Renovation Of Life Quotes

Renovate your life, the old myths say, and the universe is yours.

All white people are born with a singular mission in life in order to pass from regular whitehood into ultra-whitehood. Just as Muslims have to visit Mecca, all white people must eventually renovate a house before they can be complete.

A great part of the disaster of contemporary life lies in the fact that it is organized around feelings. People nearly always act on their feelings, and think it only right. The will is then left at the mercy of circumstances that evoke feelings. Christian spiritual formation today must squarely confront this fact and overcome it.

The hidden dimension of each human life is not visible to others, nor is it fully graspable even by ourselves. We usually know very little about the things that move in our own soul, the deepest level of our life, or what is driving it. Our “within” is astonishingly complex and subtle—even devious. It takes on a life of its own. Only God knows our depths, who we are, and what we would do.

The house was literally perfect now. Instead of being thrilling, that suddenly seemed depressing.

I guess, sometimes, it’s really necessary to cut toxic people out of your life.” His expression was loving and supportive as he met my eyes. “It’s okay to do that, Ash. Just don’t use your fabric scissors.

I took the sleeper out of Glasgow, and as the smelly old train bumped out of Central Station and across the Jamaica Street Bridge, I stared out at the orange halogen streetlamps reflected in the black water of the river Clyde. I gazed at the crumbling Victorian buildings that would soon be sandblasted and renovated into yuppie hutches. I watched the revelers and rascals traverse the shiny wet streets. I thought of the thrill and danger of my youth and the fear and frustration of my adult life thus far. I thought of the failure of my marriage and my failures as a man. I saw all this through my reflection in the nighttime window. Down the tracks I went, hardly aware that I was going further south with every passing second.

The revolution of Jesus is in the first place and continuously a revolution of the human heart or spirit. It did not and does not proceed by means of the formation of social institutions and laws, the outer forms of our existence, intending that these would then impose a good order of life upon people who come under their power. Rather, his is a revolution of character, which proceeds by changing people from the inside through ongoing personal relationship to God in Christ and to one another. It is one that changes their ideas, beliefs, feelings, and habits of choice, as well as their bodily tendencies and social relations. It penetrates to the deepest layers of their soul.

Scapegrace: Back then, I was full of ideas, I was going to renovate the whole front of the pub,, and extend out to the west, maybe get in a music system a little dancefloor. In the end, I decided not to. Too expensive, you know. And, like, nobody wanted to dance so. Skulduggery: Vaurien, if you're trying to kill us, there are quicker ways than telling us your life story Valkryie: Less painful too.

She'd just had the best sex of her life, with an ex-boyfriend she'd spent the last decade pretending didn't exist, in his adorable half-finished, renovating-by-himself one room schoolhouse. Unsettled wouldn't even begin to describe how Laney should be feeling, and it didn't matter, because how she actually felt was pretty damn good.

The so-called “right to privacy” of which so much is made in contemporary life is in very large measure merely a way of avoiding scrutiny in our wrongdoing.

God is bigger than any of life's fires that we face.

Wherever change takes me, I want to meet God there and worship Him with my thoughts and actions and words and deeds.

Tacos and home renovation supplies with an entrepreneur, a male exotic dancer, and a drag queen on her day off. Just another glamorous day in the life.

Six month of sitting home, six month of doing absolutely nothing but watching TV, going out, sleeping, getting drunk and sleeping again. Oh no, wait, I was busy with something, I was doing some renovations in my new apartment. Which legally became mine only a month ago. Yep, that's what all my life has been about, spontaneous decisions and living in the moment. Because right now technically I'm a 25-year-old illegal immigrant from Russia, four years in New York, no papers, no work authorization, no work itself. Only a crazy life filled with restaurants, shops, beauty salons, clubs and restaurants again. How is it all possible? Very simple. I used to be a stripper.

Exiting from any long-term relationship comes at great personal expense, which explains why so many people are understandably reluctant to endure the cost of severance. Beginnings and endings are always dramatic and occasionally traumatic. Youthful brio allows us to engage in transformation. As we age, we carefully weigh the spectacle of continuing enduring harrowing situations or seeking melodramatic renovation of our core being. Analysis of the respective cost benefit ratio, consideration of the known versus the unknown, can delay or permanently deter us from altering our environment, leading our persona to become more rigid as we mature. Transformations in life are disconcerting to people who resist change.

as architect of choosing... choose. to. live. awakened. entirely. wholly. wildly powerful,  deeply masterful,  authentically creative, thriving.  this is not a hoped-for possible self. [reminder: this is an immutable Law of your being] needing not to learn the skill of being whole,  the antidote is to unlearn the habit of living incompletely here’s the practice: ‘know thyself‘—its about spirit  righteousness is underrated elevate connection with the changeless essence seek similitude with the will of Source and will of self 'choose thyself'—its about substance sacred. sagacious. spacious. in thought, word and deed— intend to: honor virtue. innovate enthusiastically. master integrity. 'become who you are'—its about style  a human, being an entrepreneur of life experiences a human, being a purveyor of preferences being-well with the known experience of soul, in service your relationship with insecurities, contradictions, & failures? obstacles or...invitations to grow? [mindset forms manifestation] emotions are messengers are gifts data for discernment: dare to deconstruct them your fears a belief renovation: fear.less. & aspire towards ascendance, anyway support your shine lean into the Light be.come. incandescent as architect of choosing, I choose...  to disrupt the energy of the status quo, to eclipse the realms of ordinary, & to live--a life-well lived. w/ spirit, substance & style.

Building a happy life usually takes constant renovations.

Wordsworth once wrote of ‘spots of time’, experiences so intense they expand and inform existence ever after. They have a ‘renovating virtue’.

Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.

When one reader asked when to voice complaints and when to keep the peace, Meinecke responded, "The key is to understand that partners are not renovation projects.

Worship is at once the overall character of the renovated thought life and the only safe place for a human being to stand.

The more I walk with Christ, the more I'm aware that the battles I'm fighting are not against flesh and blood, but neither is my help.

Because of Jesus, we can walk the path of loss knowing He is always in front, lighting the way.

We have familiar experience of the order, the constancy, the perpetual renovation of the material world which surrounds us. Frail and transitory as is every part of it, restless and migratory as are its elements, still it abides. It is bound together by a law of permanence, and though it is ever dying, it is ever coming to life again. Dissolution does but give birth to fresh modes of organization, and one death is the parent of a thousand lives. Each hour, as it comes, is but a testimony how fleeting, yet how secure, how certain, is the great whole. It is like an image on the waters, which is ever the same, though the waters ever flow. The sun sinks to rise again; the day is swallowed up in the gloom of night, to be born out of it, as fresh as if it had never been quenched. Spring passes into summer, and through summer and autumn into winter, only the more surely, by its own ultimate return, to triumph over that grave towards which it resolutely hastened from its first hour. We mourn the blossoms of May because they are to wither; but we know that May is one day to have its revenge upon November, by the revolution of that solemn circle which never stops—which teaches us in our height of hope, ever to be sober, and in our depth of desolation, never to despair.

Genuine transformation of the whole person into the goodness and power seen in Jesus and his “Abba” Father—the only transformation adequate to the human self—remains the necessary goal of human life. But it lies beyond the reach of programs of inner transformation that draw merely on the human spirit—even when the human spirit is itself treated as ultimately divine.

the only prospect which is really desirable or delightful, is that from the window of the breakfast-room [...] where we meet the first light of the dewy day, the first breath of the morning air, the first glance of gentle eyes; to which we descend in the very spring and elasticity of mental renovation and bodily energy, in the gathering up of our spirit for the new day, in the flush of our awakening from the darkness and the mystery of faint and inactive dreaming, in the resurrection from our daily grave, in the first tremulous sensation of the beauty of our being, in the most glorious perception of the lightning of our life; there, indeed, our expatiation of spirit, when it meets the pulse of outward sound and joy, the voice of bird and breeze and billow, does demand some power of liberty, some space for its going forth into the morning, some freedom of intercourse with the lovely and limitless energy of creature and creation.

Genuine transformation of the whole person into the goodness and power seen in Jesus and his “Abba” Father—the only transformation adequate to the human self—remains the necessary goal of human life.

We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent, cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force, and do lean and beg day and night continually. Our housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlour soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength is born.

These changes, I believe, can be the basis of a true Islamic Reformation, one that progresses to the twenty-first century rather than regresses to the seventh. Some of these changes may strike readers as too fundamental to Islamic belief to be feasible. But like the partition walls or superfluous stairways that a successful renovation removes, they can in fact be modified without causing the entire structure to collapse. Indeed, I believe these modifications will actually strengthen Islam by making it easier for Muslims to live in harmony with the modern world. It is those hell-bent on restoring it to its original state who are much more likely to lead Islam to destruction. Here again are my five theses, nailed to a virtual door: 1. Ensure that Muhammad and the Qur’an are open to interpretation and criticism. 2. Give priority to this life, not the afterlife. 3. Shackle sharia and end its supremacy over secular law. 4. End the practice of “commanding right, forbidding wrong.” 5. Abandon the call to jihad. In the chapters that follow, I will explore the source of the ideas and doctrines in question and evaluate the prospects for reforming them. For now, we may simply note that they are closely interrelated.

