“There is an essential connection between experiencing God, loving God, and trusting God. You will trust God only as much as you love him. And you will love him to the extent you have touched him, rather that he has touched you.”

To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side I learn who I am and what God’s grace means.

If in our hearts we really don’t believe that God loves us as we are, if we are still tainted by the lie that we can do something to make God love us more, we are rejecting the message of the cross.

Childlike surrender and trust, I believe, is the defining spirit of authentic discipleship.

Genuine self-acceptance is not derived from the power of positive thinking, mind games or pop psychology. IT IS AN ACT OF FAITH in the God of grace.

How glorious the splendor of a human heart that trusts that it is loved!

We should be astonished at the goodness of God, stunned that He should bother to call us by name, our mouths wide open at His love, bewildered that at this very moment we are standing on holy ground.

Craving clarity, we attempt to eliminate the risk of trusting God. Fear of the unknown path stretching ahead of us destroys childlike trust in the Father’s active goodness and unrestricted love.

Christianity doesn’t deny the reality of suffering and evil Our hope is not based on the idea that we are going to be free of pain and suffering. Rather, it is based on the conviction that we will triumph over suffering.

The story goes that a public sinner was excommunicated and forbidden entry to the church. He took his woes to God. ‘They won’t let me in, Lord, because I am a sinner.’ ‘What are you complaining about?’ said God. ‘They won’t let Me in either.

God is loving us – you and me – this moment, just as we are and not as we should be.

The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians, who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door, and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.

In Love’s service, only wounded soldiers can serve.

You will trust God to the degree you know you are loved by Him.

To lend each other a hand when we’re falling, perhaps that’s the only work that matters in the end.

Letting ourselves be loved by God is more important than loving God.

To be alive is to be broken; to be broken is to stand in need of grace.

Find someone who can hear you even when you’re silent.

If there is something comforting – religious, if you want – about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

I do struggle because I’m attracted to beautiful things, yet at the same time I am actually very aware, in some sense, their lack of value and that the most important things in life are your connections to other people.

My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane.

I had to find the interconnection of my brain together with my physiology.

Though leaves are many, the root is one.

All mankind is us, whether we like it or not.

I never considered my dreams wasted energy; they were invariably linked to some form of action. When I dreamed about having a lemonade stand, for example, it wasn’t long before I set up a lemonade stand.