Quotes About Growth

they introduced me to extended communities of faith through writers I had never heard of before . . . Along with the writings of Gerald May and Thomas Keating, whom I had not known before, I was encouraged to explore or revisit a few other writers, including Richard Rohr (Adam's Return and The Naked Now), Thomas Merton (Thoughts

And it's always a bad move to invent a Jesus who agrees with us rather than challenges us.

Doubt signals not God's death but the need for our own—to die to the theology we hold to with clenched fists. Our first creeping feelings of doubt are like the distant toll of a graveyard chapel, alerting us that the dying process is coming our way.

my disruptive experiences are not outside impositions to or an attack on my faith, but are the soil out of which my faith matures and takes shape.

Being "saved" by God is an ongoing process of growth and transformation, of dying and rising, of being "conformed to the image of his [God's] Son," as Paul puts it (Romans 8:29). Following Jesus means experiencing the taste of resurrection and ascension now—whether doing laundry, paying bills, or leading nations.

Getting there is all about dying, and each cycle of dying and rising we come to in our lives brings us, I believe, to greater insight into our deep selves, where Christ lives "in us" and our lives are "hidden" in God.

I'VE BEEN ON A JOURNEY of rediscovering the Bible and the God behind it for over thirty years and I don't see that journey ending any time soon.

Another angle, one often taken by Christians in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, is to read the Adam story as being not about a fall down from perfection, but a failure to grow up to godly wisdom and maturity.

Wisdom leads us to dialogues with the past. It doesn't lead us back to the past.

Grace grows best in winter.

To put it plainly, the life of faith is the pursuit of wisdom.

The point is that Proverbs 26:4–5 doesn't tell me what to do. It wasn't designed to. It models something better: the permission to think it through, figure it out, and learn from experience for next time. In fact, more than just giving us permission, the contradiction sets up our expectation that we will have to think it through.

Probably for the first time in my life I was beginning to comprehend that trust was a habit I would need to cultivate.

The only things that evolve by themselves in an organization are disorder, friction, and malperformance.

People who don't take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.

This defines entrepreneur and entrepreneurship - the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

Any sentient entity who has lived, has changed.

babies are God's way of persuading parents to have teenagers.

age was a truly cumulative thing, bringing a degree of wisdom to life.

We all have a bad morning after at some point in our lives.

Nor is she yours, not any more,' Greg replied. 'No longer your little girl. She makes her own choices now.

From small foundations of hope, empires can be built.

Hindsight must surely be the most useless function of the human brain, torturing yourself over the unalterable past.

mental agency may be more usefully seen as a developing or constructed capacity.