Self Relational Quotes & Sayings

Many times when I didn't feel qualified, or like I didn't have the relational or emotional capacity, let alone the skillset, to speak to different people (it felt way out of my comfort zone), God's personality and his passion possessed me in a way that made it easy. I am not limited to my resources; I am limited to his, even when reaching outside my comfortable space. — Shawn Bolz

Holistic living means that your spiritual, relational, emotional, intellectual, physical, and financial lives are working together. — Tsh Oxenreider

So, relational evangelism? Go for it, as long as it turns into actual evangelism. You hanging out having a beer with your buddy so he can see that Christians are cool is not what we're called to do. You're eventually going to have to open up your mouth and share the gospel. — Matt Chandler

Man is a relational being. And if his first, fundamental relationship is disturbed - his relationship with God - then nothing else can be truly in order. — Pope Benedict XVI

Culture is critical in marriage because in a real sense, culture is the behavioral expression of one's values, appreciations, tastes, and relational style in both simple and serious matters of life. Add to this the dimensions of language and cultural memory, and you have worlds within worlds. In effect, culture provides the how and why of an individual's behavior. — Ravi Zacharias

We have to deal with rather than anesthetizing tension with TV or video games. It's easier to bypass relational snags with a convenient distraction, forfeiting the chance to improve problem solving and listening skills. I don't want my kids to be more comfortable interacting with a computer screen than a human being. We stay the course until we've resolved an issue, not allowing "Phineas & Ferb" to fill the space instead. This is harder and requires more time, but my kids will marry people and have bosses and children. Learning healthy relational skills is now or never. — Jen Hatmaker

Our capacity for arbitrary relational responding means that functions acquired through operant and/or respondent conditioning can change through relational framing. Something that up till now was neutral for an individual can, through relational responding, suddenly acquire a reinforcing function, or something reinforcing can acquire aversive functions. — Jonas Ramnero

The charge of blasphemy is loaded. The point is to pack a wallop behind the charge that in our worship services God simply doesn't come through for who he is. He is unwittingly belittled. For those who are stunned by the indescribable magnitude of what God has made, not to mention the infinite greatness of the One who made it, the steady diet on Sunday morning of practical how-to's and psychological soothing and relational therapy and tactical planning seem dramatically out of touch with Reality - the God of overwhelming greatness. — John Piper

third understanding of the imago Dei also gained popularity in the twentieth century, though it too had historical predecessors. In the early part of the twentieth century, Karl Barth argued that the central defining feature of the imago Dei is human relationality. Hence, this view is called the relational view of the imago Dei. Humans are created in the image of the Triune God and thus are meant to find their essence and destiny in community with one another and with God The following three essays offer arguments in favor of each of these views. — Gregory A. Boyd

Misinformation about the Bible's answers to these issues has led to much wrong teaching about boundaries. Not only that, but many clinical psychological symptoms, such as depression, anxiety disorders, guilt problems, shame issues, panic disorders, and marital and relational struggles, find their root in conflicts with boundaries. — Henry Cloud

Unfortunately, this unexpected, internal condition has often been called "falling in love." This reaction to attraction, which we could also describe as a "chemically induced crush," is actually infatuation. Who among us has not walked into a room, made eye contact with a complete stranger, and felt an instant, unexpected rush of emotion and attraction? Who hasn't had that sudden impulse to look again? Why these moments happen and what exactly triggers them - who knows? But the feelings are definitely a temporary condition. The attraction is neither irresistible nor dependable. You can easily experience infatuation with people who would turn out to be relational nightmares. That's why it is so dangerous — Chip Ingram

The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject which is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from the world, but from a world which the subject itself projects. — Maurice Merleau Ponty

In demonstrating this, the Buddha was making an important example for the ages. For almost no one is exempt from trauma. While some people have it in a much more pronounced way than others, the unpredictable and unstable nature of things makes life inherently traumatic. What the Buddha revealed through his dreams was that, true as this may be, the mind, by its very nature, is capable of holding trauma much the way a mother naturally relates to a baby. One does not have to be helpless and fearful, nor does one have to be hostile and self-referential. The mind knows intuitively how to find a middle path. Its implicit relational capacity is hardwired. — Mark Epstein

The more clearly we recognize how deep our commitment to self-protection operates in our relational style and the more courageously we face the ugliness of protecting ourselves rather than loving others, the more we'll shift our direction. — Larry Crabb

A modern theory of knowledge which takes account of the relational as distinct from the merely relative character of all historical knowledge must start with the assumption that there are spheres of thought in which it is impossible to conceive of absolute truth existing independently of the values and position of the subject and unrelated to the social context. — Karl Mannheim