In a situation such as today, by contrast, where people constantly have-or think they have-to decide what to do, they will almost invariably be governed by feelings. Often they cannot distinguish between their feelings and their will, and in their confusion they also quite commonly take feelings to be reasons. And they will in general lack any significant degree of self-control. This will turn their life into a mere drift through the days and years, which addictive behavior promises to allow them to endure. Self-control is the steady capacity to direct yourself to accomplish what you have chosen or decided to do and be, even though you "don't feel like it." Self-control means that you, with steady hand, do what you don't want to do (or what you want not to) when that is needed and do not do what you want to do (what you "feel like" doing) when that is needed.

We have familiar experience of the order, the constancy, the perpetual renovation of the material world which surrounds us. Frail and transitory as is every part of it, restless and migratory as are its elements, still it abides. It is bound together by a law of permanence, and though it is ever dying, it is ever coming to life again. Dissolution does but give birth to fresh modes of organization, and one death is the parent of a thousand lives.

He like both types of conversation with Willem, but he appreciates the mundane ones more than he'd imagined he would. He had always felt bound to Willem by the big things -love, trust- but he likes being bound to him by the small things as well: bills and taxes and dental checkups. He is always reminded of a visit to Harold and Julia's ....(they) had begun talking about the Truro house's kitchen renovation. He half dozed, listening to their quiet talk, which had been so dull that he couldn't follow any of the details but had also filled him with a great sense of peace: it had seemed to him the ideal expression of an adult relationship, to have someone with whom you can discuss the mechanics of a shared experience.

Love is for every age auspicious, But for the virginal and young Its impulses are more propitious Like vernal storms on meadows sprung: They freshen in the rain of passion, Ripening in their renovation – And life, empowered, sends up shoots Of richest blooms and sweetest fruits. But at a late age, dry and fruitless, The final stage to which we’re led, Sad is the trace of passions dead: Thus storms in autumn, cold and ruthless, Transform the field into a slough, And strip the trees from root to bough.

We want men and women who shall renovate life and our social state, but we see that most natures are insolvent. Cannot satisfy their own wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical force, and so do lean and beg day and night continually.

More truth: I have an infatuation problem. It’s not just Beardsley. It’s all of them. I’ve felt this for a hundred other men—the rush of the encounter, the way my stomach heats and bubbles, the adrenaline, the urge to run five miles and move my bowels and puke at the same time. It’s a frenzy for the story and what it could be. The ability to escape from my life, the chance at a grand renovation of self within another person. It’s the sense of possibility, so good it feels like it will salvage everything. How hard it is to beat the dream. How it traps you. It’s embarrassing. It’s lonely. It’s unsatisfying. It’s impossible. At day’s end, I just want a life where I’m laughing and eating and coming all the time. I could do this for the rest of my life—this rise and fall, defined increasingly by what I cannot have.

The novel is alive and thriving through various strategies of renovation. The merging of fiction and reality, of memoir and narrative, is one great current source of strength. The reimagining of the historical novel is a second. And the third is the admission of new voices previously unheard or slienced.

My roommate calls a meeting while I’m out falling from my bike into a customer’s cheesecake, and as soon as I climb the stairs she is there with a suitcase, saying she’s moving to a gut-renovated building in Harlem with her boyfriend as 'send me a picture of your pussy' pings onto my screen. As I watch my roommate leave, the idea that I have a pussy seems preposterous. I move through the apartment and try to reconcile the existence of the clitoris with the broccoli smell my roommate left behind. I rinse the cheesecake from my hair and get back out on my route, where the men who line the street remind me that technically yes, I do have a pussy, and that I will live with the terror of protecting it for the rest of my life.

We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction of concepts, a labor taken over in later ages by science. Just as the bee simultaneously constructs cells and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly on this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions. It is always building new, higher stories and shoring up, cleaning, and renovating the old cells; above all, it takes pains to fill up this monstrously towering framework and to arrange therein the entire empirical world, which is to say, the anthropomorphic world. Whereas the man of action binds his life to reason and its concepts so that he will not be swept away and lost, the scientific investigator builds his hut right next to the tower of science so that he will be able to work on it and to find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks which presently exist. And he requires shelter, for there are frightful powers which continuously break in upon him, powers which oppose scientific truth with completely different kinds of "truths" which bear on their shields the most varied sorts of emblems.

THE PERSON AND GOSPEL of Jesus Christ—building on simple “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so”—is the only complete answer to the false and destructive images and ideas that control the life of those away from God. The process of spiritual formation in Christ is one of progressively replacing those destructive images and ideas with the images and ideas that filled the mind of Jesus himself.

For Paul, a new creation meant a total renovation of the inner self, a change of mind and heart. It meant far more than the passive union achieved in water baptism. To be “in Christ,” he told the Philippians, means to have in you the mind of Christ Jesus, to think as Christ thought, to have the ideals Christ had, to throb with the desires that filled Christ’s heart, to replace all your natural actions to persons, events and circumstances with the response of Jesus Christ. In a word, a christocentric life means to live in the heart of Jesus, to share His tastes and aversions, to have the same interests, affections and attitudes, to be motivated in everything by His loving compassion. It means making the habitual thought patterns of Jesus Christ so completely your own that truly “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.

aversion is the tendency to dislike and distrust those who disagree with us politically, particularly those in a different political party. This aversion is toxic for our politics, but as we’ve seen, it creeps into the communion of believers as well. The very thing that ought to make Christians identifiable to the world—our love for one another (John 13:35)—is overridden by our politics, thus undermining the testimony of our faith.

That Saturday evening, they had watched a movie together, and at one point Harold and Julia had begun talking about the Truro house's kitchen renovation. He half dozed, listening to their quiet talk, which had been so dull he couldn't follow any of the details but had also filled him with a great sense of peace: it had seemed to him the ideal expression of an adult relationship, to have someone with whom you could discuss the mechanics of a shared existence.

This impotence of “systems” is a main reason why Jesus did not send his students out to start governments or even churches as we know them today, which always strongly convey some elements of a human system. They were, instead, to establish beachheads of his person, word, and power in the midst of a failing and futile humanity. They were to bring the presence of the kingdom and its King into every corner of human life simply by fully living in the kingdom with him.

Our soul is like a stream of water, which gives strength, direction, and harmony to every other area of our life. When that stream is as it should be, we are constantly refreshed and exuberant in all we do, because our soul itself is then profusely rooted in the vastness of God and his kingdom, including nature; and all else within us is enlivened and directed by that stream. Therefore we are in harmony with God, reality, and the rest of human nature and nature at large. — DALLAS WILLARD IN RENOVATION OF THE HEART

We still had our arguments,” Lisa recalled, “and we had a very trying summer” as they endured a calamitous apartment renovation in Brooklyn. “That was hell on earth,” Lisa recalled, but Patrick “had changed. He had a sense of patience he had never had before, and with me he had real joy about things. It was as if he had been relieved of the duty of caring about the details of life, and he could let all that go. Now it was about being with people, enjoying his sandwich and the walk on the promenade. It was as if we lived a lifetime in a year.

It is spring 2007, and the block-long security lines into the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) are missing now while it is closed for renovation. The once controversial and “technically superb” exhibition Science in American Life is due to be phased out. The hot new museum exhibit is at the National Museum of Natural History’s (NMNH) Kenneth E. Behring Hall of Mammals. There, entering this multimedia, multisensory immersive installation, we are invited to a “Mammal Family Reunion—Come meet your relatives!”—in a savvy response to antievolution religious activism.

If you spend all your time trying to be happy, you end up focusing all your attention on yourself and how “happy” you are and, as a result, you become a shriveled self who can’t live for some larger cause. Your life will center on yourself and your moment-by-moment focus will be on how you feel inside. Your sole criterion of evaluation for seeking a job, making friends, finding a spouse (or staying with a spouse!), and selecting a church will reduce to one overarching concern: How does this particular thing make me feel? The best way to be happy in the contemporary sense is to forget about it, to try to live a good life for a bigger purpose, especially for the cause of Christ.

There once was a town. It was a quaint little town, in a quiet valley, where life moved at the pace of snails and the only road in was the only way out, too. There was a candy store that sold the sweetest honey taffy you ever tasted, and a garden store that grew exotic, beautiful blooms year-round. The local café was named after a possum that tormented its owner for years, and the chef there made the best honey French toast in the Northeast. There was a bar where the bartender always knew your name, and always served your burgers slightly burnt, though the local hot sauce always disguised the taste. If you wanted to stay the weekend, you could check-in at the new bed-and-breakfast in town--- just as soon as its renovations were finished, and just a pleasant hike up Honeybee Trail was a waterfall there, rumor had it, if you made a wish underneath it, the wish would come true. There was a drugstore, a grocer, a jewelry store that was open only when Mercury was in of retrograde--- And, oh, there was a bookstore. It was tucked into an unassuming corner of an old brick building fitted with a labyrinthine maze of shelves stocked with hundreds of books. In the back corner was a reading space with a fireplace, and chairs so cozy you could sink into them for hours while you read. The rafters were filled with glass chimes that, when the sunlight came in through the top windows, would send dapples of colors flooding across the stacks of books, painting them in rainbows. A family of starlings roosted in the eaves, and sang different songs every morning, in time with the tolls of the clock tower. The town was quiet in that cozy, sleepy way that if you closed your eyes, you could almost hear the valley breathe as wind crept through it, between the buildings, and was sighed out again.

bank robber was standing in the center of the apartment, surrounded by Stockholmers, both figurative and literal. “Stockholm” is, after all, an expression more than it is a place, both for men like Roger and for most of the rest of us, just a symbolic word to denote all the irritating people who get in the way of our happiness. People who think they’re better than us. Bankers who say no when we apply for a loan, psychologists who ask questions when we only want sleeping pills, old men who steal the apartments we want to renovate, rabbits who steal our wives. Everyone who doesn’t see us, doesn’t understand us, doesn’t care about us. Everyone has Stockholmers in their life, even people from Stockholm have their own Stockholmers, only to them it’s “people who live in New York” or “politicians in Brussels,” or other people from some other place where people seem to think that they’re better than the Stockholmers think they

The same mis-location of the body explains many other intractable problems now facing much of our world: the sexualization of practically everything, abortion, eating disorders, and racial and other discriminations. All of these are rooted in taking the body-our own or that of others-to be the person and thereby depriving ourselves of the spiritual perspective on the person, which alone can enable us to cherish the body and its central role in our life. Body hatred also comes from disappointment about our future with it, even from outright fear of the body-of what it is going to do to us. Not accepting God as God puts us in his place, I have noted, and leaves us with nothing to trust and worship but our body and its natural powers. The frenzy over physical attractiveness that we see all around us today and the despair over its loss-eventually, in aging and death, for everyone-are the main characteristics of the contemporary climate of life.

