Renovations

Started reading Renovation of the Heart by Dallas Willard. Some things that I thought were note-worthy and well stated:

The instrumentalities of Christian spiritual formation therefore involved much more than human effort and action under our control. Well-informed human effort certainly is indispensable, for spiritual formation is no passive process. But Christlikeness of the inner being is not a human attainment. It is, finally, a gift of grace.

Love, we hear, is patient and kind (I Cor. 13:4) Then we mistakenly try to BE loving by ACTING patiently and kindly - and quickly fail. We should always do the best we can in actions, of course, but little progress is to be made in that arena until we advance in love itself - the genuine inner readiness and longing to secure the good of others. Until we make significant progress there, our patience and kindness will be shallow and short-lived.