:3)

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The Lord challenges us to suffer persecution and to confess him. He wants those who belong to him to be brave and fearless. He himself shows how the weakness of the flesh is overcome by the courage of the Spirit. This is the testimony of the apostles and in particular of the representative, administrating Spirit. A Christian is fearless.

A life of following Christ requires relinquishing those fears when they do come. It means refusing to let your fears of what others think, your fears of rejection, keep you from pursuing the truth about the Holy Spirit and whatever else God is teaching you and calling you to.

Empowering His children with the strength of the Holy Spirit is something the Father wants to do. It’s not something we have to talk Him into. He genuinely wants to see us walk in His strength.

The truth is that the Spirit of the living God is guaranteed to ask you to go somewhere or do something you wouldn’t normally want or choose to do. The Spirit will lead you to the way of the cross, as He led Jesus to the cross, and that is definitely not a safe or pretty or comfortable place to be. The Holy Spirit of God will mould you into the person you were made to be. This often incredibly painful process strips you of selfishness, pride, and fear.

The Holy Spirit does not seek to hurt us, but He does seek to make us Christ-like, and this can be painful.

As disciples of Jesus, being in a relationship with Him must be our focus.

God loves to take people in the worst of situations and transform them by His Spirit.

The Holy Spirit brought creation to life and continues to sustain it.

God is not like anything. He is incomprehensible, incomparable, and unlike any other being. He is outside our realm of existence and, thus, outside our ability to categorize Him.

The Holy Spirit is a Person who has personal relationships with not only believers, as we have seen, but also with the Father and the Son. We see the Spirit working in conjunction with the Father and the Son multiple times throughout the Scriptures.

Second, the Holy Spirit is God. He is not a lesser or different kind of Being than God the Father or God the Son. The Spirit is God. The words Spirit and God are used interchangeably in the New Testament.

When we forget about the Spirit, we really are forgetting God. Third, the Holy Spirit is eternal and holy.

Because the Spirit is holy and dwells in us, our bodies are holy sanctuaries from God’s vantage point. Too often we disdain our bodies as the source of sin and our fallenness, yet they are precisely where God the Spirit chooses to dwell! Fourth, the Holy Spirit has His own mind, and He prays for us.

In any given situation, we may not know exactly how we should pray or what we should do. But we can take confidence in the fact that the Holy Spirit knows our hearts and the will of God, and He is always interceding on our behalf. Fifth, the Spirit has emotions.

The Spirit is grieved when there is a breach in a relationship, whether it be a relationship with God or relationship with other people. When we are disunified, unloving, hateful, jealous, gossipy, etc., that is when we grieve the Spirit of God. And since He is the creator of emotions, I believe that the Spirit grieves more deeply than we can even understand.

Sixth, the Holy Spirit has His own desires and will.

The Spirit has a plan for our lives, for each of us. And He has a plan for the church, including your individual church body and the worldwide body of Christ.

Seventh, the Holy Spirit is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient.

Our desire to live should be for the sake and glory of the God who put us on this earth in the first place.

The Holy Spirit has given you a supernatural ability to serve the people God has placed around you.

God wants us to trust Him to provide miracles when He sees fit.

God does miracles when He sees fit and for His own purposes.

We also need to look for His action in the midst of our daily lives.

Trust that you are more than just a helpful addition. You need to believe you are a vital member.

You are still alive on this planet, it’s because He has something for you to do. He placed us on this earth for purposes that He orchestrated long before we were born (Eph. 2:8–10).

The Spirit is meant to lead us toward holiness. The Spirit is here with us to accomplish God’s purposes, not ours.

The way of the Spirit is not a gentle downhill grade. Often, walking with the Spirit is an uphill trudge through all sorts of distractions and difficulties. But while the path is winding and difficult, you are constantly moving in a particular direction, and that direction is set by the leading of the Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is the one who fills believers with God’s love and the one who enables us to love one another.

Serving God and living faithfully can become a constant guilt trip of “trying harder” and “doing better next time.”

