“I don’t know much, but I understand how entirely doomed I am without God.”

A good marriage is where both people feel like they’re getting the better end of the deal.

Your inside person doesn’t age. Your inside person is soul, is heart, in the eternal now, the ageless, the old, the young, all the ages you’ve ever been.

You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren’t. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don’t think your way into becoming yourself.

I don’t remember who said this, but there really are places in the heart you don’t even know exist until you love a child.

Laughter is carbonated holiness.

The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we’ve been the night before, we wake up every morning and are still here. It is phenomenal just to be.

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories.

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.

Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don’t make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit.

Forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a better past.

The road to enlightenment is long and difficult, and you should try not to forget snacks and magazines.

The reason life works at all is that not everyone in your tribe is nuts on the same day.

We are not here to see through one another, but to see one another through.

The world is always going to be dangerous, and people get badly banged up, but how can there be more meaning than helping one another stand up in a wind and stay warm?

You can either practice being right or practice being kind.

I didn’t need to understand the hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever came up with redwood trees.

If God has given you a message, go and give it to the people as God has given it to you. It is a stupid thing to try to be eloquent.

God often showcases his power on the stage of human weakness.

If asked whether I am finally letting God love me, just as I am, I would answer, ‘No, but I’m trying.

Eternal life is not a gift from God; eternal life is the gift OF GOD.

You were made by God and for God, and until you understand that, life will never make sense.

Dear God, I am so afraid to open my clenched fists! Who will I be when I have nothing left to hold on to? Who will I be when I stand before you with empty hands? Please help me to gradually open my hands and to discover that I am not what I own, but what you want to give me.

Real security can only be found in that which can never be taken from you – your relationship with God.

Jesus said go and make disciples, but so often we just sit and make excuses.