Quotes about Growth

None of us can live up to the law; all of us will break it. Marriage teaches us — indeed, it practically forces us — to learn to live by extending grace and forgiveness to people who have sinned against us. If I can learn to forgive and accept my imperfect spouse, I'll be well equipped to offer forgiveness outside my marriage. Forgiveness, I'm convinced, is so unnatural an act that it takes practice to perfect it.

You have to understand before you can respect, and you have to respect before you can fully love. This is a tremendously spiritually therapeutic process, an emptying of myself so I can grow more in my love for others.

Honesty demands directness: God has to discipline us to transform us.

Becoming one — in the deepest, Most intense sense — takes time. It takes at least the span of a decade for the sense of intimacy to really display itself in the marriage relationship.

What we can control is where we're going. If we've been less than healthy, we can commit ourselves, as a spiritual exercise, to deal with the spiritual issues behind the physical problem.

Getting married is agreeing to grow together, into each other, to virtually commingle our souls so that we share a unique and rare bond. When we stop doing that, we have committed fraud against our partner; we made a commitment we're not willing to live up to.

I had envisioned that this would be a short book, about half of what it has become. Once I opened up the Scriptures, however, it was like the glaciers melted and the dams overflowed, and I had to ride the rivers way downstream. I hope you enjoy and learn from the ride.

A Christian is never dependent on the response of others to grow spiritually. It's our own heart's decisions that matter.

A husband who truly loves his wife will want to see her grow in Christlike purity. A wife who truly loves her husband will want to see him grow in godliness. Out of true love, both will put growth in godliness above affluence, public opinion, or personal ease.

What I'm suggesting is that we connect our marriages with our faith in such a way that our experience in each feeds the other. By learning to respect others, meet each other's sexual needs, overcome dissension, and use the analogies of marriage to foster more creative prayer, we can build and maintain active, growing, and meaningful prayer lives while at the same time developing stronger marriages.

We must not enter marriage to be fulfilled, emotionally satisfied, or romantically charged, but rather to become more like Jesus Christ.

Trying to find contentment in this world without addressing the inner person is no more drastic a change than simply changing cubicles while continuing to work for the same company. Your location may change, but the overall environment is exactly the same.