Quotes about Progress

I pray not to be such a whiny, self-obsessed baby, and give thanks that I am not quite as bad as I used to be (talk about miracles). Then something comes up, and I overreact and blame and sulk, and it feels like I haven't made any progress at all. But it turns out I'm less of a brat than before, and I hit the reset button much sooner, shake it off, and get my sense if humor back.

Anne Lamott's priest friend Tom, how to get through: Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe, he said. Right foot, left foot, right foot, breathe. Salon April 25, 2003

Holiness has most often been revealed to me in the exquisite pun of the first syllable, in holes- in not enough help, in brokenness, mess. High holy places, with ethereal sounds and stained glass, can massage my illusion of holiness, but in holes and lostness I can pick up the light of small ordinary progress, newly made moments flecked like pepper into the slog and the disruptions.

I felt changed and a little crazy. But though I was still like a stained and slightly buckled jigsaw puzzle with some pieces missing, now there were at least a few border pieces in place.

How are we going to get through this craziness?" I asked. There was silence for a moment. "Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe," he said.

You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard. So

If we stay where we are, where we're stuck, where we're comfortable and safe, we die there. We become like mushrooms, living in the dark, with poop up to our chins. If you want to know only what you already know, you're dying.

Jesus is big on people evolving. And all organisms have an innate tendency to evolve toward improvement. I seem to be the outlier.

I was waiting for the kind of solution where God reaches down and touches you with his magic wand and all of a sudden I would be fixed, like a broken toaster oven. But this was not the way it happened. Instead, I got one angstrom unit better, day by day.

But where do we even start on the daily walk of restoration and awakening? We start where we are.

You can't logically get from where we were to where we are now. I think that is what they mean by grace.

We can change. People say we can't, but we do when the the stakes or the pain is high enough.