A few things I'm learning lately.
-There are no saints who did not experience suffering. The Church of the Nazarene tends to preach a mountaintop holiness, but I more frequently find that God is most readily experienced in the valleys of the shadow of death. It is in these valleys that our hearts are most readily available to be changed. There's something about the quiet moments of an aching, grieving, and scared heart that becomes a fertile soil for the work of God.
-Holiness is most beautifully demonstrated when the only word we can express is "help."
-The ultimate goal of the deeply formed life is not morality but union with God. We think they're the same but they're not. Our efforts to become more moral can, ironically, hinder our deeper awareness of God and/or ourselves when they become the object of our love and the focus of our efforts. We can be immensely moral yet profoundly un-Christlike.
-To be loved and to grow in love will shape our moral actions. However, to begin with moral demands create a calcified and lifeless yoke upon which we burden the hearts of those in our care.
-We must all judge less. We do not know what the Spirit is doing in someone's life, and our assumptions or judgments about the state of another's heart speaks more about the state of our own hearts than theirs.
-When in doubt, it's usually about control. When we cannot control our own lives, our own world, or our own sins, we project outward, demanding of others what we cannot do ourselves. Legalism is the vain attempt to create change that we cannot bring about in our own hearts.
-The answer (to whatever we are experiencing) is not greater effort. It's settling into the gentleness of God, and it's taking a single step (and another step...and another step) towards surrendering to God's perfect love. Each step is a prayerful act of submission to the good news that we are loved, that we are seen, and the Spirit is present in our hearts in ways seen and unseen.