Our upbringings definitely create challenges for us. Some of you have wounds so deep that you wonder if you’ll ever be able to trust. Perhaps you’ve subconsciously taken the failures from sinful human relationships and imposed those shortcomings onto a perfect God. Now uncertainty creeps into even your relationship with God.

One of the greatest aspects of being in the relationship with the Holy Spirit is the intimacy, security, and encouragement He brings us. It is then we can serve God as a beloved child rather than a stressed-out, guilt-ridden slave.

Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit as the “Helper” or “Comforter.” Let me ask you a simple question: Why would we need to experience the Comforter if our lives are already comfortable?

Our lack of intimacy often is due to our refusal to unplug and shut off communication from all others so we can be alone with Him.

Part of His answer to how we are to have peace and be comforted is through the provision of the Holy Spirit, the other Counsellor, who He promised would come once He left. 

The reality is that I am indwelt by the Holy Spirit. And because of this reality, stress and tiredness and impatience don’t have to define my day.

As you live your life, the Holy Spirit is dwelling in you.

We have been chosen, grafted, adopted into the family of God.

Don’t let your personal baggage keep you from enjoying this intimacy that both your spirit and God’s long for.

I think a lot of us need to forget about God’s will for my life. God cares more about our response to His Spirit’s leading today, in this moment, than about what we intend to do next year. In fact, the decisions we make next year will be profoundly affected by the degree to which we submit to the Spirit right now, in today’s decisions.

Jesus is calling us to be willing to suffer anything and forsake everything for the sake of the gospel. His call is to love those who have cheated us in business; those who have spread nasty rumours about us; those who would kill us if they could; those who disagree with us politically, practically, and fundamentally. His call is to consider everything a loss for His sake. His call is for total surrender. He calls us to give up all that we have, to give even to the point of offering up our lives as a living sacrifice. His call means realizing that His power is made perfect in our weakness, that when we are weak we are also strong (2 Cor. 12:9–10).

This does not mean that if you sin, you don’t have the Holy Spirit or aren’t a follower of Christ. It does mean that when you are sinning, you are not simultaneously submitted to the authority and presence of the Holy Spirit in your life. He is still present, but you are most likely suppressing or ignoring His counsel.

It’s obvious when someone is not walking in the Spirit (at least not consistently). What you see and experience from such a person is usually along the lines of rage, selfishness, dissension, bitterness, and envy. However, when a person is habitually and actively submitted to the Spirit, what comes out of his or her life is the fruit of the Spirit. The Holy Spirit will not—cannot—lead you into sin. If the Holy Spirit is in you, as a believer, then when you sin you are not listening to the Spirit’s leading.

Don’t believe God wants me (or any of His children) to live in a way that makes sense from the world’s perspective, a way I know I can “manage.” I believe He is calling me—and all of us—to depend on Him for living in a way that cannot be mimicked or forged. He wants us to walk in step with His Spirit rather than depend solely on the raw talent and knowledge He’s given us.

But God is not a coercive God. And though He desires for His children to know peace and love and to have wisdom, I have noticed that often He waits for us to ask.

Have you ever thought to yourself, “I’m praying to the exact same God Elijah prayed to”?

To completely ignore experience—including your personal experience and the experience of the wider body of Christ, both now and historically—is unbiblical.

God delights to show up when His children call on His name and when they are trusting fully in Him to come through, whether that is in relationships, in battling sin, in strength to make sacrifices, or in endurance to be faithful in daily life. 

The church is intended to be a beautiful place of community. A place where wealth is shared and when one suffers, everyone suffers. A place where when one rejoices, everyone rejoices. A place where everyone experiences real love and acceptance in the midst of great honesty about our brokenness. Yet most of the time this is not even close to how we would describe our churches. Without the Spirit of God in our midst, working in us, guiding us, and living and loving through us, we will never be the kind of people who make up this kind of community. There is no such thing as a real believer who doesn’t have the Holy Spirit, or a real church without the Spirit. It’s just not possible. But what is possible is that we would individually and corporately quench and hinder the Spirit’s activity in and through our lives.

Let’s pray that God would build His church, an unstoppable force, empowered and sustained by the Holy Spirit.

