Quotes about Growth

Prayers are tools not for doing or getting, but for being and becoming.

Church is the textured context in which we grow up in Christ to maturity. But church is difficult. Sooner or later, though, if we are serious about growing up in Christ, we have to deal with church. I say sooner.

The difficult pastoral art is to encourage people to grow in excellence and to live selflessly, at one and the same time to lose the self and find the self. It is paradoxical, but it is not impossible.

If your first concern is to look after yourself, you'll never find yourself.

And just as the child gradually breaks off the habit of regarding his mother only as a means of satisfying his own desires and learns to love her for her own sake, so the worshipper after a struggle has reached an attitude of mind in which he desires God for himself and not as a means of fulfillment of his own wishes.

Individualism is the growth-stunting, maturity-inhibiting habit of understanding growth as an isolated self-project. Individualism is self-ism with a swagger. The individualist is the person who is convinced that he or she can serve God without dealing with God.

Maturity cannot be hurried, programmed, or tinkered with. There are no steroids available for growing up in Christ more quickly. Impatient shortcuts land us in the dead ends of immaturity.

To live only for some future goals is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow. But of course, without the top you can't have the sides. It's the top that defines the sides.

I am trying to teach my mind to bear the long, slow growth of the fields, and to sing of its passing while it waits.

There are no shortcuts in growing up. The path to maturity is long and arduous. Hurry is no virtue. There is no secret formula squirreled away that will make it easier or quicker. But stories help.

Psalm 131 is a maintenance psalm. It is functional to the person of faith as pruning is functional to the gardener: it gets rid of that which looks good to those who don't know any better, and reduces the distance between our hearts and their roots in God.

It was included in the Songs of Ascents to develop just those aspects of life under God and in Christ which my sometime friend Kelly lacked and which we all need.