Simi Chopra, will you marry me?" He opened the blue velvet box in his hand and showed me a beautiful sapphire ring surrounded by diamonds. My mouth opened, but all that spilled out was, "My brain..." A frown creased Jack's brow. "Not really the answer I was expecting." "I can't..." I shook my head. "You organized all this? Chloe? The dress? The car? Trey and all the renovations were real? When did you buy this house? It had to be after I told you I wanted to take a break." "Yes, it was." "But how did you know we'd get back together?" "Because if we weren't meant to be together, I would never have been in the bushes the night you tried to save Chloe in the museum. I wouldn't have held you in my arms and known deep in my bones that I'd met the woman I'd been waiting for all my life... a woman who is intelligent and beautiful and brave and loyal, who has a secret love of adventure and a wicked sense of humor, a woman who lights up every room she walks into and can take a group of misfits and turn them into a family. A woman I want to call my wife." He took the ring out of the box and slid it on my finger. "This was my mother's ring. It is the only thing I have left to remember her by, and there is no one else I have ever wanted to give it to but you." I looked at the ring and then at the man who had stolen my heart. "Yes, Jack, I'll marry you.

Some years ago a leading media personality had a high-level conference in Aspen, Colorado, on the topic of evil. (Shouldn’t that meeting have been held elsewhere? South Los Angeles or Soweto?) The outcome was that one or two participants out of a large group thought that there was such a thing as evil. But most were either noncommittal on the point or certain that evil did not exist at all. When you heard their comments it was clear that they simply could not conceptualize the evil to be seen flourishing abundantly around them in the twentieth century. One of the most glaring evidences of the bankruptcy of contemporary ethical thinking is that it cannot deal with evil. A recent proposal to found a field of “Evil Studies” within academia will not be enthusiastically received.7 We should be very sure that the ruined soul is not one who has missed a few more or less important theological points and will flunk a theological examination at the end of life. Hell is not an “oops!” or a slip. One does not miss heaven by a hair, but by constant effort to avoid and escape God. “Outer darkness” is for one who, everything said, wants it, whose entire orientation has slowly and firmly set itself against God and therefore against how the universe actually is. It is for those who are disastrously in error about their own life and their place before God and man.8 The ruined soul must be willing to hear of and recognize its own ruin before it can find how to enter a different path, the path of eternal life that naturally leads into spiritual formation in Christlikeness.

Soon it was time for us to leave; the clock had struck midnight, and we had miles to go before we slept. After throwing my bouquet and saying good-byes, Marlboro Man and I ran through the doors of the club and climbed into the back of a smoky black limousine--the vehicle that would take us to the big city miles away, where we’d stay before flying to Australia the next day. As we pulled away from the waving, birdseed-throwing crowd at the front door of the club, we immediately settled into each other’s arms, melting into a puddle of white silk and black boots and sleepy, unbridled romance. It was all so new. New dress…new love…a new country--Australia--that neither of us had ever seen. A new life together. A new life for me. New crystal, silver, china. A newly renovated, tiny cowboy house that would be our little house on the prairie when we returned from our honeymoon. A new husband. My husband. I wanted to repeat it over and over again, wanted to shout it to the heavens. But I couldn’t speak. I was busy. Passion had taken over--a beast had been unleashed. Sleep deprived and exhausted from the celebration of the previous week, once inside the sanctity of the limousine, we were utterly powerless to stop it…and we let it fly. It was this same passion that had gotten us through the early stages of our relationship, and, ultimately, through the choice to wave good-bye to any life I’d ever imagined for myself. To become a part of Marlboro Man’s life instead. It was this same passion that assured me that everything was exactly as it should be. It was the passion that made it all make sense.

most of which Gloria and I undertook by ourselves. I shoveled two hundred wheelbarrow loads of dirt from the cellar to increase the overhead clearance from five feet to a more comfortable and much dryer six and one-half feet, and I lined the floor with flat blue stones from the creek, creating a perfect place to store my homemade wine, cider, saucisson, and prosciutto. After sledgehammering used telephone-pole ends under the joists to level the floor and provide support, we ripped out walls to create a 1,200-square-foot kitchen-dining room-living room space, covering the floor ourselves with red quarry tile left over from a Howard Johnson’s renovation.

Caretaking in a relationship is not flowers or date night—necessary as these are, they are the equivalent of a new color painted on your walls. Delightful, but not structural. Structural is unloading the dishwasher when it’s your partner’s turn, or making sure whoever gets home last from work is greeted with dinner. It’s learning about mushroom hunting or musical theater or rugby because your spouse loves it. It is talking about the best of your partner in public, not the worst. It’s listening to stories we have heard a hundred times before as if they are new. Often, it is just listening, period. My father always washed the car by hand before he took my mother out on a date, even after they were married. He would say he wanted it clean “for his girl.” That is the part she remembered, not where they went or what they did. As psychologist John Gottman, who has studied countless married couples, will tell you, it is the presence of respect and an abiding willingness to support each other, more than romance, that indicates whether a marriage will last. Couples that exhibit these qualities tend to stay together, creating the marital equivalent of firmitas.

Beth taught me this lesson too, years ago, when she developed another important list (she loves lists), this one being her “list of interests.” She came up with this concept after she got tired of people asking her if she was going to renovate her house. She worked out the best way to shut down these conversations was simply to say: “Renovation is not on my list of interests.” It wasn’t figurative. She actually created a list of interests so “home renovation” could, specifically, not be on it.

During the Commonwealth period in England (1649–1660), antinomianism was present among high Calvinists who maintained that an elect person, being predestined to salvation, need not keep the moral law and doesn’t even need to repent. No one should be urged to repent, therefore. Others have said “that good works hinder salvation, and that a child of God cannot sin; that the moral law is altogether abrogated as a rule of life; that no Christian believeth or worketh any good, but that Christ only believeth and worketh [good].”[9] The Effect on Spiritual Formation Now, you have only to think for a moment to see what a disaster this will be for spiritual formation and the development of character. It amounts to rejecting it entirely except insofar as it may be done to you by God, passively. And you have only to glance briefly at the behavior of professing Christians currently to realize the practical outcome of holding the law and obedience to the law to be irrelevant to the life of faith in Christ.[10] The basic practice of Western Christianity today is, I fear, strongly antinomian. Here is a true story from the current Christian scene. Test our theology on it: A man—a longtime, faithful church member—came to his pastor and said, “I’m going to divorce my wife and marry someone else.” The pastor, aghast, said, “You can’t do that! You’re a devoted Christian, and so is your wife. Divorce in these circumstances is clearly wrong.” “Yes,” the man replied, “I know that, but I’m going to do it anyway. I just can’t stand her any longer. I know it’s wrong, but after it’s all over I’ll ask God for forgiveness and he will forgive me. He must, because I believe that Christ died for me. That’s what you teach.” You can extend this to imaginary cases: murdering someone who “deserves it”; a once-in-a-lifetime, career-making, crooked deal; and so forth. How, precisely, does our version of salvation rule out a judicious use of sin? And what does growth in Christlikeness mean if one can hold such a use in reserve? Just something to think about.

Now, as St. Augustine saw long ago, the opposite of love is pride. Love eliminates pride because its will for the good of the other nullifies our arrogant presumption that we should get our way. We are concerned for the good of others and assured that our good is taken care of without self-will. Thus pride and fear and their dreadful offspring no longer rule our life as love becomes completed in us.

See, most people who remain emotionally immature are hung up on a lot of really bad stuff. And that often expresses itself in a secret life that they have to hide from others. But healthy people—people who are spiritually and emotionally mature, people who are following Jesus—don’t live there. So Paul can say in verse 9 of Philippians 4, “The things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.

The spiritually mature person is someone who has chosen the Kingdom of God—God’s reign over them—as their guide to what is good. And not only that, but the Kingdom is understood as what will enable them to achieve and live for what is good. They have developed the knowledge and habits that keep them constantly turned toward and expectant of God and God’s action in their life. This is the primary source of direction and empowerment for all that concerns them and their world.

God. As I searched for what it meant to believe in Jesus, three elements of the Christian life came into sharp focus: (1) dialogue with God about everything, (2) do nothing out of fear, and (3) love people deeply. Dallas was precipitating a collision between my professional training and the very spiritual life that initiated my counseling education

We had come without knowing it to our inevitable place. —Robinson Jeffers

But what original commentary can you supply, from the uniqueness of your particular life? What holy text have you absorbed and made your own? In what ways have these timeless truths renovated your nature? Are you content to be a hollow victrola, mechanically repeating the words of other men?