Book Quotes: Out of the Storm by Christopher Ash

The book of Job is both about and for people who know suffering.


There is no instant working through grief, no quick fix to pain

Wisdom is to fear God and turn away from evil

The problem of suffering essentially by saying that God is doing his best and it is not his fault if he does not manage to eliminate suffering.

Without question, God is in control. Satan has to ask permission but cannot go one millimeter beyond the permission he has been given. And the scandal is that the supreme God does give permission to Satan to cause God’s blameless servant to suffer. And suffer he does.

Between Job 2 and Job 42 is an age of agony, perplexity, and suffering. If we are to understand that agony we cannot skip those chapters in between.

The four markers of Job are:

Job really is blameless.
Satan has real influence.

The Lord is absolutely supreme.
The Lord gives terrible permissions.


The living God, the Lord, is the only supreme God. Nothing happens in the universe without his permission. 

We ourselves, if we walk closely with Christ, may go through very deep darkness, deeper even perhaps than if we had not walked faithfully in his footsteps. And that as we grasp this sobering truth we may learn to weep with those who weep.

We need to recognize that those who suffer, suffer alone.

God is absolutely in control.

God is absolutely just and fair.

God is absolutely in control and God is absolutely just and fair.

Suffering is the fire that refines and reveals the heart of worship.

No, we are called, as was Job, to begin our lives of discipleship with the fear of God and repentance from evil, and to continue our walk with God in exactly the way we started it

He speaks to us, whether or not we will listen (verse 14b). Sometimes he does so in a dream or some other means of getting through with deep conviction of sin to our minds and hearts (15–16). Why does he make us feel so bad about ourselves in this way? In order that we may repent, not become proud and so be rescued from death (17–18). God does speak, and when he does, it greatly disturbs us (verse 16, terrifies), but it is meant for our good. But sometimes he speaks to us through pain
Job 37 is a magnificent description of an awesome God revealed in a fearsome storm, with whirlwind included (37:9).

 ‘Look around and you will understand that I the Lord am the Creator and sustainer of life, I am in control of all the world, and therefore you may trust me with your life and your unanswered questions.’

In biblical imagery, the sea, the raging water, is the place of threat and chaos and hostility to the security of the people of God

Satan, Leviathan, is a horrible monster. But he cannot go one millimeter beyond the leash on which the Lord keeps him.

That means that as we suffer, and as we sit with others who suffer, we may with absolute confidence bow down to this sovereign God, knowing that the evil that comes may be terrible, but it cannot and will not ever go one tiny fraction beyond the leash on which God has put it. And it will not go on forever. For the One to whom we belong is God.

The One who is God even over Leviathan suffered on the cross. He is the God who deals in scars, for he bears them in the person of his Son.

Job is not about human suffering in general; it is about the suffering endured by a believer because he or she is a believer. Job is being persecuted, not by human enemies but by Satan. He endures disaster, tragedy, and sickness because he fears God.

Every morning we ought to wake up and say to ourselves, ‘There is a vicious dark spiritual battle being waged in me today.’ Satan is very busy; wherever on earth there is a believer walking with God in loving fear

So here is one inescapable element of the normal Christian life: warfare. That expectation relates to our circumstances. The second relates to our attitude of the heart.

So we learn from the perseverance of Job that we ought to expect warfare and waiting, struggle and prayer.

The most deeply compassionate and merciful thing God can do is to humble us and bring us low so that we may bow before him and lean on him and trust him. That is the first mark of the compassion of God: that he loves enough to humble.

The technical term is ‘justification’. God vindicates Job; he declares him to be in the right. God acknowledges Job as one of his people.

The normal Christian life is warfare and waiting and being loved and humbled by God, and being justified by God, all in the here and now.

Let us remember what we ought to expect of the normal Christian life. Warfare. For each believer is a battlefield and the battle is sometimes dark. Let us be honest about that and not be surprised. Waiting. We are to be full of prayer, longing, yearning, passionate, even desperate prayer, as we wait for God to act. Humbling. When we are brought low, it is a mark of God’s mercy that we may learn to lean on him alone. Acceptance or justification. Here and now we may know God has accepted us, and we belong to him forever. Blessing in the end. For when the Lord returns he will shower such blessing on us that we will not be able to contain it.

