“Suppose our failures occur, not in spite of what we are doing, but precisely because of it.”

God’s aim in human history is the creation of an inclusive community of loving persons, with himself included as its primary sustainer and most glorious inhabitant.

The first act of love is always the giving of attention.

In solitude we find psychic distance, the perspective from which we can see, in the light of eternity, the created things that trap, worry, and oppress us.

Feelings are good servants, but they are disastrous masters.

Ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.

Prayer is talking with God about what we are doing together.

The hardest thing about leadership is the intimacy it requires.

In Spiritual formation we are aiming at a character and life that is so shaped that the deeds of Christ routinely and easily come from what is inside.

Our relations with others are not external. They enter into our very identity. And that’s why people struggle with them so.

The Great Commission is still the mission statement of the Church.

The union Christ had with the Father was the greatest that we can conceive of in this life-if indeed we can conceive of it.

Our failure to hear His voice when we want to is due to the fact that we do not in general want to hear it, that we want it only when we think we need it.

We are unceasing spiritual beings with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe.

Make disciples. Surround them in the reality of the Trinity in a fellowship of disciples. Teach them to do everything Jesus says.

The idea of having faith in Jesus has come to be totally isolated from being his apprentice and learning how to do what he said.

The aim of spiritual formation is not behavior modification but the transformation of all those aspects of you and me where behavior comes from…Circumcision of the heart.

The personal frustrations that they don’t dare let out on anyone else but a brother or sister,

Immediately on landing I got together my few effects; and, squeezing myself through the crowd,

No man alive can say, This shall not happen to me.

We’re talking about the struggle to drag a thought over from the mush of the unconscious into some kind of grammar, syntax, human sense; every attempt means starting over with language. Starting over with accuracy.

I was an expert on why everyone else was having problems with theirs. Then I had three of my own.

When I began to be published, people got the idea that I should ‘teach writing,’ which I have no idea how to do and don’t really believe in.

Listen … With faint dry sound, Like steps of passing ghosts

Spiritual formation for the Christian basically refers to the Spirit-driven process of forming the inner world of the human self in such a way that it becomes like the inner being of Christ himself.