“Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.”

I’m human, you’re human, let me greet your humanness. Let’s be people together for a while.

No is a complete sentence.

Everyone is flailing through this life without an owner’s manual, with whatever modicum of grace and good humor we can manage.

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.

But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.

I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world-present and in awe.

I’m not going to change the way people think about me, but I can say you know what? I’m not going to carry that in my backpack.

One thing I know for sure about raising children is that every single day a kid needs discipline. But also every single day a kid needs a break.

Prayer means that, in some unique way, we believe we’re invited into a relationship with someone who hears us when we speak in silence.

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious.

Pay attention to the beauty surrounding you.

Sometimes I think that Jesus watches my neurotic struggles, and shakes his head and grips his forehead and starts tossing back mojitos.

You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.

And as it turns out, if one person is praying for you, buckle up. Things can happen.

A big heart is both a clunky and a delicate thing; it doesn’t protect itself and it doesn’t hide. It stands out, like a baby’s fontanel, where you can see the soul pulse through.

To get to that next level, you gotta learn to get comfortable being uncomfortable.

Move out of your comfort zone. You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new.

It hurts me when seeing a girl cry. I want to comfort them as long as I canor I’ll end up crying too.

The biggest trap, the biggest dungeon in life isn’t laziness or bad luck, it’s comfort.

We live in a society of victimization, where people are much more comfortable being victimized than actually standing up for themselves.

Being comfortable is over-rated.

Chains tie us down by land and sea; And wishes, vain as mine, may be All that is left to comfort thee.

Come, let’s be a comfortable couple and take care of each other! How glad we shall be, that we have somebody we are fond of always, to talk to and sit with.