growth on Surgery

Gracious God–who opens Your arms wide to welcome us just as we are but who’s too loving leave us that way: in response to Your invitation we come humbly and boldly with our broken hearts and weak hand...

Sometimes the process of growth looks a lot like destruction and pain. But you’ll realize with time that you’re not breaking; you’re healing.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

What is the shape of your pain? Is your pain a gaping wound? Is it stuffed into the back corner of a closet, or is it neatly categorized and filed away with annotations that no one but you understand?...

Any experienced gardener has heard of a botanical term called Apical (ah-pick-ul) dominance. In most plants that grow from a central stem, from maple trees to bush peas, whatever branch is at the top ...

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story.

Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

Alcoholics Anonymous has a great definition of how we change: We change when the pain of remaining the same is greater than the pain of changing .

Faith does not grow in spite of suffering, but through suffering, when hope learns to contradict reality.

We should neither court suffering nor complain about it. Instead, we should see it as one of the means God chooses to employ in order to make us increasingly useful to our Master.

Nail in my hand From my creator You gave me life Now show me how to live.

There is no growth without change, no change without fear or loss and no loss without pain.

The mind is seldom quickened to very vigorous operations but by pain, or the dread of pain. We do not disturb ourselves with the detection of fallacies which do us no harm.

From what is common in all these expressions, we can extract the dictionary definition of sacrifice: “the surrender of something of value for the sake of something else.” That is a good definition, bu...

My Lord Jesus can hew heaven out of worse timber than I am.

There was once a sculptor who worked hard with hammer and chisel on a large block of marble. A little child who was watching him saw nothing more than large and small pieces of stone falling away left...

The battle is won in the secret places of the will before God, never first in the external world… Nothing has power over the [person] who has fought out the battle before God and won there.

You can be saved without suffering, but you cannot be sanctified without suffering. That doesn't mean you seek it out, but it does mean you see it for what it is. It's an opportunity to glorif...

We are being shaped into either the wholeness of the image of Christ or a horrible destructive caricature of that image—destructive not only to ourselves but also to others, for we inflict our brokenn...

Grateful people learn to celebrate even amid life’s hard and harrowing memories because they know that pruning is no mere punishment, but preparation."

Individual disasters, too, very largely follow upon human choices, our own or those of others. And whether or not they do in a particular case, the situations in which we find ourselves are never as i...

In their excellent book, Invitation to a Journey , M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the foundation of life as being spiritual in nature. This means we are constantly be “form...

Growth is the only evidence of life.

The following illustration, taken from Ronald Rolheiser book, The Holy Longing, can be applied to the idea of bad habits, that they often have a way of returning, no matter how hard we try to kill t...

The animal behavior scientist Temple Grandin, who achieved significant success while struggling with autism, has this to say on the subject of progress: People are always looking for the single ma...

Before God can deliver us we must undeceive ourselves.

What is spiritual formation? There is an outer you—your body—that is being shaped all the time by the way you eat, drink, sleep, exercise, and live. You may do this well or poorly, intentionally or no...

Your prayer for someone may or may not change them, but it always changes YOU.

The truth is, that more spiritual progress is made through failure and tears than success and laughter.

Amy Carmichael was a passionate missionary to India. She gave her life for the sake of those who had suffered the consequences of an unyielding caste system. She also had her suffering, due to physica...