Transformation

Growth, Trials 0

I used to see a butterfly in my mind’s eye every time I heard the word transformation, but life has schooled me. Transformation isn’t a butterfly. It’s the thing before you get to be a pretty bug flying away. It’s huddling in the dark cocoon and then pushing your way out. It’s the messy work of making sense of your fortunes and misfortunes, desires and doubts, hang-ups and sorrows, actions and accidents, mistakes and successes, so you can go on and become the person you must next become.

— Cheryl Strayed, Brave Enough, p. 134

Turning to God in Suffering

God, Growth, Healing 0

In general, we do not turn to God in suffering because we suddenly become irrational. Rather, God is able to reach us because our defenses are lowered. The barriers that we erected to keep out God — whether from pride or fear or lack of interest — are set aside, whether intentionally or unintentionally. We are not less rational. We are more open.

— James Martin, S.J., The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, p. 78

Expectations Ruin Experiences.

Acceptance, Growth 0

Expectations ruin experience because they place a demand on the situation to meet our needs. However, there is a good chance that our needs will not be met even if the situation lives up to our plan (our picture of how it should be). Our plan is a way of ritually killing all the inspiration of the event. Expectations are different from goals, which are good to have because they invite us forward and are much more productive and successful. If we miss the deadline or goal, we simply reset it, which facilitates moving forward. If we miss an expectation, we beat ourselves up and make ourselves feel bad, which do not facilitate moving forward.

— Chuck Spezzano, If It Hurts, It Isn’t Love, p. 41.

We Can’t Go Back.

Growth 0

Once we fall in the service of being brave, we can never go back. We can rise up from our failures, screw-ups, and falls, but we can never go back to where we stood before we were brave or before we fell. Courage transforms the emotional structure of our being. This change often brings a deep sense of loss. During the process of rising, we sometimes find ourselves homesick for a place that no longer exists. We want to go back to that moment before we walked into the arena, but there’s nowhere to go back to. What makes this more difficult is that now we have a new level of awareness about what it means to be brave. We can’t fake it anymore. We now know when we’re showing up and when we’re hiding out, when we are living our values and when we are not. Our new awareness can also be invigorating — it can reignite our sense of purpose and remind us of our commitment to wholeheartedness. Straddling the tension that lies between wanting to go back to the moment before we risked and fell and being pulled forward to even greater courage is an inescapable part of rising strong.

— Brene Brown, Rising Strong, p. 5

Acceptance

Acceptance, Growth, Healing 0

Accept that their actions hurt you deeply. Accept that this experience taught you something you didn’t want to know. Accept that sorrow and strife are part of even a joyful life. Accept that it’s going to take a long time for you to get that monster out of your chest. Accept that someday what pains you now will surely pain you less.

— Cheryl Strayed, Brave Enough, p. 83

Making Us Capable

God, Growth, Universalism 0

“Do you mean that God never punishes anyone for what he cannot help?”

“Assuredly. God will punish only for wrong choices we make. And then his punishment will be redemptive, not retributive: to make us capable — more than merely capable; hungry, aching, yearning to be able — to make right choices, so that in the end we make that one supreme right choice our wills were created to make — the joyful giving up of our wills into his!”

“How do you prove that?”

“I will not attempt to prove it. If you are content to think of God as a being of retribution, if it does not trouble you that your God should be so unjust, then it would be fruitless for me to try to prove otherwise to you. We could discuss the question for years and only make enemies of ourselves. As long as you are satisfied with such a god, I will not try to dissuade you. Go on thinking so until at last you are made miserable by it. Then I will pour out my heart to deliver you from the falsehoods taught you by the traditions of the elders.”

— George MacDonald, The Landlady’s Master, quoted in Knowing the Heart of God, p. 308-309

Making Us Good

God, Growth 0

“But if God can do anything he please,” said Evans, “he might as well make us good, and there would be an end of it.”

“That is just what he is doing,” returned Marion. “Perhaps, by giving them perfect health, and everything they wanted, with absolute good temper, and making them very fond of each other besides, God might have provided himself a people he would have had no difficulty in governing, and among whom, in consequence, there would have been no crime and no struggle or suffering. But I have known a dog with more goodness than that would come to. We cannot be good without having consented to be made good. God shows us the good and the bad; urges us to be good; wakes good thoughts and desires in us; helps our spirit with his Spirit, our thought with his thought: but we must yield; we must turn to him; we must consent, yes, try to be made good. If we could become good without trying, it would be a poor goodness: we should not be good, after all; at best, we should only be not bad. God wants us to choose to be good, and so be partakers of his holiness; he would have us lay hold of him. He who has given his Son to suffer for us will make us suffer too, bitterly if needful, that we may repent and turn to him. He would make us as good as good can be, that is, perfectly good; and therefore will rouse us to take the needful hand in the work ourselves — rouse us by discomforts innumerable.

— George MacDonald, The Vicar’s Daughter, chapter 25, quoted in Knowing the Heart of God, p. 286.

The New You

Acceptance, Growth, Life 0

You get it right when you realize that you cannot go back to who you once were. And this is a good thing. You already did that person. Now it is time to be the new you. Now it is time to embrace that person you were who got you here. That person is brave. That person is resilient. That person is complex. That person is deserving. You are deserving.

This is why so many people say in hindsight, Now it all makes sense. It is not because they made one decision that turned out perfectly – that landed them in the room they wanted to stay in for the rest of their lives. It is because they made a series of decisions, and each one led them into a new room. And even when they were sure a room was not where they were supposed to be, or it felt really hard, or they could not imagine it getting better, they did not give up. They realized that they had to keep going forward into the next room and then the next, until they found the one that felt right.

— Sherre Hirsch, Thresholds, p. 183