Is sisu a mental power or muscle that you flex? Where does it come from? Is it a cultural construct, part of a country brand, or a slogan? Or, as I suspect, a sort of mind and body attitude that anyone, anywhere, can tap into? In my quest to wrap my head around the term, I initially apply it liberally to cover a quality that I notice a great many Finns seem to share: a hardy, active, outdoors-in-any-weather, do-it-yourself approach to life. Even when it comes to domestic chores, such as house or window cleaning, which many people could easily afford to pay someone to do, it seems instead to be a source of personal pride and satisfaction to take on the task oneself. I observe that this DIY approach also includes trying to fix things before rushing out to buy new ones and taking on home renovations instead of contracting them out. Doing instead of buying.

Midnight's Toll by Stewart Stafford As the lungs of our world burn, SS Nero crashes on plastic rocks, Kamikaze Captain Mann at the helm, Safety is beyond our salvation. As a loved one cruelly disfigured, By a crazed passerby in the street, The house we once loved as life, Now a distant, renovated stranger. Midnight's toll becomes due, The malicious piper paid in full, Only desolation, bones and dust, Our necropolis legacy to the future. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

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She remains intent on renovating the old, historic house her great-aunt left her and giving it a new life as a B&B.

I believe one reason why so many people do in fact fail to immerse themselves in the words of the New Testament, and neglect or even avoid them, is that the life they see there is so unlike what they know from their own experience.

Now the realm of feelings may appear on first approach to be an area of total chaos. But this is not so. There is also an order among feelings, and it is a much simpler one than most people think. When we properly cultivate, with divine assistance, those few feelings that should be prominent in our lives, the remainder will fall into place. What then are the feelings that will dominate in a life that has been inwardly transformed to be like Christ? They are the feelings associated with love, joy, and peace... [which] are not mere feelings, but conditions of the whole person which are accompanied by characteristic positive feelings. Love, joy, and peace are--we recall--the three fundamental pieces of the fruit (note the singular) of the spirit. They mutually interpenetrate and inform one another, and naturally express themselves in the remainder of that *one* fruit: patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

Your entire life happens inside your body. It's the one home you will always occupy and can never sell. But you can renovate it. If you can only pick one habit to build, exercise might be the one. Everything is downstream from how your body is functioning.

Dirk and Billy plan to make all of them care. They plan to wage war and create sides in this thing. They’re loud. They’re boisterous. A lot of people won’t listen to them. The ones who have a firm hold on who they are and what’s important to them in life. But some people will be swayed by those two. Those are the ones we have to worry about. It’s not just Dirk and Billy that are the main problems; it’s what they’ll create that concerns me.

simple goal for the leaders of a particular group would be to bring every person in attendance to understand clearly what it means to be a disciple of Jesus and to be solidly committed to discipleship in their whole life. That is, when asked who they are, the first words out of their mouths would be, “I am an apprentice of Jesus Christ.” This goal would have to be approached very gently and lovingly and patiently with existing groups, where the people involved have not understood this to be a part of their membership commitment.

Many of my parents’ friends own more than one house, sometimes so many that whole dwellings sit unused and empty for years. And so it’s an odd contradiction that they often seem to get stuck on the most minute details when it comes to renovations. My hypothesis is that this is a way to feel the thrill of ownership come to life again. It’s polishing the already gilded lily.

It’s especially galling to be the Millennial who’s expected to pay over decades of hard-won life savings and anything the bank will lend, for the privilege of buying a structure in need of a full renovation or rebuild. That is assuming, of course, that the local development authority agrees to take part in the pantomime.

Things good and bad will happen to us, of course. But what our life amounts to, at least for those who reach full age, is largely, if not entirely, a matter of what we become within.

That is the function of the will or heart: to organize our life as a whole, and, indeed, to organize it around God.

He kicked off his boots before walking through the living room. Day’s house was very nice. It had been his grandmother’s and she’d left it for him in her will. Day made a lot of renovations on the three-bedroom, two-story home, and God found himself wishing he had a family to share that type of home with. He could see himself sitting on the large leather sofa in the den with Day snuggled up next to him. His mom baking them raisin bread and Genesis upstairs blasting his music too loud. God shook his head at the nonsense and went to find the one thing he had in his life that was real in the kitchen. Day loved him, and as far as he was concerned, that would be enough for him.

I live in the big house we’ve owned since David was a boy. I renovate when the whim takes me, and it takes me often, and the renovations are expensive. I get my hair done every fortnight, and I buy premium brands and I never, ever have to worry about how to pay the bills. Maybe I gave up some things to stay with Wyatt, and maybe even once he was an adult, I did it for David. I just don’t kid myself any more that there isn’t something in this life for me too.

The disturbances in the country grew not out of anything republican, but out of slavery, which is a part of the system of hereditary wrong; and the expulsion of this domestic anomaly opens to the renovated nation a career of unthought-of dignity and glory. Henceforth our country has a moral unity as the land of free labor. The

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Jen Hatmaker is the author of the New York Times bestseller For the Love (plus eleven other books) and happy hostess of a tightly knit online community where she reaches millions of people each week. She is a high-functioning introvert who lives her home life in yoga pants and her travel life in fancy yoga pants. She and her husband, Brandon, founded the Legacy Collective, a giving community that granted more than a million dollars in its first year and funds sustainable solutions to systemic problems locally and globally. They also starred in the popular series My Big Family Renovation on HGTV and stayed married through a six-month remodel. Jen is a mom to five, a sought-after speaker, and a delighted resident of Austin, Texas, where she and her family are helping keep Austin weird. For more information, visit jenhatmaker.com.

enable us to walk increasingly in the wholeness, holiness, and power of the kingdom of the heavens. No one need live in spiritual and personal defeat. A life of victory over sin and circumstance is accessible to all.

The revolution of Jesus is in the first place and continuously a revolution of the human heart or spirit. It did not and does not proceed by means of the formation of social institutions and laws, the outer forms of our existence, intending that these would then impose a good order of life upon people who come under their power. Rather, his is a revolution of character, which proceeds by changing people from the inside through ongoing personal relationship to God in Christ and to one another.

renovating the artist’s studio that sat nestled among a grouping of trees on the far side of the property. Initially, Kurt thought he might use the studio as a writing retreat separate from where he lived, with the idea that leaving the cottage to work might give him a chance to actually have a life and not feel pressure to write twenty-four-seven. What he found was that the studio was too far removed from the sights and sounds that inspired him, and it made him feel like even

The 8 Basic Headers Work Family & Kids Spouse Health & Fitness Home Money Recreation & Hobbies Prospects for the Future Work The Boss Time Management Compensation Level of interest Co-workers Chances of promotion My Job Description Subordinates Family Relationship with spouse Relationship with children Relationship with extended family Home, chores and responsibilities Recreation & hobbies Money, expenses and allowances Lifestyle and standard of living Future planes and arrangements Spouse Communication type and intensity Level of independence Sharing each other's passions Division of roles and responsibilities Our time together Our planes for our future Decision making Love & Passion Health & Fitness General health Level of fitness Healthy lifestyle Stress factors Self awareness Self improvement Level of expense on health & fitness Planning and preparing for the rest of my life Home Comfort Suitability for needs Location Community and municipal services Proximity and quality of support/activity centers (i.e. school. Medical aid etc) Rent/Mortgage Repair / renovation Emotional atmosphere Money Income from work Passive income Savings and pension funds Monthly expenses Special expenses Ability to take advantage of opportunities / fulfill dreams Financial security / resilience Financial IQ / Understanding / Independent decision making Social, Recreation & Hobbies Free time Friends and social activity Level & quality of social ties Level of spending on S, R&H Culture events (i.e. theater, fairs etc) Space & accessories required Development over time Number of interests Prospect for the future Type of occupation Ratio of work to free time Promotion & Business development (for entrepreneurs) Health & Fitness Relationships Family and Home Financial security Fulfillment of vision / dreams  Creating Lenses with Excel If you wish to use Excel radar diagrams to simulate lenses, follow these steps: Open a new Excel spreadsheet.

This current state of affairs may prevent otherwise thoughtful people from seeing the value of what has traditionally been regarded as the best of “common sense” about life and of what has been preserved in the wisdom traditions of most cultures—especially in two of the greatest world sources of wisdom about the human self, the Judeo-Christian and the Greek, the biblical and the classical.

IDEAS ARE VERY GENERAL models of or assumptions about reality. They are patterns of interpretation, historically developed and socially shared. They sometimes are involved with beliefs, but are much more than belief and do not depend upon it. They are ways of thinking about and interpreting things. They are so pervasive and essential to how we think about and how we approach life that we often do not even know they are there or understand when and how they are at work. Our idea system is a cultural artifact, growing up with us from earliest childhood out of the teachings, expectations, and observable behaviors of family and community.

Anthropologists observe that the world occupied by a human being comprises not only the surrounding land, water, sky, plant and animal life, human beings and works of human hands, but also a “symbolic reality,” which is superimposed upon material reality.