We believe evangelism is more relational than confrontational, more communal than solitary, and is more a beginning point than an end. Evangelism involves not only sharing our faith with others, but also welcoming them into a community and enabling them to begin to grow in their faith. Above all evangelism is about love: God's love for us in Jesus, our love for our neighbor, and the invitation to receive and grow in a new life that is characterized by love. — Hal Knight

Followers of Christ are not called to be merely tolerant of others. We are called to love those who disagree with us. Abnormal communication - blessing those who curse us - establishes the relational level of our communication and demonstrates our concern for others. — Tim Muehlhoff

One of the best records I've ever heard. Seriously, maybe top 20 all-time ... I think if Rich Mullins had been given more time here, and if God had blessed his life with love and a wife, if he had the chance to see as much of the relational beauty as he saw of the natural beauty, I think he might have written some songs like the ones we find on BiRDS OF RELOCATiON. And you know that's about the highest praise I can give someone. You will not find a combination of more beautiful poetry, raw honesty, and gorgeous melodies for a long time. — Todd Agnew

Teach her to question men who can have empathy for women only if they see them as relational rather than as individual equal humans. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Knowing European manhood's boundaries to be porous and needing reinforcement, and meeting Indigenous possibilities that threw such boundaries into question, early conquerors invoked berdache as if assigning a failure to differentiate sex to Indigenous people, but they did so to define sexual normativity for them all. Thus, if colonial observers invoked berdache to mark Indigenous difference, the aim was to teach both colonial and Indigenous subjects the relational terms of colonial heteropatriarchy. — Scott L. Morgensen

I think the reason this was so important to Jesus was that He wanted people to know that God is relational - truly relational without any impure or selfish motives. He wanted His Father to be trusted, and therefore He needed men and women who represented this. The psychology of agendas is that they make relationships transactional, which means that people are used for a purpose. People become a means to someone else's end, and this erodes a person's belief that he or she is valued regardless of any production. — Hugh Halter

Relational congruence is the ability to be fundamentally the same person with the same values in every relationship, in every circumstance and especially amidst crisis. It is the internal capacity to keep promises to God, to self and to one's relationships that consistently express one's identity and values in spiritually and emotionally healthy ways. Relational congruence is about both constancy and care at the same time. It is about both character and affection, and self-knowledge and authentic self-expression. Relational congruence is the leader's ability to cultivate strong, healthy, caring relationships; maintaining healthy boundaries; and communicating clear expectations, all while staying focused on the mission. — Tod Bolsinger

Wolves and women are relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength. They are deeply intuitive, intensely concerned with their young, their mate and their pack. Yet both have been hounded, harassed and falsely imputed to be devouring and devious, overly aggressive, of less value than those who are their detractors. — Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Through developing trusting and respectful relationships with the boys in our lives, we can help boys to value and acknowledge their relational capabilities, which they may otherwise learn to discount or overlook. We can also offer and model for them definitions of maturity, masculinity, health and success that will enable them to remain grounded in their self-knowledge (e.g. as they encounter societal pressures to conform to group and cultural norms), and to form relationships that will sustain rather than constrain them. — Judy Chu

This chapter provides a comprehensive definition of life scripts as a complex set of unconscious relational patterns based on physiological survival reactions, implicit experiential conclusions, explicit decisions, and/or self-regulating introjections, made under stress, at any developmental age, that inhibit spontaneity and limit flexibility in problem-solving, health maintenance and in relationship with people. — Richard G. Erskine

Scripture As Text: Learning What God Reveals," was an orientation in the personal, revelatory nature of Holy Scripture. All these words are person-to-person - the three-personed God addressing himself personally to us in our full capacity as persons-in-relationship. The Holy Trinity provided a way of understanding the irreducible personal and relational nature of this text, and affirmed that the only reading congruent with what is written is also personal and participatory.
In this chapter, "Scripture As Form: Following the Way of Jesus," I want to observe the way in which these personal words arrive in our lives and connect the Jesus way with the way in which we now live them. I want to attend to the way that the form of Scripture is also the form of our lives. — Eugene H. Peterson

The idea that relationships are not a strategy is potent; and the sad commentary proceeds to say that often relationships are seen as a strategy, a means to accomplish great things - except love and relationship are not what is really wanted. We want to appear relational so people will like what we have to offer. It's the difference between wanting a good marriage and loving the person you married. — Scot McKnight

