Quotes About Transformation

Having undergone that disintegration and dying of past individuals and rebirth into something vastly more powerful, all these creatures had joined millions of years before into its own early Gravemind, far more than the sum of its parts.

The last few years had taught her that, bizarrely, there might be more to life than money, heists, and adrenaline. A crazy idea, no kidding, and she wasn't entirely convinced yet, but maybe, just maybe, she could be something more than a thief?

into another identity. And I

American history is punctuated by watershed moments, fulcrum points that separate one sense of ourselves (as a nation) from another.

change my conviction.

Brother Horse spread five fingers in the wind. 'Thus the tree grows,' he quoted, 'and each new branch, as a new tree. Nothing is unchanging, least of all the ways of people.

Newton's Third Law To move forward, we have to leave something behind.

God can use anyone who truly decides he or she is "for Jesus," as Greg did in 1970, to accomplish extraordinary things for His kingdom.

if you want to see a revival, do revival-like things.

Like the prodigal's father, God accepts us as we are. But He doesn't want to leave us that way. God will change us.

I've never felt like this before. I'm a snake shedding my skin. A pupa hatching into a butterfly.

Greta worked her way toward the back, skipping past racks and stacks of records marked with the year. One after another. It was as if she were going back in time, getting younger as she went and heading toward the girl she'd been back then. Young. Impressionable. A follower. The spark of memories made her shake her head. She'd come so far since then.

We tend to become the decisions we make. The more we choose something, the more we become that something. We are all in the process of solidifying our identities by the decisions we make. With each decision we make, we pick up momentum in the direction of that decision.

This is what we are called to be: a community characterized by radical, revolutionary, Calvary-quality love; a community that manifests the love of the triune God (John 17:21–26); a community that strives for justice not by conquering but by being willing to suffer; a community that God uses to transform the world by providing it with an alternative to its own self-centered, violent way of existing.

What the fear of hell could not do, my discovery of the love of God could do: it began to permanently break the stronghold

Our call is to trust that the foolishness of self-sacrificial love will overcome evil in the end. Our call is to manifest the beauty of a Savior who loves indiscriminately while revolting against all hatred and violence. This is the humble mustard seed revolution that will in the end transform the world.

The kingdom of God is not a Christian version of the kingdom of the world. It is, rather, a holy alternative to all versions of the kingdom of the world, and everything hangs on kingdom people appreciating this uniqueness and preserving this holiness.

If we hope to be transformed, we have to allow God's Word to have more credibility than our present feelings. Take

I believe one of the most pervasive problems in contemporary Western Christianity is that we mistakenly assume that information automatically translates into transformation.

There is a quasi-scientific fable that if you can get a frog to sit quietly in a saucepan of cold water, and if you then raise the temperature of the water very slowly and smoothly so that there is no moment marked to be the moment at which the frog should jump, he will never jump. He will get boiled. Is the human species changing its own environment with slowly increasing pollution and rotting its mind with slowly deteriorating religion and education in such a saucepan?

He loves it all anyway, as his first life as a teenager never allowed. Everything is different this time. On Sundays his mother's lengthy grace doesn't grate on him. This time he savors each one At high school he recalls who wrote poetry in Klingon, who sold dope, who was really gay and thought nobody knew. Friends, long forgotten by his late forties. As they pass by him again, he has a sad appreciation of how fleeting it all is.

his most recent sobriquet

A lot of bad stuff in the world wasn't really that bad until someone tried to change it.

Slowly, desolately, the fist of what we'd done unclenched the clawed palm of what we'd become.