Quotes about Growth

For with God, there's always another role to undertake, a fresh assignment, and another task that will call upon everything we've experienced and learned thus far. God is never finished with us. He may, however, be finished with our current role. If so, we must be prepared to take on the next assignment that inevitably comes.

If we won't be serious about dealing with our sin,we cannot expect to grow in our faith. If you want to move to a new level with God,take an inventory of what God has told you about your sin and consider what you've been doing about it.

The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling, or changing, or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo — even when it's not working. It attaches to past and present and fears the future.

I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized persona.

The morning glories and the sunflowers turn naturally toward the light, but we have to be taught, it seems.

The big truth for men is that often we have to leave home in the first half of life before we can return home at a later stage and find our soul there.

Life is all about practicing for heaven. p 101.

In the second half of life, we do not have strong and final opinions about everything, every event, or most people, as much as we allow things and people to delight us, sadden us, and truly influence us.

We all remain who we are. But on the way to healing or liberation we have to do what the Romans called agere contra: we have to act against the grain of our natural compulsions. This requires clear decisions. Because it does not happen by itself, it is in a way unnatural or supernatural . . . (we) simply have to cut loose now and then, and in the process . . . make mistakes.

One of the great surprises is that humans come to full consciousness precisely by shadowboxing, facing their own contradictions, and making friends with their own mistakes and failings. People who have had no inner struggles are invariably both superficial and uninteresting. We tend to endure them more than communicate with them, because they have little to communicate.

Yes, transformation is often more about unlearning than learning, which is why the religious traditions call it "conversion" or "repentance.

Try to say that: "I don't know anything". We used to call it "tabula rasa" in Latin. Maybe you could think of yourself as an erased blackboard, ready to be written on. For by and large, what blocks spiritual teaching is the assumption that we already know, or that we don't need to know. We have to pray for the grace of beginner's mind. We need to say with the blind man, "I want to see".