The book of Job is not fundamentally about suffering. Job suffers because he is a believer and he suffers as a believer. And because he is a suffering believer the central character and subject of the book of Job is not Job who suffers but the God with whom he has to deal. The book of Job is about God.

The book of Job is not about Job, but about God – his character, sovereignty, justice, goodness and, yes, even his love. Above all, it is about God the Creator of everything, the God who is God, who made everything, even the wildest corners of the created order, even evil and death.

Job points us to the mystery at the heart of the universe that a blameless believer who walks in fellowship with his Creator, may suffer terrible and undeserved pain, may go through deep darkness and then at the end be vindicated.


The drama, the pain and the perplexity of Job reach their climax at the cross of Jesus Christ. In the darkness and God-forsakenness of those terrible hours of lonely agony, the sufferings of Job are transcended and fulfilled.

Book Quotes: The End of Sexual Identity by Jenell Williams Paris

 Why Sex Is Too Important to Define Who We Are

Sexuality generates energy, creativity and beauty. It's a gift from God that we're invited to receive and enjoy.

People often find that when they are immersed in a different culture, what is initially strange becomes familiar, and what was once familiar begins to seem strange. Experience in other cultures can help open our eyes to the uniqueness of what we take as "just normal" in our own world.

Culture provides the words, practices, sounds, buildings, musical instruments and so on, with which we make our religious lives.

God did create humans male and female. But sin has influenced every dimension of human life, even sexual development in utero.

Being born male or female is a burden insofar as sex is a factor in social inequality around crime, violence, income, body-image issues and so on. But minimizing the difference between sexes seems to belittle the importance of human reproduction and the delight that men and women find in relationship with one another.

As our minds are transformed, we will craft social constructs-words, phrases, concepts and systems-that help us live well in God's world.

Jeremiah 17:9-10 is helpful: "The heart is hopelessly dark and deceitful, a puzzle that no one can figure out. But I, God, search the heart and examine the mind. I get to the heart of the human. I get to the root of things. I treat them as they really are, not as they pretend to be" (The Message).

We are known by God more truly than we will ever know ourselves.

Swept along with the development of the societies in which they live, however, Christians have come to believe that what a person does sexually represents more than just adherence to or violation of God's law; it determines the kind of person you are.

Many humans have capacity for sexual feelings toward both sexes, though women report greater fluidity than men.

Sexuality, including both the good and the bad, is better understood in light of our beloved created nature, not in light of sexual desire. Identity comes from God, not sexual feelings.

The Christian religion is grounded in cultural disturbance, a rattling of what people take for granted.
"Homosexuality" is a sexual identity that links sexual desire to sexual identity; who you want sexually is who you are socially.

Behaviour is never isolated from context.

When we root after the wrong things, we miss the peace and rest of a mature relationship with God, and whether or not we intend to, we deny that peace to others.

John Wesley described holiness as love of God and neighbour, which is Jesus' description of the greatest commandment (Matthew 22:34-40).

Being a lover, in the fullest sense, is an important part of human sexuality.

"The Holy Spirit's work within us leads us to conformity to the person of Jesus Christ. Neither should be expressed without the other."

After sexual trauma such as assault, for instance, a person may find healing in their emotions, which links to their relationships, which links to behaviours, thoughts and feelings.

Loving Jesus means receiving many blessings, but also sharing in Christ's sufferings.

The peace and stillness doesn't come from being perfect, but from loving and being loved by God and neighbour.

Whether humans are brand new in the Garden of Eden, or poor, sick and politically dominated in the Roman Empire, God responds to us with compassion and love.

Therefore desire, even sexual desire, is a venue for grace.

Sexual attractions are feelings, desires, longings or arousals. Sexual orientation is the dominant direction of sexual attractions, whether toward those of the same sex, other sex, both or neither. Sexual identity is a chosen social label that corresponds (or doesn't correspond) with attraction or orientation.

We need to set a place at the table for people with conflicted desires, inconsistent behaviour and complicated sexual journeys. And if we really receive them, we'll realize that they are us.

