Quotes About Renewal

The central control center of the soul is the mind. Therefore, the mind is the battlefield and will determine whether or not we have victory or defeat in our Christian lives. This is why the Bible instructs us to renew our minds with God's Word. The Word keeps us in God's perfect will for our lives.

An unrenewed mind is a mind that lacks the knowledge of God's Word. A lack of knowledge about the Word keeps us from maturing spiritually.

There were torn between wanting to look back and wanting to exist absolutely in the new life they'd created

I just sat there, because something about that idea—that you could be one person in one moment and then wake up and be completely different—punched me in the gut.

We have a Savior Who took on our humanity to take on our shame. We have a God Who knows the pain of betrayal, abandonment, humiliation, and violence, Who shows us that wounds can be healed and can be purified. It's okay if your past is messy.

Jesus here places his entire bet on the process of interabiding: I in you, you in me, all in God, God in all. It is not a ladder but a circle that brings us to God: the continuously renewed giving and receiving which in its totality is where God dwells.

Sometimes, we can't go forward until we go back.

It's a powerful thing to rescue something. It changes both of you.

And, finally, I know, too. That throwing away this mess doesn't mean I'm giving something up. Or losing something I can't get back. It's just that there are too many pieces and too much dust. I'm just ready for something whole." —Pete Cassidy

The biggest change we can make and the most exhilarating is to change ourselves

He felt — washed clean, healed. He felt if he could just live here he would be all right. He felt as if he had never been alive before. He felt at ease with himself and as if he had come home to a place where he could be himself, without hiding anything, without pretending even to himself. He felt, thinking his way back up the beach, as if his brain had just woken up from some long sleep, and it wanted to run along beside the waves, to see how far and fast it could go.

In our springtime there is no better, there is no worse. Blossoming branches burgeon as the must. Some are long, some are short.' Stay upright. Stay with life.

When it hurts we return to the banks of certain rivers. — Czeslaw Milosz, from "I Sleep A Lot," The Collected Poems 1931— 1987 . (The Ecco Press; First Edition edition 1988)

Who I will be when I wake after enduring

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, I felt a door opening in me and I entered the clarity of early morning. One after another my former lives were departing, like ships, together with their sorrow. And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas assigned to my brush came closer, ready now to be described better than they were before.

At every sunrise I renounce the doubts of night and greet the new day of a most precious delusion.

[I]t is the one season of the year when we can lay aside all gnawing worry, indulge in sentiment without censure, assume the carefree faith of childhood, and just plain "have fun." Whether they call it Yuletide, Noel, Weinachten, or Christmas, people around the earth thirst for its refreshment as the desert traveller for the oasis.

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.

If you want a revolution/grow a new mind/and do it quietly if you can

In a new friend we start life anew, for we create a new edition of ourselves and so become, for the time being, a new creature.

Life was like that, thought Liz. You drifted on for years and years—then, suddenly, everything happened at once and all the things that had seemed so stable dissolved and disintegrated before your eyes…and life was new.

But the next time they met the friendship had always cooled off, and Mrs. Dance had to start all over again. What Mrs. Dance did not realize was that the person in question had been willing enough to listen to the anecdotes and tidbits, but had afterward reflected, consciously or unconsciously, I wonder what Mrs. Dance says to other people about me.

For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.

There are musicians who go through their lives sort of shedding their skins. For me, I've always felt backward-compatible to Version 1.0.