I’d always assumed that the people who lived in those fancy houses in the suburbs were financially better off than I was, and only once I’d joined them did I come to understand that it’s all just a much more sophisticated and elaborate way of being broke. There’s the jumbo mortgage, the home equity loan to renovate the kitchen and bathrooms, the two or three monthly luxury car payments; before you know it, you’ve spent a hundred grand of post-tax income before you’ve put the first piece of bread on your table. Curse of the middle class, my ass. They do it to themselves, all because they’ve got this Hollywood Christmas movie notion of what their life is supposed to look like. It’s a tenuous existence built precariously on a foundation of colossal debt, and one miscalculation, one meager bonus or bad investment or unforeseen expense, can bring the whole thing crashing to the ground.

It interests me that there is no end of fictions, and facts made over in the forms of fictions. Because we class them under so many different rubrics, and media, and means of delivery, we don't recognize the sheer proliferation and seamlessness of them. I think at some level of scale or perspective, the police drama in which a criminal is shot, the hospital in which the doctors massage a heart back to life, the news video in which jihadists behead a hostage, and the human-interest story of a child who gets his fondest wish (a tourist trip somewhere) become the same sorts of drama. They are representations of strong experience, which, as they multiply, began to dedifferentiate in our uptake of them, despite our names and categories and distinctions... I say I watch the news to "know". But I don't really know anything. Certainly I can't do anything. I know that there is a war in Iraq, but I knew that already. I know that there are fires and car accidents in my state and in my country, but that, too, I knew already. With each particular piece of footage, I know nothing more than I did before. I feel something, or I don't feel something. One way I am likely to feel is virtuous and "responsible" for knowing more of these things that I can do nothing about. Surely this feeling is wrong, even contemptible. I am not sure anymore what I feel. What is it like to watch a human being's beheading? The first showing of the video is bad. The second, fifth, tenth, hundredth are—like one's own experiences—retained, recountable, real, and yet dreamlike. Some describe the repetition as "numbing". "Numbing" is very imprecise. I think the feeling, finally, is of something like envelopment and even satisfaction at having endured the worst without quite caring or being tormented. It is the paradoxically calm satisfaction of having been enveloped in a weak or placid "real" that another person endured as the worst experience imaginable, in his personal frenzy, fear, and desperation, which we view from the outside as the simple occurrence of a death... I see: Severed heads. The Extra Value Meal. Kohl-gray eyelids. A holiday sale at Kohl's. Red seeping between the fingers of the gloved hand that presses the wound. "Doctor, can you save him?" "We'll do our best." The dining room of the newly renovated house, done in red. Often a bold color is best. The kids are grateful for their playroom. The bad guy falls down, shot. The detectives get shot. The new Lexus is now available for lease. On CNN, with a downed helicopter in the background, a peaceful field of reeds waves in the foreground. One after another the reeds are bent, broken, by boot treads advancing with the camera. The cameraman, as savior, locates the surviving American airman. He shoots him dead. It was a terrorist video. They run it again. Scenes from ads: sales, roads, ordinary calm shopping, daily life. Tarpaulined bodies in the street. The blue of the sky advertises the new car's color. Whatever you could suffer will have been recorded in the suffering of someone else. Red Lobster holds a shrimp festival. Clorox gets out blood. Advil stops pain fast. Some of us are going to need something stronger.

Nothing less than the entire renovation of the image of God in our souls will constitute us evangelically holy. No series of obediential actings, no observance of religious duties, no attendance unto actions amongst men as morally virtuous and useful, how exact soever they may be, or how constant soever we may be unto them, will ever render us lovely or holy in the sight of God, unless they all proceed from the renovation of the image of God in us, or that habitual principle of spiritual life and power which renders us conformable unto him.

Will you permit God to stir the Holy Spirit within you today? Are you ready to seek out His perfect will for your life, even if it is contrary to your present hopes, dreams, and desires? Will you submit to any necessary change or refinement the Spirit exposes and requires, so that you may live a more serviceable and righteous witness for Christ? A major heart remodel may be necessary. The renovations could take many, many years to complete but the cathedral He creates within your very being will be magnificent. May His desire for your life be yours as well, from this very moment and throughout all of eternity.

If you find yourself surrounded by negative, whiny, sarcastic people, consider the architecture of your life and think about doing a little renovation. 

A New Blueprint: Time to Renovate the Architecture of Our Lives

I had never been hit before in my life, and for the first time to be with my live-in lesbian lover was further proof that my love life needed a renovation. I

Similarly, it is the vision of life in God’s kingdom and its goodness that provides an adequate basis for the steadfast intention to obey Christ.

THOSE WITH A WELL-KEPT heart are persons who are prepared for and capable of responding to the situations of life in ways that are good and right.

The possibility of knowledge is relevant to Dallas’s account of the spiritual life. The point of his books The Spirit of the Disciplines, The Divine Conspiracy and Renovation of the Heart is that we must adopt specific practices in order to deepen our apprehension of God’s activity in the world. If we fail to sharpen our perception of the great spiritual truths as revealed in the life of Christ, God’s kingdom, in all its life-transforming richness and power, will simply pass us by. Again, you see it happen every day.

The revolution of Jesus is in the first place and continuously a revolution of the human heart or spirit. It did not and does not proceed by means of the formation of social institutions and laws, the outer forms of our existence, intending that these would then impose a good order of life upon people who come under their power.

Hence it is not enough to deal with the Temper. We must go to the source, and change the inmost nature, and the angry humors will die away of themselves. Souls are made sweet not by taking the acid fluids out, but by putting something in—a great Love, a new Spirit, the Spirit of Christ. Christ, the Spirit of Christ, interpenetrating ours, sweetens, purifies, transforms all. This only can eradicate what is wrong, work a chemical change, renovate and regenerate, and rehabilitate the inner man. Will-power does not change men. Time does not change men. CHRIST DOES. Therefore, "Let that mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus.

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an individual undergoing the transformation of his feelings (emotions, sensations, desires) from those he learned in the home, school, and playground as he grew up to those that characterize the inner being of Jesus Christ. He is now not to be one who will spend hours fantasizing sensual indulgence or revenge, or who will try to dominate or injure others in attitude, word, or deed. He will not repay evil for evil—push for push, blow for blow, taunt for taunt, hatred for hatred, contempt for contempt. He will not be always on the hunt to satisfy his lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and the pride of life (1 John 2:16). No wonder he has no real idea of who he will be; and he must content himself with the mere identity: “apprentice of Jesus.” That is the starting point from which his new identity will emerge, and it is in fact powerful enough to bear the load.

In one of C. S. Lewis's more striking passages, he challenges us to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.... There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations-these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit-immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

When we leave this earth, there will not be a U-Haul with our crap following us. The pharaohs tried, and they got robbed. You can’t take it with you. We need to live our best life now. There’s no room for what might have been.

My vision is this: when any building is created, it emerges in response to the unique climate, ecology, culture, and community of its specific location. The structure becomes a story of that place, and it embraces the same natural breezes and sunshine to heat, cool, and light the space that have been used to make buildings comfortable for centuries, even millennia. When any existing building is renovated, it reintroduces daylight and natural ventilation and opens up to the outside... Already a combination of very high efficiency and passive solar can maintain comfortable indoor temperatures with outdoor temperatures as low as 45 degrees. BUILDINGS DESIGNED FOR LIFE by Amanda Sturgeon

Everyone is winning at the game of life, and I’m always left holding the crappiest hand. It’s not fair . . . I’m so sick of hearing about everybody else’s fast metabolism, relaxing vacations, fancy home renovations, and amazing dogs who don’t chew the couch . . . I wanted ALL that. Oh! Here she is again with her “I’ve lost the weight and I’ve got it all” posts . . . If I had a trainer, I’d look like that too . . . If he says “It’s so easy for me” one more time . . . I had the idea to start Uber 10 YEARS ago. I was getting around to it . . . It’s so much easier when you don’t have kids . . . If only my husband understood me . . . I’ve had a much harder life, and I don’t go flaunting it . . . Anyone can use a social media filter, try showing up IRL looking that good . . . Everyone is outdoing me and there’s no room for me to shine. It’s all over for me. I realize, now, that I wanted their success to be MY success. But they’ve grabbed

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There may be those on earth who dress better or eat better, but those who enjoy the peace of God sleep better.

The man of action saves the movement from the suicidal dissensions and the recklessness of the fanatics. But his appearance usually marks the end of the dynamic phase of the movement. The war with the present is over. The genuine man of action is intent not on renovating the world but on possessing it. Whereas the life breath of the dynamic phase was protest and a desire for drastic change, the final phase is chiefly preoccupied with administering and perpetuating the power won.

To close, I think Zig Ziglar the motivational speaker said it so eloquently: “If you’ll do for the next three to five years what other people won’t do, you’ll be able to do for the rest of your life what other people can’t do.

Now it was run down, crumbling, beautiful, and inhabited only by Grandpa, entirely alone. But then hope had crept in. A man, Grandpa wrote, had offered to rent Hudson Castle. He had offered to transform it into a school. Grandpa would stay on as a governor; it would give him new purpose, something to do. No paperwork had been signed, but the man was eager to begin renovations. The man’s name was Sorrotore, a New York millionaire. He enclosed a press cutting, showing a man standing outside a vast New York building, smiling at the camera with Hollywood teeth. “Victor Sorrotore outside his home in the Dakota,” read the caption. “Victor Sorrotore,” whispered Vita, and she memorized his face, just in case. Within a week, Sorrotore struck. Grandpa returned from an afternoon walk to find his way back home barred. A strange man with two guard dogs came out of the caretaker’s cottage and pointed a rifle at him. “Hudson Castle belongs to Mr. Sorrotore,” the guard had said. “Scram!” Grandpa had never in his adult life been told to scram. He had tried to push past the guard, and one of the dogs had bitten his ankle; not a snap but a true bite, which drew blood. The gun was leveled at his chest. Bewildered, he took the train to New York, rented the tiny apartment on Seventh Avenue, and found Sorrotore’s lawyer.