Instead of living more deeply into what we already have, we're encouraged to believe fulfilment is just a purchase, relationship or experience away.

But even if a marriage lacks great sex for a while-even for a long while-it can still exhibit sexual holiness. Take, for instance, a marriage in which one person is healing from past sexual trauma, or is assaulted after marriage in a way that impacts his or her sexuality. This may influence the frequency and quality of sexual intercourse, but the love expressed in the relationship may be healing and restorative. Or consider a couple with young children: the combination of pregnancy, nursing hormones and fatigue may have squelched the sexual energy of the wife, the husband or both. Neither spouse may be sexually fulfilled for an entire season of the marriage, but love is abounding.
Sexual knowing is part of sexual holiness when people come to more deeply recognize, understand and take responsibility in their relationships to self, others and God.

Sex is more than contact between body parts; it is contact between human beings.

Practicing sex, over and over in the course of a marriage, makes plain that sexual intimacy is not an opportunity to get, have, or do a person or an experience. Instead, it is an opportunity to give and receive love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23). The fruit of the Spirit ripens in the body.

Sexuality is all about reactions-whether in behaviour, thoughts or feelings-that can be heated, volatile or unexpected. Good sex arouses the body, to be sure, but it also awakens emotion, hope and memory.
Sexual holiness includes receiving and caring for all that sex arouses in both people over time. For most couples, this demonstrates the paradox of suffering and blessing being simultaneously present in the life of holiness.

A person may have suspicions cast against them as to why they remain single.

God's love is always available to us, and that we are always able to reach out to God and to our neighbours.

Our identities are permanently altered by love and grace, not by sexual sin or sexual virtue.

In reality, adoption into God's family is the real deal.

Book Review: Wideness of the Sea by Maggi Dawn

Summer or winter, the water’s edge is a cathedral in the open spaces, a place that restores perspective, where the mental cobwebs are blown away.

There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, like the wideness of the sea.

Without a clear voice on what the problem is or where the fault lies, an institution arrives at a point of paralysis, which it seems powerless to resolve.

And deaconesses became ‘a curiously effective combination of nurse, social worker and amateur policemen’.

‘Love one another,’ said Jesus - not agree with one another, or compromise and be nice, but love one another, even if you are on the point of a temporary falling apart.

The discipline of patient waiting is vital to faith and to ministry. Sometimes we choose to wait because it is wise to do so, and sometimes waiting is forced on us.

Waiting on God is not passive, but active and attentive, preparing for whatever comes next with acute and careful listening.

Waiting on God is one thing, but waiting interminably for a promise that, repeatedly broken, morphs into a destructive, pointless deferral, is not so much waiting, as wasting away.

There are a number of places where waiting for something to happen reverses the dynamic: instead of the world waiting for God to intervene, act, protect, support or defend, as if initiative always comes from God, we see that God also waits for a human response.

God is not in a hurry, and waits for human response, even to the extent that the outcome of events depends as much on human response as on divine will or guidance.

Not only do we wait for God; God waits for us - to have an opinion, to provide an answer, to take action, to do justice and love kindness.

Book Quotes: Crazy Love by Francis Chan

Overwhelmed by a Relentless God 

Worry implies that we don’t quite trust that God is big enough, powerful enough, or loving enough to take care of what’s happening in our lives. Stress says that the things we are involved in are important enough to merit our impatience, our lack of grace toward others, or our tight grip of control.

God has allowed hard things in your life so you can show the world that your God is great and that knowing Him brings peace and joy, even when life is hard.

The greatest knowledge we can ever have is knowing God treasures us.

Thorns are anything that distracts us from God.

The impossible becomes possible with God.

God wants our best, deserves our best, and demands our best.

He measures our lives by how we love.

 “I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing” (1 Cor. 13:2–3 ESV).

God is not someone who can be tacked on to our lives.

Jesus said, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). Life isn’t perfect when you follow Christ wholeheartedly; you will have trouble, Jesus says—it is pretty much guaranteed.

