Quotes About Transformation

The sun melts butter and hardens clay. Blessed are the troubled who allow their tribulation to soften their heart to repentance. Notice how often God uses our children to get our attention. Christianity is a religion of rescue. It is designed for the desperate.

Our lives improve only when we take chances -- and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.

A political country is like an American forest; you have only to cut down the old trees, and immediately new trees come up to replace them.

A]n ancient and ever-altering constitution is like an old man who still wears with attached fondness clothes in the fashion of his youth: what you see of him is the same; what you do not see is wholly altered.

Overtime my writing style has evolved in part because I try to do something different with each book.

Torn from its branch, the moon waned for a couple of weeks.

Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.

The last we saw of them was when they kissed, then beautifully naked walked as if into a sea of bright blue water --- leaving their bodies like old clothes upon the shore.

Prayer is a refusal to settle for what is.

The key insight is that honest talk transforms and emancipates when it is received in faithful seriousness.

Two movements in human life are important: (a) deep reluctance to let loose of a world that has passed away, and (b) capacity to embrace a new world being given.

It is the silence-breaking cry that begins the process that turns pain into joy.

The news enacted by Elisha is reperformed by Jesus. It is, subsequently, performed in many other venues, sometimes by the followers of Jesus, sometimes by others who stand alongside the faithful followers of Jesus. In every such performance of the news, it is Gospel truth enacted as practical transformation that settled power can neither enact nor prevent.

It is the work of the poet to imagine YHWH out beyond old stereotypes and to show us that the God of Israel, at the very moment of risk, is a God of healing, transformative, covenantal fidelity.

In a society that knows about initiative and self-actualization and countless other things, the capacity to lament the death of the old world is nearly lost. In a society strong on self-congratulation, the capacity to receive in doxology the new world being given is nearly lost.

The power of King Jesus is intrinsically revolutionary and subversive against every repressive regime.

Jesus astonishes his contemporaries by his capacity to see and act beyond conventional assumptions.

4. There is a text that looms in resilient power. There is a waiting congregation, perhaps not tired out, but too sure of self, pretending buoyancy where there might have been transformation. There is the voice that takes the old script and renders it to evoke a new world we had not yet witnessed (cf. Isa. 43:19). The fourth and final partner is this better world given as fresh revelation.

He became an obedient human person, and because of his passion for God's will for him, he collided with the will and purpose of the Roman Empire and with the Jews who colluded with the empire. He is not crucified because of some theory of the atonement. He is crucified because the empire cannot tolerate such a transformative, subversive force set loose in the world.

Clearly, human transformative activity depends upon a transformed imagination. Numbness does not hurt like torture, but in a quite parallel way, numbness robs us of our capability for humanity.

Observance of the freedom God has to change causes a terrible unsettling among the faithful.

The key players, it turns out, are those who refuse to be credentialed or curbed by traditional modes of power, who understand that the transformative power of truth is not a credible companion for consolidating modes of established power, but that truth characteristically runs beyond the confines of such power.

Those who sign on and depart the system of anxious scarcity become the historymakers in the neighborhood.

It's a very odd thing—As odd as can be—That whatever Miss T. eatsTurns into Miss T.