The first step in change is usually discomfort!

This next sentence is one of the most important spiritual truths you will ever learn: God develops the fruit of the Spirit in your life by allowing you to experience circumstances in which you're tempted to express the exact opposite quality! Character development always involves a choice, and temptation provides that opportunity.

Every time you forget that character is one of God's purposes for your life, you will become frustrated by your circumstances. You'll wonder, "Why is this happening to me? Why am I having such a difficult time?" One answer is that life is supposed to be difficult!

A lot of times we change, not when we see the light, but when we feel the heat.

But faith develops in the valleys. When our dreams shatter and we feel helpless, that's when we have to believe in God's power and presence.

How we respond to what happens to us - especially the painful, excruciating things that we never wanted and we have no control over - is a creative act.

Catherine of Aragon said,"None get to God but through trouble.

But it's in that disappointment, in that confusion, in that pain—the pain that comes from things not going how I wanted them to—that I find the same thing happening, again and again. I come to the end of myself, to the end of my power, the end of my strength, the end of my understanding, only to find, in that place of powerlessness, a strength and peace that weren't there before.

Taking heaven seriously, then, means taking suffering seriously, now. Not because we've bought into the myth that we can create a utopia given enough time, technology, and good voting choices, but because we have great confidence that God has not abandoned human history and is actively at work within it, taking it somewhere

How we respond to what happens to us—especially the painful, excruciating things that we never wanted and we have no control over—is a creative

Suffering and loss have this extraordinary capacity to alert and awaken us to the gift that life is.

Failure, we see again and again, isn't final, judgment has a point, and consequences are for correction.