But He has overcome the world. So take heart, keep on, fight the good fight, pray continuously, and do not grow weary. There is nothing better than giving up everything and stepping into a passionate love relationship with God, the God of the universe who made galaxies, leaves, laughter, and me and you.

God is the only true Giver, and He needs nothing from us. But still He wants us. He gave us life so that we might seek and know Him.

Having faith often means doing what others see as crazy. Something is wrong when our lives make sense to unbelievers.

But God doesn’t call us to be comfortable. He calls us to trust Him so completely that we are unafraid to put ourselves in situations where we will be in trouble if He doesn’t come through.

We are each given different gifts and talents by our Master. The thing that matters most is how we use what we have been given, not how much we make or do compared to someone else. What matters is that we spend ourselves.

True faith is loving a person after he has hurt you. True love makes you stand out.

Just as there are different utensils in the kitchen that serve diverse functions, God has created unique people to accomplish a variety of purposes throughout the world.

Book Quotes: Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians by Tom Wright

God is faithful! And it is through God that you have been called into the fellowship of his son, King Jesus, our Lord (vs 9)

Every human being, man, woman, child, and even unborn child, bears the image and likeness of God, and has neither more nor less dignity because some other people have heard of them, look up to them, or think they’re special.

The Bible is always clear that God intends human society to be ruled by appropriate wise and just government; but all government, precisely because it wields power, has the capacity to go bad, to become arrogant, to act in ways that promote its own self-interest instead of true justice, wisdom and truth.

Don’t you see? You are God’s Temple! God’s spirit lives in you! If anyone destroys God’s Temple, God will destroy them. God’s Temple is holy, you see, and that is precisely what you are. (vs 16 & 17)

Description of a humble faith. ‘It isn’t’, he said, ‘a matter of knowing that you’ve got it all together; you haven’t. It’s a matter of knowing that somewhere it is all together and that you’re part of it.’

Life & Faith: There is a Time.....

The other day I was reading the daily devotion from Proverbs 31 Ministries that was written by Arlene Pellicane and was about how we spend our time mostly on our phones and tablets these days and not just when we are on our own but also when we are working or socialising with friends and family.

For me I think it is really rude to bring your phone to the table and spend so much time on it instead of talking to the people you are with – even having phones on the table annoys me – they need to be kept in a bag or away from the table. Ok, sometimes I lapse when am with my family and I apologise for that. No one is perfect.

In the devotion, we are told that they are many times recorded in Scripture when Jesus are with people.  Granted they didn’t have phones back then, but if they did, can you picture Jesus preoccupied with texting instead of talking? No, I don’t think so. Jesus reclined at the table with tax collectors and sinners (Mark 2:15-17) lepers (Mark 14:3), Pharisees (Luke 7:36) and close friends (John 12:2). Jesus communed with people, often sharing meals with them. It was the last Passover meal when Jesus introduced what is now known as the Lord’s Supper. As Jesus took the cup and bread and gave thanks. His disciples were paying attention. They were not distracted by taking photos of this pivotal moment in history so they could put it on Facebook, Instagram or putting quotes from Jesus on Twitter.

Arelene Pellicane drew inspiration from the famous words of Solomon in Ecclesiastes 3 and wrote a poem about the need for discernment in this digital age. And when I read it, it struck a chord with me as I am preoccupied with my phone and Kindle – playing games, seeing what people are doing on Facebook, taking pictures when am at concerts or walks – capturing the moment for memories sake.

“There is a time for everything technological,

And a season for every activity under your roof:

A time to take photos and a time to refrain from taking photos,

A time to text and a time for long conversation,

A time to install apps and a time to uninstall apps,

A time to limit and a time to use,

A time to watch funny cat videos and a time to read thoughtfully in a corner,

A time to delay gratification and a time for lavish gifts,

A time to keep and a time to throw away,

A time for Facebook and a time to shut Facebook down,

A time for Skype and a time for getting on an airplane,

A time for digital advances and a time for silent retreat”

So there is a time to text and a time to talk. So I hope we may have the wisdom to tell the difference and know when we should send a text or pick up the phone and have a conversation. Remember sometimes texts can be misconstrued.