Now, Daniel and I propped ourselves up with pillows in his bed, our legs stretched out in front of us, passing the lo mein and dumpling cartons back and forth, digging into them with chopsticks while we heckled the married couple with more money than sense on the television. “Really?” I yelled. “You have a quarter of a million dollars to renovate a Philadelphia row house, and that’s the cheap garbage tile you pick for the bathroom?” “They have to make up for the money they spent replacing those hardwood floors somehow.” Daniel crunched into an eggroll. I tsked and shook my head. “They could have refinished the original ones for half that, easily.” “Oh, yeah?” He bumped my shoulder with his. “Refinish a lot of floors, do you?” “I watch a lot of TV where other people refinish a lot of floors. I think that makes me an expert.” He considered that. “Close enough. I’ll accept that.” I slurped up one more bite of noodles while the couple on the screen bickered about the color of the shower tile. Their marriage wasn’t going to last beyond the renovation of that house. “I wonder what it’s like,” I finally said. “I think the green would have looked better, but that’s not the hill I want to die on.” “No . . .” I passed the lo mein carton to him. “I mean having a space like that. My place would fit in their kitchen, you know? I watch shows like this and wonder what it would be like to live that kind of life. Where you have an amazing space like that, and the money to make it exactly what you want.

A doctor, for instance, is bored with his job and his family and must always have a project to keep himself entertained—a second house that needs renovation, another house at the beach, a farm outside town, an overseas trip for ‘professional development’, a share in a racehorse, extensions to the family home. This is the pattern of restless overconsumers, who deploy their wealth as a means of avoiding confrontation with the essential meaningless of life that they fear may lie just below the surface. They keep themselves amused by changing the form of their assets.

It was hard to invest in a person when one saw how things passed. Take the ball player, for example, who dedicates his life, gets injured, and then watches the sport proceed without him. He sits on his leather couch, watching better athletes run across his television screen, younger ones on renovated fields. And he, who sacrificed his sweat, youth, and sanity to the sport and knew coaches, teammates, and even janitors at the stadium like brothers—is forced to still live afterward. His teammates said kind words before a match, hugged him after a goal, but now seem to be focused on new seasons and new goals. He gets left behind. Did none of it mean anything? He cries for the fast world to stop and says, “Slow down. This pains me. We were just here. I used to joke with you. We said we loved each other. Wait for me. Will you just wait for me?” Those hands he shook after a victory could not care for the weeping, broken-footed man hiding in the shadows of his home, once lit by the sun, once the life of the party. When Andrei walked into a job now, or even met someone for the first time, he thought: How long will it take you to forget me?

He said that it was strange it had taken us so long to meet: in fact it was almost exactly a year to the day day since we had been – albeit briefly – introduced by a mutual friend. Since then, he had asked the mutual friend several times for my number; he had attended parties and dinners where he had been told I would be present, only to find that I wasn’t there. He didn’t know why the mutual friend resisted putting him directly in touch with me, if it was anything so deliberate as resistance. But one way or another, he had been obstructed; until – again without knowing why – be had recently asked the mutual friend once more for my number and promptly been given it. I said that my current feelings of powerlessness had changed the way I looked at what happens and why, to the extent that I was beginning to see what other people called fate in the unfolding of events, as though living were merely an act of reading to find out what happens next. That idea – of one’s own life as something that had already been dictated – was strangely seductive, until you realised that it reduced other people to the moral status of characters and camouflaged their capacity to destroy. Yet the illusion of meaning recurred, much as you tried to resist it: like childhood, I said, which we treat as an explanatory text rather than merely as a formative experience of powerless. For a long time, I said, I believed that it was only though absolute passivity that you could learn to see what was really there. But my decision to create a disturbance by renovating my house had awoken a different reality, as though I had disturbed a beast sleeping in its lair. I had started to become, in effect, angry. I had started to desire power, because what I now realised was that other people had had it all along, that what I called fate was merely the reverberation of their will, a tale scripted not by some universal storyteller but by people who would elude justice for as long as their actions were met with resignation rather than outrage.

He said that it was strange it had taken us so long to meet: in fact it was almost exactly a year to the day since we had been – albeit briefly – introduced by a mutual friend. Since then, he had asked the mutual friend several times for my number; he had attended parties and dinners where he had been told I would be present, only to find that I wasn’t there. He didn’t know why the mutual friend resisted putting him directly in touch with me, if it was anything so deliberate as resistance. But one way or another, he had been obstructed; until – again without knowing why – be had recently asked the mutual friend once more for my number and promptly been given it. I said that my current feelings of powerlessness had changed the way I looked at what happens and why, to the extent that I was beginning to see what other people called fate in the unfolding of events, as though living were merely an act of reading to find out what happens next. That idea – of one’s own life as something that had already been dictated – was strangely seductive, until you realised that it reduced other people to the moral status of characters and camouflaged their capacity to destroy. Yet the illusion of meaning recurred, much as you tried to resist it: like childhood, I said, which we treat as an explanatory text rather than merely as a formative experience of powerless. For a long time, I said, I believed that it was only though absolute passivity that you could learn to see what was really there. But my decision to create a disturbance by renovating my house had awoken a different reality, as though I had disturbed a beast sleeping in its lair. I had started to become, in effect, angry. I had started to desire power, because what I now realised was that other people had had it all along, that what I called fate was merely the reverberation of their will, a tale scripted not by some universal storyteller but by people who would elude justice for as long as their actions were met with resignation rather than outrage.

We need to renew ourselves often. Even temples need renovation.

the commonly used term housekeeper morphed into housewife. The shift was subtle, but the change in connotation was profound: a woman no longer managed her home; she was married to it.

During my frequent house-moving, I came to understand how this city has no patience for those who cannot, or do not wish to, acclimatise to change. You like old neighbourhoods, un-renovated housing, nature growing wild? Good luck. You want to live a simple life outside of cheques and balances? Just try. Technology will urge itself into your pockets. Highways will encroach upon your gardens. Luxury housing will impress itself upon your land and upon the cemeteries of your ancestors. Prices will skyrocket out of your control and if you're not working, always working, urge you back into your parents' homes, or out into the streets.

We’d brought with us the small closet door on which we’d measured our children as they grew, and now we hung it on the wall just inside our back door, so the kids would greet us every time we walked in.

Ever since the year we’d cooked a Thanksgiving dinner for Italians in Bergamo—spreading the table with turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and gravy and green beans and creamed onions and cranberry sauce, and then watching their eyes fill with politely disguised horror at the cacophony of so many dishes coming out all at once

My mission of being in the heart of the people is not just a part of my life or a badge I can take off; it is not an “extra” or just another moment in life. Instead, it is something I cannot uproot from my being without destroying my very self. I am a mission on this earth; that is the reason why I am here in this world.

stress self-evaluation test should be done regularly, it helps to renovate your self-concept

She learned the hard way that she’s a great café designer and renovation project manager, and a lousy deli manager.

People pleasers think they’re being “nice.” Nope, we’re liars. If you’re a people pleaser, you will behave in a way to manipulate what somebody thinks about you. That’s why you spend most of your energy curating yourself so that you fit in, or will be liked, or so that no one’s mad at you. You are manipulating what people think about you. Instead of just showing up as yourself and making decisions that work for you, you twist yourself (or your renovated playroom, in this case) in knots so that other people won’t be upset with you. Courage and confidence dissolve guilt.

Brooklyn, like the West Village, again makes me think of gentrification's ability to erase collective memory. I cannot imagine what people who aren't from New York think when they move to Brooklyn. Do they know they're moving into neighborhoods where just ten years ago you wouldn't have seen a white person at any time of day? Do they know that every apartment listed on Craigslist as 'newly renovated' was once inhabited by someone else who likely made a life there before the ground under their feet became too valuable? It's hard not to feel guilt living here, and I wonder if other gentrifiers feel the same way. I represent the domino effect. I was priced out of Manhattan, but I know my existence in this borough comes at the cost of the erasure of others' cultures and senses of home. I know the woman with the Gucci bag in the West Village elicits the same kind of angst within me as my presence does for a native Brooklynite. I try to stay away from the hippest joints and I try to support long-established businesses, but I often fail at doing these things, and I know that even when I'm successful at trekking this increasingly narrow path, I've only done so much. Brooklyn, like the West Village, is irrevocably changed, and I know I'm part of that. The question is, how do I stop it when the process is so much larger than me and has already progressed so far? Mass displacement means that there are fewer and fewer people coming to Brooklyn now know only that it's hip and expensive and has good brunch. As Sarah Schulman writes, gentrifiers 'look in the mirror and think it's a window, believing that corporate support for and inflation of their story is in fact a neutral and accurate picture of the world.' It's a circular logic that dictates Brooklyn is Brooklyn because it's Brooklyn - the brand mimicked by hipsters all over the world and mocked in hundreds of tired late-night parodies. What gentrifier sees Brooklyn not as it is but as the consequence of a powerful and violent system?

