Quotes about Growth

As we grow into maturity in Christ our distinctiveness is accentuated, not blunted. General directions, useful as they are, don't take into account the details that face us as holiness takes root in the particular social and personal place we are planted.

But there is an older wisdom that puts it differently: by changing our behavior we can change our feelings.

Christian faith needs continuous maintenance. It requires attending to. "If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post.

The transition from a sucking infant to a weaned child, from squalling baby to quiet son or daughter, is not smooth. It is stormy and noisy. It is no easy thing to quiet yourself: sooner may we calm the sea or rule the wind or tame a tiger than quiet ourselves. It is pitched battle. The baby is denied expected comforts and flies into rages or sinks into sulks. There are sobs and struggles. The infant is facing its first great sorrow and it is in sore distress.

For we're newcomers at this, with a lot to learn, and not too long to learn it.

Blossoming flowers look beautiful before they're cut or picked, but without soil or water they wither more quickly than grass.

Premature praise is false praise. Praise is our end but not our beginning. We begin our lives crying, not smiling and cooing and thanking our parents for bringing us into this lovely world full of dry diapers and sweet milk and warm flesh. We kick and flail. We yell and weep. We have the popularization of a kind of religion that, instead of training people to the sacrificial life after the pattern of our Lord, seduces them into having fun on weekends.

But if you're content to be simply yourself, you will become more than yourself.

David's isn't an ideal life but an actual life.

Maturity requires the integration, not the amputation, of what we have received through our conception and birth, our infancy and schooling.

Perseverance does not mean "perfection." It means that we keep going. We do not quit when we find that we are not yet mature and there is a long journey still before us.

The state of the economy is not the issue when it comes to growing a business. The relevant questions are always: 'What business are you in? Furthermore, is it adapting to the times?'