Indeed, all human troubles come from thinking of God wrongly, which then means, thinking about ourselves wrongly.

Search me, O God." "Let the meditations of my heart be acceptable to you." "Renew in me a right spirit." At a certain point my own "beyond that is within" (my heart) has been formed and I am then at its mercy. Only God can save me.

They do not know what they are doing and do not have the ability to distance themselves from it so they can see it for what it is. That is the power of "culture.

Life as usual must go. It will be replaced by something far better.

And we can't all just get along. Rather, we have to become the kinds of persons who can get along. As a major part of this, our epidermal responses have to be changed in such a way that the fire and the fight doesn't start almost immediately when we are "rubbed the wrong way." Solitude and silence give us a place to begin the necessary changes, though they are not a place to stop.

So, C. S. Lewis writes, our faith is not a matter of our hearing what Christ said long ago and "trying to carry it out." Rather, "The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself. He is beginning, so to speak, to 'inject' His kind of life and thought, His Zoe [life], into you; beginning to turn the tin

Beyond my immediate context of relationships, the central question my friends and I began asking was quite simple: How could the soul health and transformation available to us become normative in our experience as a church community? While such experience of soul transformation has certainly been normative in seasons throughout history and even today, it is largely absent, or at least rare and idiosyncratic, in many environments where I have served.

Things good and bad will happen to us, of course. But what our life amounts to, at least for those who reach full age, is largely, if not entirely, a matter of what we become within.

But for all of the soul's vastness and independence, the tiny executive center of the person—that is, the spirit or will—can redirect and re-form the soul, with God's cooperation. It mainly does this by redirecting the body in spiritual disciplines and toward various other types of experiences under God.

Spiritual formation is a matter of reworking all aspects of the self.

It is one of the curiosities of Western intellectual history that, during the last century or so, those with no serious involvement with practical Christianity—maybe totally ignorant of it or even hostile to it—have been allowed, under the guise of "scholarship" or innovative thought, to define what religion is and to reinterpret Christian teachings in the light of their own biased definitions and purposes.

He ruined soul must be willing to recognize its own ruin before it can discover how to enter a different path.