We've created a theology in the West of a God who is fundamentally self-centered. The imagery of God as distant, unapproachable, unreachable
that's not a God who is relational. It is a God that gets to declare or judge when he gets pissed off. But there is no basis for love and relationships if God is a fundamentally self-centered being. — William P. Young

Until we are willing to question many of the specifics of the male sex role, including most of the seven norms and stereotypes that psychologist Robert Levant names in a listing of its chief constituents--'avoiding femininity, restrictive emotionality, seeking achievement and status, self-reliance, aggression, homophobia, and nonrelational attitudes toward sexuality'--we are going to deny men their full humanity. Feminist masculinity would have as its chief constituents integrity, self-love, emotional awareness, assertiveness, and relational skill, including the capacity to be empathic, autonomous, and connected. — Bell Hooks

You are real! Everyone has to be different or the world would be really boring. If we all looked the same, then no one could tell us apart. -Janelle — Tara Michener

This dual position suggests a basic tension or 'existential dilemma' in human living that each of us seeks to resolve: the search for, and attempt to construct, a way of being that somehow will balance our unique reflections upon our lived experience with the perceived demands and desires of being-with-others. In this sense, the fundamental project of living, for all of us, becomes the struggle to achieve relational balance between or experience of our own self-construct, our experience of others as we have construed them to be, and our experience of that 'between-ness' that emerges through our every encounter with the world. — Ernesto Spinelli

So that's the process of understanding, and through that process, if you have a deep realization of the selflessness in regard to your absolute self, then it releases your relational self to be happily interconnected with everything in a blissful way. Then you yourself have "no problem" in the sense of no suffering. You reach Nirvana. — Robert Thurman

I wanted to be with Drew every minute. I wanted to drink him, sleep him, and inhabit his body. I wanted to spend the day in his pocket. — Randy Susan Meyers

It is true that dispossession carries this double valence and that as a result it is difficult to understand until we see that we value it in one of its modalities and abhor and resist it in another. As you say, dispossession can be a term that marks the limits of self-sufficiency and that establishes us as relational and interdependent beings. Yet dispossession is precisely what happens when populations lose their land, their citizenship, their means of livelihood, and become subject to military and legal violence. We oppose this latter form of dispossession because it is both forcible and privative. — Judith Butler

Truly transformational knowledge is always personal, never merely objective. It involves knowing of, not merely knowing about. And it is always relational. It grows out of a relationship to the object that is known - whether this is God or one's self. — David G. Benner

We are relational creatures. All humans live in community and most people seek social interaction. In western culture, isolation is seen as one of the most stringent of punishments. Even criminals do not aspire to solitary confinement. — Gary Chapman

Buddhism is the study of the way the mind works. One has to be able to hold a large number of relational concepts simultaneously in the mind. It is necessary to grid, to literally unlock realities and dimensions with the power of your mind. — Frederick Lenz

True wisdom is to see and understand your relationship with the universe. When you gain that relational knowledge, then you are wise. — Frederick Lenz

That's why it is so dangerous to use infatuation as a sign to pursue a relationship. If you and I don't know the difference between infatuation and love, we are destined to make some of the dumbest and most regrettable decisions we'll ever make. These bad decisions come with heavy and painful price tags. So you see, it's imperative in this tricky business of "falling in love" that we take the time to clearly define what we mean by the word "love." The investment will pay off handsomely. We can actually learn how to avoid future relational baggage and how to recognize authentic love relationships when we clarify two crucial issues: (1) what love is, and (2) what the difference is between love and infatuation. — Chip Ingram

Relational depth often emerges from intentional dialog — Brad Lomenick

About 80% of what it takes to lead transformationally is relational. — Jim Louwsma

Though in this world there are phenomena that might justly be termed "strange," there are no phenomena that cannot -- given sufficient information -- be explained. This is not to suggest that for every effect there is a cause, of course. That is an assumption that we are not prepared to make, less it launch us ineluctably down the path of determinism. This is only to suggest, rather, that there is no "thing" that exists without some relation to at least one other "thing," and it is the matrix of a "thing's" relationship that determines its meaning in the larger context of the world. Even something strange can be explained by tracing its relational lines of flight, however casual or casual they may be. — Dustin Long

Wealth is a relational barrier. It keeps us from having open relationships. — Randy Alcorn

How wonderful to discover that God has never been alone. He has always been Trinity - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God has always been a fellowship. This whole Story began with something relational. — John Eldredge

