life on planet earth on Character Transformation

What are we hear for in the first place? The fundamental answer…is that we we’re “here for” is to become genuine human beings, reflecting the God in whose image we’re made, and doing so in worship on ...

I’m more of an aboveground type of girl, as in, I like the stuff you can see. Flowers, trees, and vegetation symbolize life, growth, and transformation. The problem with focusing on external manifesta...

Compared to our personality traits, character traits are more malleable. Our personalities can only be managed (or tamed, some might say). Our characters can be shaped, although this isn’t easy and ha...

At their core, transitions are the internal adjustments by which we reorient ourselves to new environments, new experiences, and new seasons of life.

We are all hypocrites in transition. I am not who I want to be, but I am on the journey there, and thankfully I am not whom I used to be.

Where transformation is actually carried out is in our real life, where we dwell with God and our neighbors. . . . First, we must accept the circumstances we constantly find ourselves in as the place ...

The caterpillar must yield up the life it knows and submit to the mystery of interior transformation. It emerges from the process transfigured, with wings that give it freedom to fly. . .. A rule of lif...

I want to change my circumstances. God wants to change me.

God doesn’t want to keep changing your circumstances; he wants to change you.

It isn't the changes that do you in, it's the transitions. Change is not the same as transition. Change is situational: the new site, the new boss, the new team roles, the new policy. Transiti...

The road to character often involves moments of moral crisis, confrontation, and recovery. When they were in a crucible moment, they suddenly had a greater ability to see their own nature. The everyda...

There is an immense difference between training to do something and trying to do something. … Spiritual transformation is not a matter of trying harder, but of training wisely. This is what the apost...

Things Are Different: You never know the story By the cover of the book. You can’t tell what a dinner’s like By simply looking at the cook. It’s something everybody needs to know Way down deep inside ...

Beware of harking back to what you once were when God wants you to be something you have never been.

The goal is not for us to get through the Scriptures. The goal is to get the Scriptures through us. Some churches give people the idea that the only way to transformation is knowledge. There is an ass...

Our character is not merely the result of our choices, but rather the form our agency takes through our beliefs and intentions. So understood, the idea of agency helps us see that our character is not...

All these changes did the Merciful One effect: Stripping of His glory and putting on a body; For He had devised a way to reclothe Adam, In that glory which Adam had stripped off.

If you really want to change, it starts with your story. If you want to change the story of your life, you need to change the stories in your mind. So what story do you want to live? Do you want to ex...

The circumstances we ask God to CHANGE are often the circumstances God is using to CHANGE US.

At root, change means the partial or total abandonment of the norms, safeties, and patterns of behavior that make our lives manageable.

You will never cease to be the most amazed person on earth at what God has done for you on the inside.

In the end, the hope of transformation is anchored in the presence of a God who is utterly familiar with all the dark and light within us—and is not afraid of it. Recall the words of Macarius…“The hea...

Will it increase a man’s happiness to be converted? . . . [People] have a secret, lurking fear, that if they are converted they must become melancholy, miserable, and low-spirited. Conversion and a so...

Every story of conversion is a story of blessed defeat.

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

Once the process [of conversion] is begun and continues...you are continually turning inward toward God and away from your own egocentricity...you have to see this selfish side of yourself in order to...

The secret is that God loves us exactly the way we are... and that he loves us too much to let us stay like this.

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.

This story of Thomas Merton’s dramatic vocational change is illustrative of the life that Jesus offers us. For many of us, we assume discipleship means becoming less “us” and more like “Jesus”. But if...

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.