Quotes about Growth

We become ourselves by dying to ourselves. We gain only what we give up, and if we give up everything we can everything. We cannot find ourselves within ourselves, but only in others, yet at the same time, before we can go out to others we must find ourselves.

There is, in a word, nothing comfortable about the Bible...

When I was almost 13 I was ripe for religion. I was actually just plain ripe.

Over the years my mom has become a self-taught Biblical scholar.

A real friend makes you feel better about yourself. Friends help you cope when you think you're done and offer hope that it can get better. They love you as you are but won't let you stay that way. Clearly, having friends improves our lives. And best friends? They make every good thing even better.

Home ought to be our clearinghouse, the place from which we go forth lessoned and disciplined, and ready for life.

But in order to have an adult faith, most of us have to outgrow and unlearn much of what we were taught about religion.

Whatever you do repeatedly," he writes, "has the power to shape you, has the power to make you over into a different person— even if you're not totally engaged' in every minute!

conversion is no more spectacular than learning to love the people we live with and work among.

Living with people at close range over many years, as both monastics and small-town people do, is much more difficult than wearing a hair shirt. More difficult, too, I would add, than holding to the pleasant but unrealistic ideal of human perfectibility that seems to permeate much New Age thinking.

For some reason we human beings seem to learn best how to love when we're a bit broken, when our plans fall apart, when our myths of our self-sufficiency and goodness and safety are shattered.

It's a power that I can't explain. As it flows and it grows and it shapes my faith. There've been hundreds of moments I can't deny. When it brushe against the fire or dwelt in the Fire of God.