“The business of church is ultimately people. You’re trying to heal people, grow people, teach people, and mend people. And when leaders spend all of their time helping and growing other people, they ignore their own growth.”

When you encourage someone, it literally changes their brain chemistry to be able to perform, sends fuel to the brain.

To rescue people from the natural consequences of their behavior is to render them powerless.

When truth presents itself, the wise person see the light, takes it in, and makes adjustments. The fool tries to adjust the truth so he does not have to adjust to it.

Leave your pride, ego, and narcissism somewhere else. Reactions from those parts of you will reinforce your children’s most primitive fears.

One of the worst things you can die with is potential.

Love can only exist where freedom and responsibility are operating.

You will not grow without attempting to do things you are unable to do.

If your boundary training consists only of words, you are wasting your breath. But if you ‘do’ boundaries with your kids, they internalize the experiences, remember them, digest them, and make them part of how they see reality.

The amount of truth a relationship can handle is proportional to the amount of perceived love that’s present.

In a very real way, ownership is the essence of leadership. When you are ridiculously in charge, then you own whatever happens in a company, school.

The human heart will seek to be known, understood, and connected with above all else. If you do not connect, the ones you care about will find someone who will.

If people are really narcissistic or have a need to be seen as more than they really are, or to be admired as having it all together, then they cannot be followed and trusted by others.

Encourage literally came from “in courage.” The courage is put “into” you from outside. Our character and abilities grow through internalizing from others what we do not possess in ourselves.

For someone’s character to grow, it has to be free from internal attack. Falling down never stopped children from developing. But getting yelled at, criticized, and put down can stop them for life.

Faith goes beyond reason. It goes beyond what you can see. But it is as real as anything you can touch or feel.

To get greater than 100% return on a growth step, give up defensiveness. Defensiveness stifles performance, and destroys relationships.

And sometimes, from their envy of each other’s special abilities they become inspired to work harder, persist and achieve.

Could you visit me in dreams? That would cheer me. Sweet to see friends in the night, however short the time.

Between you and me only reason will be the judge … since you proceed according to the rational method, so shall I. …

They could recognize each other’s style by their dots and dashes. They called that the “fist.” St. George, they have a fist.

There was less than I’d expected in the rainy-day fund that Mom had kept in the bottom of an underwear drawer in a panty hose egg labeled ‘DEAD SPIDERS.’ As if I hadn’t always known it was there. As if I wouldn’t want to look at dead spiders.

Art is built on the deepest themes of human meaning: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate. No other story has incarnated those themes more than the story of Jesus.

To make them feel for me, or to make them hate me, I want a reaction. I want their emotions.

Caught between the tongue and the taste.