Quotes About Growth

There's a good chance your ikigai will change over time. Relax, this is normal.

To be here is to embrace the spiritual challenge of your ikigai, doing the hard work of figuring out who you are and what you have to give the world. This is work we all have to do, because we're all a piece of work, in the endless process of exploring our ikigai.

It's like I'm figuring it out, but as soon as I do, something shifts, and we get to figure it out all over again. I resist this endless figuring it all out, but over time, it starts to work a kind of magic on me.

I realize I've been living for years with the assumption that at some point you arrive. You get it all nailed down. You sort it all out. And then from there you get on with it.

It's possible to resist the very growth and change and expanding consciousness that God desires for you by appealing to your religious convictions.

You start with your 1, and then you suspend judgment on what you're doing, because you don't know what you have when you start. No one does.

It is your responsibility to stop listening to voices that hinder your ongoing growth and maturity.

If you are filled with pride over how free and intelligent and enlightened you are in comparison to their backward, antiquated ways, your new knowledge has simply made you arrogant. Watch your heart carefully, because if you aren't more compassionate and more kind and more understanding, then you haven't grown at all.

My wife, Kristen, and I often talk about raising our kids in such a way that they have as little as possible to unlearn later on in life.

We come up against our powerlessness and often our first response is If I were just more powerful Ã¢â'¬Â¦ But this isn't an obstacle we power through, it's a truth we make peace with. I was starting to learn that Ã¢â'¬Â¦

How we respond to what happens to us—especially the painful, excruciating things that we never wanted and we have no control over—is a creative

What new and good thing is going to come out of even this? When you ask this question, you have taken something that was out of your control and reframed it as another opportunity to take part in the ongoing creation of the world.

Failure, we see again and again, isn't final, judgment has a point, and consequences are for correction.

It's at the end of ourselves that new futures open up.

There was a giant paradox there, hiding in that love. She didn't make any demands, but what that did was make me want to be a better person. She loved me exactly as I was, but what that produced in me was a tremendous desire to live up to that love.

Jesus called disciples—students of life—to learn from him how to live in God's world God's way. Constantly learning and growing and evolving and absorbing. Tomorrow is never simply a repeat of today.

It's like there's a scale from 1 to 10, and you always would have sworn that someone or something mattered to you with a 10. But then you almost (or you actually do) lose her or him or it or them, and suddenly your heart is filled with a 17 or a 39 or a 4,291 kind of mattering. New capacities, ones you didn't know were possible before, open up inside of you.

Do you believe that God is for you? Do you believe that God's desire is that you flourish, thrive, shine? Do you believe that God wants you to be everything you could possibly be as you become more and more and more your true self?

The truth is, you want risk. Not too much that it overwhelms you, but some. You want some risk in your life. Risk is where the life is.

To do anything new—to do the 1—requires tremendous mental fortitude to not think about 2 or 3 yet. That time will come. And it is not now. Now is the time for 1. You start with 1. And you work on that. Just 1. And when 1 is done, you move to 2.

Spirit is often lurking in whatever it is you most dislike.

The measure of a sermon is not whether it affirms what you already believe. A sermon is not a product to be consumed and then evaluated according to how good it was or whether it was pleasing or enjoyable.

I was developing the musculature, bit by bit by bit, to lean in instead of away. To listen, when my first instinct was to plug my ears. To open up, when I wanted to shut down.

When you do crash and burn, ask yourself lots of questions about whatever it is that happened: What can you learn here? How will you see things differently moving forward? Why did I do that? leads to, What have I learned? leads to, How will I do it differently in the future?