Omaha native Paul Stratman spent forty-four years in the electrical trade, laying wire, managing people, and eventually doing 3D modeling. Then he retired. Dissatisfaction soon set in. “My wife had a long list of things she wanted done around the house,” Paul said, “but that took me less than a year to complete. And I certainly didn’t want to just sit around the house doing nothing for the rest of my life. I wanted to help people.” About this time, he heard about a group of retired tradesmen in the Omaha area who call themselves the Geezers. Several times each week, for a half day at a time, a group of five to ten Geezers meets in North Omaha (a poorer part of town) to rebuild a house for later use by a nonprofit. “Currently, we’re rebuilding a home that will house six former inmates,” Paul told me. “We’re providing the home, and the nonprofit will provide the mentorship when the gentlemen move in.” The goal is to help formerly incarcerated people build better lives and stay out of jail. The rate of recidivism in the United States reaches as high as 83 percent.[12] “Our goal is zero percent among the men who will occupy this home when we are finished,” Paul said. On a previous occasion, after the devastating 2019 midwestern floods, Paul was working as a volunteer in the area to restore electricity to many of the homes when he received an urgent phone call concerning a couple in their fifties whose home had been destroyed in the flood. The couple were living in a camper with their teenage daughter and three grandkids (whose mother was unable to take care of them) while they tried to get enough money to fix their house. Six people in a tiny camper! The couple were worried because they had been informed that someone from Nebraska’s Division of Children and Family Services would be coming to inspect the living conditions for the three grandkids. The couple feared their grandkids were going to be taken from them. They were almost frantic to prevent that. Would Paul help? Paul went right to work. He completed the electrical wiring and safety renovations inside the flood-damaged home, free of charge, in time for it to pass inspection by CFS. The family stayed together. Reflecting on this experience, Paul said, “When you can help people that are so desperate, and can make a little difference in their lives—people who have put their lives on hold to care for the needs of someone else—it is moving. That was one of the most emotional experiences I’ve ever had and some of the most meaningful work I’ve ever accomplished.” Paul has retired from his job, but he hasn’t stopped working for others.

it is the presence of respect and an abiding willingness to support each other, more than romance, that indicates whether a marriage will last. Couples that exhibit these qualities tend to stay together, creating the marital equivalent of firmitas.

The structure did not fail in any technical sense, but its excessive utility at the expense of beauty created its demise.

Many of us had eldest children in middle school, and after years in the tunnel of raising young offspring, for the first time we were having a chance to look up and around. The partner many saw across the dinner table was not always the person they remembered falling in love with. Or perhaps it was their own needs that had changed.

He would have needed you much more than you needed him, and that is never a power dynamic you want to be in. It makes people desperate, and often they’ll sink to the lowest depths of humanity in order to maintain a life that they believe they cannot live without

According to Appleton, humans are most comfortable in situations where they can observe (prospect) and feel safe (refuge) at the same time. A window seat is a classic example—enclosed and part of the house, but with a view of what is outside—an architectural re-creation of the experience of being held in a mother’s arms.

The tragedy of life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. —Benjamin Mays

You don’t pass through menopause. You enter it and live there for the rest of your life. It’s like a big old Victorian house that needs some work but will be beautiful when you finish the renovations.

S. Lewis created a beautiful word picture I like to think of when I cannot understand what God is doing. He told us to think of ourselves as a house God is renovating. We think we know what work needs to be done—maybe some small repairs here and there—and then He starts knocking down walls. We are confused and feeling the pain of this level of rebuilding. But maybe His vision is much different than ours. “You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”1 We see a cottage. God sees a palace. We see destruction. God sees construction. We see only what the human mind can imagine. God is building something we cannot even fathom. It’s not what we wanted, but it is so very good. And in the end, maybe it’s not what God is working on but how God is working in us that matters most of all. So, pray what you know to pray. Pray what you need to pray. Pray all the words and let the tears flow into sobs and demands and frustrations and doubts mixed with hope. But then let the faithfulness of God interpret what you see. Let the faithfulness of God build your trust. Let the faithfulness of God ease the ache of your confusion and bitterness and bewilderment. God’s faithfulness isn’t demonstrated by His activity aligning with your prayers. It’s your prayers aligning with His faithfulness and His will where you become more and more assured of His activity. Even if, maybe especially if, His activity and His answers don’t look like you thought they would. I titled this chapter “Forgiving God,” not because God needs to be forgiven. But sometimes, in the middle of deep hurt, our hearts can start to wrongly believe God is at fault. When we truly feel we’ve asked God for something urgently necessary, good, right, and holy, like saving a marriage or a loved one’s life or preventing something horrific from happening, and God doesn’t do it? We wouldn’t say He sinned, but we very much may feel betrayed by Him. Or disillusioned by Him. Or possibly wonder if God even cares about us. When the evils of this world rage around us and terrible tragedies break our hearts, it is understandable why we weep, bang our fists on the steering wheel, scream out very hard words, feel consumed by the seemingly never-ending unfairness of it all, and wrestle through all the questions berating our grief-filled souls. The problem is when we form conclusions from that place. Because, as we’ve been talking about, our perspectives—especially while we are here—aren’t complete.

They were to bring the presence of the kingdom and its King into every corner of human life simply by fully living in the kingdom with him.

The lesson here is that political and cultural logic, rooted in emotion, identity, and ways of life cultivated among one’s own kind, operates in a wholly different dimension than the rational and universalizing ethos of economics and technology. Far from moving forward in lock-step progress, when they meet, they clash.

The matter of our prayer respects the depravation of our nature, and our wants on that account. The darkness and ignorance that is in our understandings; our unacquaintedness with heavenly things, and alienation from the life of God thereby; the secret workings of the lusts of the mind under the shade and covert of this darkness; the stubbornness, obstinacy, and perverseness of our wills by nature, with their reluctancies unto and dislike of things spiritual, with innumerable latent guiles thence arising,—all keeping the soul from a due conformity unto the holiness of God,—are things which believers have an especial regard unto in their confessions and supplications. They know this to be their duty, and find by experience that the greatest concernment between God and their souls, as to sin and holiness, doth lie in these things; and they are never more jealous over themselves than when they find their hearts least affected with them. And to give over treating with God about them,—for mercy in their pardon, for grace in their removal, and the daily renovation of the image of God in them thereby,—is to renounce all religion and all designs of living unto God.

Belief in the corruptibility of all institutions leads to a dead end of universal distrust,” political scientist Francis Fukuyama warns. “American democracy, all democracy, will not survive a lack of belief in the possibility of impartial institutions; instead, partisan political combat will come to pervade every aspect of life.”1 And so it has. From a reading of history going back to ancient Rome, we know that this is the way republics unravel. That danger should be our uppermost concern today.

human life as a whole does not run by will alone. Far from it. Nevertheless, life must be organized by the will if it is to be organized at all. It can only be pulled together “from the inside.” That is the function of the will or heart: to organize our life as a whole, and, indeed, to organize it around God. And of course life must be organized, and organized well, if one’s existence is to be even fairly tolerable to one’s self or those around. Every civilization of any type has recognized this. A great part of the disaster of contemporary life lies in the fact that it is organized around feelings. People nearly always act on their feelings, and think it only right. The will is then left at the mercy of circumstances that evoke feelings. Christian spiritual formation today must squarely confront this fact and overcome it.

Life is a renovation project.

Matters for Thought and Discussion 1. What are three “thoughts” that have occupied your mind this week? Why those thoughts, and not some others? What have their effects on your life been? 2. What are the main ideas that rule our society today? Do you think they favor a godly life or hinder it? 3. What are the major ideas Jesus brought into human history and how do you see them affecting the contemporary world? Think broadly and of parts of our world most unaffected by Christian teaching. 4. Was the distinction between ideas and images made clear in this chapter? Where do you see images most at work in our lives today? Political campaigns? Advertising? Religion? Education? 5. What images of God seem most common and influential in our world? How about in your own thinking and devotional life? In that of your friends? 6. What were Peter’s ideas and images concerning the Messiah? Do you think we do much better than Peter? 7. Reflect on the Gospel (New Testament) as basic information about reality. Is that a good way to think of it? What are the alternatives to thinking of it in that way? 8. Should followers of Jesus Christ be known as thinkers? Is thinking actually a good thing for Christians to do? How might it help us? Is it dangerous? 9. What is worship? How are thought, worship, and spiritual formation related? 10. What are some steps we can take to make sure that thought is rightly directed and used in the process of spiritual formation? How can images help that process?

The world is going to be remade, not reconditioned. All its would-be renovators are powerless to stop this. If these experts do not understand me, so much the better; I certainly have no desire to understand them.

But I intend that holiness which I have before described; which may be reduced to these three heads:—(1.) An internal change or renovation of our souls, our minds, wills, and affections, by grace; (2.) An universal compliance with the will of God in all duties of obedience and abstinence from sin, out of a principle of faith and love; (3.) A designation of all the actions of life unto the glory of God by Jesus Christ, according to the gospel. This is holiness; so to be and so to do is to be holy.

Sin is a symptom of an empty space not being filled by God.

