Quotes about Growth

As you proceed through life, following your own path, birds will shit on you. Don't bother to brush it off. Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance. Having a sense of humor saves you.

Life was like an extremely difficult, horribly unbalanced video game. But sometimes the game can have a surprise ending. And sometimes, when you think you've reached the end of the game, suddenly you find yourself standing in front of a whole new level. A level you've never seen before. And the only thing you can do is keep right on playing.

For me, growing up as a human being on the planet Earth in the twenty-first century was a real kick in the teeth.

There's nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility is being superior to your former self.

Lord, give me wisdom, not knowledge. Or rather the knowledge that leads to wisdom and true happiness and not the kind that leads to power.

Prayers are tools not for doing or getting, but for being and becoming.

Church is the textured context in which we grow up in Christ to maturity. But church is difficult. Sooner or later, though, if we are serious about growing up in Christ, we have to deal with church. I say sooner.

The difficult pastoral art is to encourage people to grow in excellence and to live selflessly, at one and the same time to lose the self and find the self. It is paradoxical, but it is not impossible.

If your first concern is to look after yourself, you'll never find yourself.

And just as the child gradually breaks off the habit of regarding his mother only as a means of satisfying his own desires and learns to love her for her own sake, so the worshipper after a struggle has reached an attitude of mind in which he desires God for himself and not as a means of fulfillment of his own wishes.

Individualism is the growth-stunting, maturity-inhibiting habit of understanding growth as an isolated self-project. Individualism is self-ism with a swagger. The individualist is the person who is convinced that he or she can serve God without dealing with God.

Maturity cannot be hurried, programmed, or tinkered with. There are no steroids available for growing up in Christ more quickly. Impatient shortcuts land us in the dead ends of immaturity.