Bryk and Schneider also found that relational trust - between teachers and administrators, teachers and teachers, and teachers and parents - has the power to offset external factors that are normally thought to be the primary determinants of a school's capacity to serve students well: "Improvements in academic productivity were less likely in schools with high levels of poverty, racial isolation, and student mobility, but [the researchers] say that a strong correlation between [relational] trust and student achievement remains even after controlling for such factors." 9 — Parker J. Palmer

For god is nothing other than the eternally creative source of our relational power, our common strength, a god whose movement is to empower, bringing us into our own together, a god whose name in history is love ... — Carter Heyward

An unmentored daughter is an unnurtured daughter, unnurtured in the strength she needs to Survive as an original woman in this world. Daughters, as compared to sons in a hetero-relational family, are more undernurtured in all ways by mothers and pressured prematurely to become nurturers of others - mostly of men. What also happens in this context, as Denice Yanni has pointed out, is "a silencing of woman's own needs for nurturing by making her the primary nurturer. — Janice G. Raymond

Don't steamroll your way into a conversation before establishing any relational credibility. — Bill Hybels

Did you notice that trials do not test our character, they test our faith? Faith is fundamentally a relational term - it is not first a matter of what you believe, but of whom you trust. The battle for our trust is as old as Adam and Eve. In the midst of battle, it can seem so complex, but when the dust settles and the smoke clears, the real war is always over the same question - whom will we believe? Whom will we listen to, God or the devil? — Kris Vallotton

No scientist knows the world merely by holding it at arm's length: if we ever managed to build the objectivist wall between the knower and the known, we could know nothing except the wall itself. Science requires an engagement with the world, a live encounter between the knower and the known. That encounter has moments of distance, but it would not be an encounter without moments of intimacy as well. Knowing of any sort is relational, animated by a desire to come into deeper community with what we know. — Parker J. Palmer

Too many times adults are insensitive to the nurture and instruction of children. Notice the balance! On the one hand there is training, nurturing, or instruction of a child. On the other, the warning or instructional dimension is emphasized. Training in God's Word must have a relational aspect. — Michael Anthony

God has made us this way, in his own image, because he himself is a personal, relational being. — Gordon D. Fee

A word meant something only between people, and life's meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form. It was the relational aspect of humans that undergirded meaning. — Paul Kalanithi

brain imaging studies show that the experience of physical pain and the experience of relational pain, like rejection, look very similar in terms of location of brain activity. — Daniel J. Siegel

Unfulfilled dreams, ongoing relational tension, the loss of friendships, a hard marriage, rebellious teenagers, the death of loved ones, remaining sinful patterns - whatever it is for you - live long enough, lose enough, suffer enough, and the idealism of youth fades, leaving behind the reality of life in a broken world as a broken person. — Tullian Tchividjian

Descartes argued "I think, therefore I am," and people after Freud translated that into the modern vernacular by saying, "I feel, therefore I am a self"; modern evangelicals of the relational type seem to have added their own quirk to it by saying that "I feel religiously, therefore I am a self." The search for the religious self then becomes a search for religious good feelings. But the problem with making good feelings the end for which one is searching is, as Henry Fairlie argues, that it is possible to feel good about oneself, even religiously, "in states of total vacuity, euphoria, intoxication, and self-indulgence, and it is even possible when we are doing wrong and know what we are doing." This kind of self-fascination is by no means an excrescence of an otherwise robust sector of religious life. It is at the very center of evangelicalism. — David F. Wells

I'm drawn to the Jewish notion of the soul, nephesh, which is not something preexistent but emergent - forming in and through physicality and relational experience. This suggests that we need our bodies to claim our souls. The body is where every virtue lives or dies, but more: our bodies are access points to mystery. And in some way that barely makes sense to me, I'm sure that we have to have feet planted on the ground, literally and metaphysically, to reach towards what is beyond and above us. — Krista Tippett

It appears that a simple rule, of something adhering to another similar idea, repeated, leads to stabilities. This seems to be a function of relational data sets, linked to rules, like in DNA chains that have infinite adaptability for sequencing proteins. Out of only four bases, which in turn are further limited by two rules of complimentarity, a myriad of forms arise. — Cecil Balmond

Jesus' approach to training was primarily as a mentor, and his mentoring method was relational, informal, oral, and mobile. — Evelyn Hibbert

The fatal flaw of human wisdom is that it promises that you can change your relationships without needing to change yourself.
Every painful thing we experience in relationships is meant to remind us of our need for God. And every good thing we experience is meant to be a metaphor of what we can only find in Him ... We settle for the satisfaction of human relationships when they were meant to point us to the perfect relational satisfaction found only with God. — Paul David Tripp