Quotes About Transformation

The gospel of grace begins and ends with forgiveness. And people write songs with titles like "Amazing Grace" for one reason: grace is the only force in the universe powerful enough to break the chains that enslave generations. Grace alone melts ungrace.

Over time Christians learned that the faith grows best from the bottom up rather than being imposed from the top down.

He had not come primarily to heal the world's cells, but to heal its souls.

God does some of God's best work with people who are truly, seriously lost.

How would my life change if I truly believed the Bible's astounding words about God's love for me, if I looked in the mirror and saw what God sees?

I can only advance in the kingdom if I become like that woman: trembling, humbled, without excuse, my palms open to receive God's grace.

That stance of openness to receive is what I call the "catch" to grace. It must be received, and the Christian term for that act is repentance, the doorway to grace.

From such experiments Christians have learned that the gospel grows best from the bottom up rather than being imposed from the top down.

He called himself Jack, a plain handshake of a name, a far cry from the Clive Staples he had been christened, and to be Jack was the hard work of a lifetime.

Everyone and everything needed to be raised to its highest level – the teacher must become a mage, the husband a knight errant, the labor a hero in a sacred drama – intensified, rarefied, baptized in the turbulent waters of restlessness, curiosity, and ardor.

Self-deprecation is the appropriate response of any new convert, as he matches his stained soul against the purity of God.

Grief had refined her girlish prettiness, she had the clear decided looks of a woman who had seen her hopes destroyed.

En Ma Fin Est Ma Commencement - In my end is my beginning.

He smiled at me, his wolfish smile. 'We are making a new order,' he said, 'a new world. Everything is changing, and here we are, at the very front of the change.' 'If I refuse?' I asked, my voice very thing. He gave me his most cynical smile that left his eyes as cold as wet coals. 'You don't,' he said simply. 'The world's not changed that much yet. Men still rule.

I cannot catch courage from his smile. I have to do this all entirely alone, with thousands of strangers watching my every movement. Nothing is to detract from my rise from gentry woman to Queen of England, from mortal to a being divine: next to God. When they crown me and anoint me with the holy oil, I become a new being, one above mortals, only one step below angels, beloved, and the elect of heaven.

Twelfth night, of all the nights of the year, is one where shapes shift and identities flicker.

Her beauty completely erased by jealousy.

His Holy Nature, what I want is the help of his angels, what I want to do is to further his work, to make gold from base, to make Holy from Vulgar.' He broke off.

we ourselves will be transubstantiated, we shall be angels

Slowly, like a breeze going through treetops, they doff their hats and bow, and I realize that they are acknowledging me as queen, queen in the place of Margaret of Anjou, Queen of England, the greatest woman in the realm, and nothing in my life will ever be the same again. I

You are a son of Melusina," I say, trying to smile. "You sound like her when she had to be free to go into the water.

We would never meet. I would never have to see them. They were a life I had left behind. I could cut myself in two and say: "That was the old life, the old life with her; it is gone now, all gone.

No, you look like the beauty you are, and you know it. You have that gift, which our mother had, of growing older and becoming more lovely. Your features have changed from being merely those of a pretty girl to being those of a beautiful woman with a face like a carving. When you are laughing and dancing with Edward, you could pass for twenty, but when you are still and thoughtful, you are as lovely as the statues they are carving in Italy. No wonder women loathe you.

To let yourself know that you want something, that you yearn for it. Sometimes that's the hardest thing to do. Because you have to have courage to know what you desire. You have to have courage to acknowledge that you are unhappy without it. And sometimes you have to find courage to know that it was your folly or your wrongdoing which lost it; before you make a spell to bring it back, you have to change yourself. That's one of the deepest transformations that can be.