Quotes about Growth

Grateful people learn to celebrate even amid life's hard and harrowing memories because they know that pruning is no mere punishment, but preparation.

Community as discipline is the effort to create a free and empty space among people where together we can practice true obedience.

The main problem of service is to be the way without being "in the way." And if there are any tools, techniques and skills to be learned they are primarily to plow the field, to cut the weeds and to clip the branches, that is, to take away the obstacles for real growth and development.

she said, Whether you are the younger son or the elder son, you have to realize that you are called to become the father.

Friendship and love cannot develop in the form of an anxious clinging to each other.

We all are children and parents, students and teachers, healers and in need of care.

The more capable you are of mourning the loss of the old place and letting go of the pain that lies there. You cannot mourn something that has not died.

I will see great things when I am willing to be seen. I will receive new eyes that see the mysteries of GOD's own life, but only when I allow God to see me, all of me, even those parts that I myself do not want to see.

One of the greatest acts of faith is to believe that the few years we live on this earth are like a little seed planted in a very rich soil. For this seed to bear fruit, it must die. We often see or feel only the dying, but the harvest will be abundant even when we ourselves are not the harvesters.

As the beloved son, I have to claim my full dignity and begin preparing myself to become the father.

Personally I believe that being an elder can be a real grace. After having seen so much of life and having "made it" in so many ways there is still that possibility of growing into a second childhood, a second naiveté. I think that is quite an exciting possibility and I pray that God will allow you to be reborn in such a new way of being.

Although after many years of living we often feel more lonely, hostile and filled with illusions than when we had hardly a past to reflect upon, we also know better than before that all these pains have deepened and sharpened our urge to reach out to a solitary, hospitable and prayerful mode of existence.