Quotes About Transformation

Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terrorism have reduced the pace of military transformation and have revealed our lack of preparation for defensive and stability operations. This Administration has overextended our military.

Now we're in the midst of not just advocating for change, not just calling for change - we're doing the grinding, sometimes frustrating work of delivering change - inch by inch, day by day.

Change will not come if we wait for some other person, or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

A change is brought about because ordinary people do extraordinary things.

We are the change we have been waiting for.

One voice can change a room, and if one voice can change a room, then it can change a city, and if it can change a city, it can change a state, and if it change a state, it can change a nation, and if it can change a nation, it can change the world. Your voice can change the world.

To deal with the source usually requires a life change that ultimately leads to a personal life more connected to the core of one's being.

Something ordinary in the past becomes valuable in the future

When the Japanese mend broken objects, they aggrandize the damage by filling the cracks with gold. They believe that when something's suffered damage and has a history it becomes more beautiful.

Change is the order of the day.... And change means change the Congress.

I cannot say for sure when my reliable ideas about God began to slip away, but the big chest I used to keep them in is smaller than a shoebox now. Most of the time, I feel so ashamed about this that I do not own up to it unless someone else mentions it first. Then we find a quiet place where we can talk about what it is like to feel more and more devoted to a relationship that we are less and less able to say anything about.

I always wondered why it took "three days" for significant things to happen in the Bible--Jonah spent three days in the belly of the whale, Jesus spent three days in the tomb, Paul spent three days blind in Damascus--and now I know. From earliest times, people learned that was how long they had to wait in the dark before the sliver of the new moon appeared in the sky. For three days every month they practiced resurrection.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings. —Wendell Berry

I noted that it is sometimes hard to tell whether you are being killed or saved by the hands that turn your life upside down.

You only need to lose track of who you are, or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you end up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart. Do this, Jesus says, and you will live.

I thought that being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was, in other words, and it was not until this project failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness.

The faith that had sustained them through their middle years had gotten as tight as their old clothes. Their views of God, scripture, the church, and the world were all under renovation.

Tame worship is easier to agree on than any other kind, and bringing fire requires a lot more energy than simply showing up. When life is pretty good and church is pleasant enough, who needs resurrection?

I have found things while I was lost that I might never have discovered if I had stayed on the path. I have decided to stop fighting the prospect of getting lost and engage it as a spiritual practice instead.

All these years later, the way many of us are doing church is broken and we know it, even if we do not know what to do about it.

The soul does not grow by addition but by subtraction," wrote the fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart.

if you always do what you have always done, then you will always get what you have always got. Extreme measures are sometimes called for, and these measures sometimes even produce results.

I have lived through parts of life that no one in her right mind would ever willingly have chosen, finding enough overlooked treasure in them to outweigh my projected wages in the life I had planned. These are just a few of the reasons that I have decided to stop fighting the prospect of getting lost and engage it as a spiritual practice instead.

Consciousness. That was it! The difference between my ordinary urban life and my wooded Tantric retreats was consciousness. If I could be completely conscious and present in each moment, it wouldn't matter whether I practiced Tantra in Bali or on the Bowery. Not only would location not matter, but neither would strict adherence to "traditional" Tantric practices. Anything I performed with complete consciousness would be completely alive, authentic, and transformative.