transformation on Challenges

Resilience is not something that can be mustered in a moment of “rising to the occasion.” It is formed over a long period before the crisis of testing so that it can continue the transformation during...

When he [the prodigal son] found himself desiring to be treated as one of the pigs, he realized that he was not a pig but a human being, a son of his father. . . . Once he had come again in touch with...

One of the biggest challenges in the Christian journey is grasping the heart of grace. Oftentimes there is an internal battle between our theology and our lived experience. In this short excerpt, Fred...

A group of researchers sought to study the nuances of self-control. They conducted a study with a few dozen kindergarten students and gave them a painfully boring, repetitive task designed to test how...

A Story from the Philokalia A story is told in  The Philokalia  about a young monk who went to an older monk to confess a struggle. The older monk was appalled, telling the young monk that his strugg...

There is a consistent pattern in Scripture of what happens in a life that God wants to use and improve: -There is always a call. God asks an ordinary person to engage in an act of extraordinary trust...

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

Transformation is a process, and as life happens there are tons of ups and downs. It's a journey of discovery - there are moments on mountaintops and moments in deep valleys of despair.

When I teach on the dynamics of real change and maturation, I often describe a “furnace of transformation” each of us must pass through for the sake of growth and refinement. I’ve never seen real grow...

Projects of personal transformation rarely if ever succeed by accident, drift or imposition.

I actually want to believe that when it comes to communication, my biggest problem is outside of me, not inside of me. I want to think that it’s my kids, my wife, my neighbors, my boss. I want to thin...

Many of us try to shove spiritual transformation into the nooks and crannies of a life that is already unmanageable, rather than being willing to arrange our life for what our heart most wants. We thi...

The million little things that drop into your hands - the small opportunities each day brings He leaves us free to use or abuse and goes unchanging along His silent way.

Conforming to boundary markers too often substitutes for authentic transformation. The church I grew up in had its boundary markers. A prideful or resentful pastor could have kept his job, but if eve...

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 ...

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

The truth about significant soul transformation is this—change is possible, but it is harder than we want and takes longer than we expect…. real change requires more than willpower and easy, simple st...

Loving God, you love us so much that you invite us to a life of transformation. You call us to live outside ourselves, and to follow you more faithfully with each day that passes. We confess to you th...

Introduction Our Gospel reading for today, the well-known “Parable of the Talents,” is one of a series of Jesus’ teachings in the Gospel of Matthew that focuses on what Davies and Allison rightly lab...

In her book Confessions of a Beginning Theologian , Elouise Renich Fraser discusses how crucial it has been to listen to her body throughout her personal and theological growth. My body, once...

Cultural transformation in a church or organization must go beyond interpersonal models of changing “one person at a time,” which dominates Western evangelical thinking. The goals of reconciliation ne...

Resilience is the virtue that enables people to move through hardship and become better. No one escapes pain, fear, and suffering. Yet from pain can come wisdom, from fear can come courage, from suffe...

Dawn grew up in a family in which she felt she had a fairly happy childhood. But in her adult years she struggled greatly with emotional, psychological, and physical maladies. She never felt a sense o...

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

I cannot transform myself, or anyone else for that matter. What I can do is create the conditions in which spiritual transformation can take place, by developing and maintaining a rhythm of spiritual ...

To frame is to put a language boundary around our experience. It is to name what happens in particular ways, to say how we see the world, and to see the world how we say it is. Framing includes tellin...

Gracious Lord, like Nicodemus, we come to the word with many questions. Like the Pharisees, we can be captivated by correctness, intent on right answers. As we turn to your word, Spirit of God, do not...

The bottom line is this: never grow complacent. Never grow tired of learning. As soon as we stop learning we lose the capacity to grow and mature in our work and our relationships. This continual lear...

What, for example, does it mean to celebrate the Eucharist as food (bread and wine) in a place where we are increasingly obsessed with and yet deeply afraid and ashamed of food, where we idolize and d...

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...