Quotes About Renewal

The essence of being in God's image is our ability, like God, to stop. We imitate God by stopping our work and resting.

To become a Christian and to be adopted into God's family with the new name of "Christian" does not erase the past. God does not give us amnesia or do emergency emotional/spiritual reconstructive surgery. God does forgive the past, but he does not erase it. We are given a new start, but we still come in as babies drinking milk and are expected to die daily to the parts of our lives that do not honor God and follow Jesus.

twenty-four hours) to rest and delight in God.

The Sabbath calls us to build the doing of nothing into our schedules each week.

The Four Principles of Biblical Sabbath

In retrospect, I can see in my own life what I could not see at the time — how the job I lost helped me find work I needed to do, how the "road closed" sign turned me toward terrain I needed to travel, how losses that felt irredeemable forced me to discern meanings I needed to know. On the surface it seemed that life was lessening, but silently and lavishly the seeds of new life were always being sown. — Parker Palmer50

you gotta let go of this whole self thing. Identity changes by the second, you turn into someone else every time a new thought rewires your brain.

For who can doubt that Rome would rise again instantly if she began to know herself?

The mind ought sometimes to be diverted, that it may return the better to thinking.

The mind ought sometimes to be diverted that it may return to better thinking.

Thats a very appropriate color he's wearing. Green.

A large psychic void is left by a loss of faith. So many Catholics have tried so many things to replace it.

A New World. A world where God has set up housekeeping, where God will live right with us, and we with Him. He'll wipe the tears from our eyes, and death will die. No more crying, no more sorrow, no more pain, no more.

I wash off the night in the water, my scrapes and aches numbed by the sea. My bones have become boughs, all scarred knees and gnarled kuckles. None of us are the same person we once were, since the human body replaces itself every seven years; there have been at least six different mes.

It is no idle phrase that man was made in God's image. There is something worth saving in the worst of us, and out of this something a new man may be fashioned.

Yet to me this decaying landscape has its uses: To make me remember, who am always inclined to forget, That there is always a changing at the root, And a real world in which time really passes. — Philip Larkin, from "New Year Poem," Collected Poems , ed. Anthony Thwaite (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989)

The Trees The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Let me begin again as a speck of dust caught in the night winds sweeping out to sea. Let me begin this time knowing the world is salt water and dark clouds, the world is grinding and sighing all night, and dawn comes slowly, and changes nothing.

The earth drinks all that's left of you and asks for more.

Even if it means oblivion, friends, I'll welcome it, because it won't be nothing. We'll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we'll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we'll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.

You know, sometimes a thing, a system, a creation grows so old, and corrupt, and weighed down by its own baggage, that all you can do is change it. Move on. Start afresh. It's frightening, but it has to be done.

Cleansed and newly born, we step from the shower and wrap ourselves in a towel. Mother Earth waits with open arms.

When you awake in the morning, stretch your arms to the sky and breathe deeply. Fill your insides with the emptiness around you. Breathe easy. You're alive.

I want to live again. I want to live again. I want to live again. Please God, let me live again.