Quotes About Renewal

I decided to forgive you after reading The Little Flowers of Saint Francis," María began. "You remember the wolf I talked about? Well, he was a monster who terrorized everybody until Saint Francis gave him a talking-to. He was sweet as a lamb and never ate anything but vegetables after that." "I didn't know wolves could digest vegetables," said Matt, who had studied biology. "That's not the point.

As we walk through each day, responding to the needs of those around us, we can become physically, emotionally, and spiritually depleted. God has a never-ending supply of grace, strength, and wisdom available that He wants to flow through us to others. And we need to keep coming back into His presence to get our supply replenished.

ese rumor de aliento libre en primavera que corre al mar para volver y volver a partir. that whisper of the free breath of spring that flows seaward only to return returning only to depart again. (de Negro)

The suburban dream began innocently enough one and a half centuries ago, with a weariness of city life and a craving for all things green bright and pure.

It reminds me that something can be broken and then get tossed around a lot and what comes out at the end is amazing.

Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law … . They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission. —Michael Ledeen, The War Against the Terror Masters, 2002

We need a Marshall Plan for the Earth.

We must always remember that the fossil fuel era began in violent kleptocracy, with those two foundational thefts of stolen people and stolen land that kick-started a new age of seemingly endless expansion. The route to renewal runs through reckoning and repair: reckoning with our past and repairing relationships with the people who paid the steepest price of the first industrial revolution.

They come and go like seasons, the winter that gives no thought to the spring.

They cut them down. They will always cut them down. They come and go like seasons, the winter that gives no thought to the spring

When I say us, what I mean is them. I felt fine. No; I felt like I'd woken up after a long sleep and had a good workout in the fresh air and a really nice stretch and was now contemplating with interest the idea of a hearty lunch. Sitting on edge in a classroom for hours surrounded by fluffy peeping freshmen waiting for one mal to pop out at me: nightmarish. Summoning a river of magma to instantly vaporize twenty-seven carefully designed attacks at once: nothing to it.

My girl, my brave girl had done this. She had gone and come back bloody and she had brought us back the spring. And she had come back, she had come back, which was worth all the spring and more for me.

Nothing changed outwardly, and yet in his essentials he felt as wholly altered as if he had been reborn, since the last time he had set foot upon the deck of a ship: a tide coming in, high and fast, which had swept clean the sand.

Skin had hope, that's what skin does. Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.

Fresh as a new notebook — that's how anyone wanted to live. Hopeful as a pencil sharpened, clear as one beam of light landing on the table's far side.

To forgive ourselves for what we didn't do Replay a scene over and over in mind Change it change Apologizing to our own story handful of soil I could have planted something better here To walk without remembering another walk To wash off the hoped of a darkened day Make a new one

Last night I dreamed—blessed illusion— that I had a beehive here in my heart and that the golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from my old failures. — Naomi Shihab Nye, Honeybee: Poems (HarperCollins, 2009)

Hair, pulled back or braided. Maybe it was time for a big trim. At certain points things weighed you down.

Lay me on an anvil, O God. Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar. Let me pry loose old walls. Let me lift and loosen old foundations. Lay me on an anvil, O God. Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike. Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together. Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders. Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars.

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes. I tell you yesterday is a wind gone down, a sun dropped in the west. I tell you there is nothing in the world only an ocean of to-morrows, a sky of to-morrows.

Speak to the branches of spring and the surprise of blossoms: they too hope for a good year.

God wants us to perform good deeds--to repair what's broken, to make things better in the world.

Christ has freed us from the past with its infinite complexities. In Him we have become new creatures and begun a new life, owing nothing to anyone, writing in our book, Now I am beginning... What matter is your past, your sin? Now walk in the newness you have found and sin no more.

Don Juan said that everybody that knew me had an idea about me, and that I kept feeding the idea with everything I did. "Don't you see?" he asked dramatically. "You must renew your personal history by telling your parents, your relatives, and your friends everything you do. On the other hand, if you have no personal history, no explanations are needed; nobody is angry or disillusioned with your acts. And above all no one pins you down with their thoughts.