When the routines and circumstances of your life are set up so that your lifestyle is a good fit for your natural preferences, it can give you a feeling of being in equilibrium. This will help prevent you from getting overwhelmed by anxiety on a regular basis. And by arranging your life to suit your temperament, you’ll have the time to process and calm down from life events that make you feel anxious. Some areas in which you can set up your life to fit your temperament are: --Have the right level of busyness in your life. For example, have enough after-work or weekend activities to keep you feeling calmly stimulated but not overstimulated and scattered. Note that being understimulated (for example, having too few enjoyable activities to look forward to) can be as much of a problem as being overstimulated. --Pick the physical activity level that’s right for you. Fine-tuning your physical activity level could be as simple as getting up from your desk and taking a walk periodically to keep yourself feeling calm and alert. Lifting things (such as carrying shopping bags up stairs) can also increase feelings of alertness and energy. Having pleasurable activities to look forward to and enough physical activity will help protect you against depression. --Have the right level of social contact in your life, and have routines that put this on autopilot. For example, a routine of having drinks after work on a Friday with friends, or attending a weekly class with your sister. Achieving the right level of social contact might also include putting mechanisms in place to avoid too much social interruption, like having office hours rather than an open-door policy. --Keep a balance of change and routine in your life. For example, alternate going somewhere new for your vacation vs. returning to somewhere you know you like. What the right balance of change and routine is for you will depend on your natural temperament and how much change vs. stability feels good to you. --Allow yourself the right amount of mental space to work up to doing something—enough time that you can do some mulling over the prospect of getting started but not so much time that it starts to feel like avoidance of getting started. --If coping with change sucks up a lot of energy for you, be patient with yourself, especially if you’re feeling stirred up by change or a disruption to your routines or plans. As mentioned in Chapter 2, keep some habits and relationships consistent when you’re exploring change in other areas. --Have self-knowledge of what types of stress you find most difficult to process. Don’t voluntarily expose yourself to those types without considering alternatives. For example, if you want a new house and you know you get stressed out by making lots of decisions, then you might choose to buy a house that’s already built, rather than building your own home. If you know making home-improvement decisions is anxiety provoking for you, you might choose to move to a house that’s new or recently renovated, rather than doing any major work on your current home or buying a fixer-upper. There’s always a balance with avoidance coping, where some avoidance of the types of stress that you find most taxing can be very helpful.

Kethledge, it turned out, relies on long periods alone with his thoughts to write his famously sharp legal opinions, often working at a simple pine desk in a barely renovated barn with no internet connection.

various unpleasant and unexpected side effects of someone’s renovation.

Comparing myself to my friend and the anger that I felt was teaching me a life-changing lesson. I wasn’t mad at her. I wasn’t even mad at my husband. I was mad at myself because I had given up on my own ambition. I had counted on my husband being successful and providing me with the financial support to have the things that I wanted in life. The truth is, your life is your responsibility. If you want financial success, it is your responsibility to create it. If you want a house that has queen bunk beds and a renovated kitchen, it is your responsibility to work for it.

It’s as if Luke somehow came and gave my life a renovation, and all of a sudden I’ve got everything I always needed, but never knew I wanted.

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In essence, by managing our beliefs, we gain the power to steer our life’s ship. So why aren’t we all walking around with a “Belief Management” toolbox, ready to renovate our mental landscape at will?

was locking up at the local mosque for which I am a trustee when an elderly frail gentleman approached me and quietly asked if I could help raise money to repair the roof of the local synagogue. He went on to explain that he was one of only 200 Jews left in Bradford and there was only one old and small synagogue standing in the city which needed repairs as the roof was leaking badly. The small Jewish community he went on to say was not wealthy but was trying to raise funds for the repair. I was taken aback at a Jewish man approaching a mosque to help repair a synagogue. I responded that I would like to visit the synagogue to see what needed doing which I did the next day to find the roof was indeed in bad shape with buckets kept in various places in the prayer area to catch the leaks. The following Friday before Friday prayers I briefed the Imam who leads the prayers with this story who recounted it to the congregation attending Friday prayers and to my surprise £130,000 in donations was raised from two weekly Friday prayers supported with a few significant value donations from local Pakistani businessmen. The funds were used not just to renovate the roof but to carry out badly needed structural repairs and repaint the entire synagogue. The letters of thanks from the Jewish community were touching and were posted on the mosque notice boards. There is a significant proportion of the 200 Jews in the city now attending our Eid gatherings at the mosque to have a meal together and join in Eid celebrations and similarly Muslims from the mosque visit the synagogue on Jewish celebratory days.” I asked if this beautiful incident of religious tolerance had been covered in the press. “The mainstream media looks for sensational stories more than such human stories, maligning the Muslim community without broadcasting the good progress being made on inter-faith relations and integration.

Self-denial" must never be confused with self-rejection; nor is it to be thought of as a painful and strenuous act, perhaps repeated from time to time against great internal resistance. It is, rather, an overall settled condition of life in the kingdom of God, better described as "death to self." In this and this alone lies the key to the soul's restoration. Christian spiritual formation rests on this indispensable foundation of death to self and cannot proceed except insofar as that foundation is being firmly laid and sustained.

But what is this "self-denial" or "death to self," which goes hand in hand with restoration of the soul and eventually the whole person? At first it sounds like some dreadfully negative thing that aims to annihilate us. And frankly, from the point of view of the ruined soul, self-denial is and will always be every bit as brutal as it seems to most people on first approach. The ruined life is not to be enhanced but replaced. We must simply lose our lives -- that ruined life about which most people complain so much anyway.

Those who are not genuinely convinced that the only real bargain in life is surrendering ourselves to Jesus and his cause, abandoning all that we love to him and for him, cannot learn the other lessons Jesus has to teach us. They cannot proceed to anything like total spiritual transformation. Not that he will not let us, but that we simply cannot succeed. If I tell you that you cannot drive an automobile unless you can see, I am not saying I will not let you, but that you cannot succeed even if I do.

My patterns of thinking will conform to the truths of scriptural revelation, and I will extend and apply those truths, under the guidance of God's Holy Spirit, to all of the details of my daily life. Am I undertaking some task? Then I in faith do it with God, assuming and finding his power to be involved with me. That is the nature of his kingdom. Is there an emergency? I will meet it with the knowledge that God is in the midst of it with me and will be calm in a center of intense prayer. Am I praised? My thoughts (and feelings) will move immediately to the goodness of God in my life. Am I condemned or reproached? I know that God is supporting and helping me because he loves me and has a future for me. Am I disappointed and frustrated? I rest in the knowledge that God is over all and that he is working things out - that "all things work together for good to those who love God and are called into the fulfillment of his purposes" (Romans 8:28, PAR). And so forth.

I constantly and thoughtfully engage myself with the ideas, images, and information that are provided by God through the Scriptures; his Son, Jesus; and the lives and experiences of his people through the ages. In doing that, I am constantly nourished by the Holy Spirit in ways far beyond my own efforts or understanding. What I receive in response to my efforts is therefore also a gift, a grace. Spiritual (trans)formation of my thought life is achieved by the ministry of the Spirit in the midst of my necessary and well-directed efforts.

Now, there are no formulas in the spiritual life, because it is not a life that runs on its own. It runs in interaction with God.

We cannot transform our ideas and images, or even the information we have or our thought processes, into Christlikeness by direct effort. But we can do things - adopt certain practices - that, indirectly, will increasingly have that effect. The most obvious thing we can do is to draw certain key portions of Scripture into our minds and make them a part of the permanent fixtures of our thoughts. This is the primary discipline for the thought life. We need to know these Scriptures like the backs of our hands, and a good way to do that is to memorize them and then constantly turn them over in our minds as we go through the events and circumstances of our lives (Joshua 1:8; Psalm 1:2).

We’re not a house that needs to be torn down, but we are a house that needs serious, serious renovation. We need the renovation of words—the encouragement and rebuke of friends.

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Would you know who is the greatest saint in the world? It is not he who prays most or fasts most; it is not he who gives most alms, or is most eminent for temperance, chastity, or justice; but it is he who is always thankful to God, who wills everything that God willeth, who receives everything as an instance of God’s goodness, and has a heart always ready to praise God for it. WILLIAM LAW, A SERIOUS CALL TO A DEVOUT AND HOLY LIFE

We can’t change ourselves. Edwards wrote to the Scottish pastor John Erskine in 1757, “There can properly be no such thing, or anything akin to what the Scripture speaks of conversion, renovation of the heart, regeneration, etc. if growing good, by a number of self-determined acts, are all that is required.”4

C. S. Lewis created a beautiful word picture I like to think of when I cannot understand what God is doing. He told us to think of ourselves as a house God is renovating. We think we know what work needs to be done—maybe some small repairs here and there—and then He starts knocking down walls. We are confused and feeling the pain of this level of rebuilding. But maybe His vision is much different than ours. “You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”1

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In the spiritual life one never rests on one's laurels. It is a sure recipe for falling. Attainments are like the manna given to the Israelites in the desert, good only for the day (Exodus 16:4, 20). Past attainments do not place us in a position of merit that permits us to let up in the hot pursuit of God for today, for now. Paul knew that, and he knew that others missed it or forgot it to their great harm.

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Just as the bee simultaneously constructs cells and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly on this great columbarium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions. It is always building new, higher stories and shoring up, cleaning, and renovating the old cells; above all, it takes pains to fill up this monstrously towering framework and to arrange therein the entire empirical world, which is to say, the anthropomorphic world. Whereas the man of action binds his life to reason and its concepts so that he will not be swept away and lost, the scientific investigator builds his hut right next to the tower of science so that he will be able to work on it and to find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks which presently exist. And he requires shelter, for there are frightful powers which continuously break in upon him, powers which oppose scientific “truth” with completely different kinds of “truths” which bear on their shields the most varied sorts of emblems.

Anything can be haunted if you wish it to be," said one of the preservationists suddenly, like a released spring. "Ghosts are tumors of the imagination. Instead of renovating old hospital, abandoned factories, you permit them to decay. You celebrate stagnant, broken forms and shirk the responsibility to bring them back to life.

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