“The most frequent promise in the Bible is ‘I will be with you.’”

The ministry of bearing with one another is learning to hear God speak through difficult people.

Our beliefs are not just estimates of probabilities. They are also the instruments that guide our actions.

Both hope and pessimism are deeply contagious. And no one is more infectious than a leader.

We who preach have one tool. We are people of the book.

The problem with spending your life climbing up the ladder is that you will go right past Jesus, for he’s coming down.

What matters is not the accomplishments you achieve; what matters is the person you become.

Failure is not an event, but rather a judgment about an event. Failure is not something that happens to us or a label we attach to things. It is a way we think about outcomes.

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.

Every human being who has ever lived has suffered from a messiah complex-except one.

Prayer allows us to wait without worry.

Skepticism can keep us from blessing, can keep us trapped in two minds.

Passion for our work is not usually a subterranean volcano waiting to erupt. It is a muscle that gets strengthened a little each day as we show up – as we do what is expected of us, and then some.

Nobody lives up to the norms that God had in mind when he first created human beings.

Grace is the offer of God’s ceaseless presence and irrational love that cannot be stopped.

When I teach the formal curriculum, I have the chance to think about it ahead of time. I can rehearse it. I can illustrate it with self-deprecating humor and humble-sounding personal disclosure. I can try to make it comes out just right.

Peace doesn’t come from finding a lake with no storms. It comes from having Jesus in the boat.

I’m more concerned about who you’re becoming than what you’re doing.

Maybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it’s more scary to draw. It’s more revealing. You can’t disguise yourself in drawing.

A pessimist and an optimist, so much the worse; so much the better.

Peace does not lie in getting God to give me other circumstances. Peace lies in finding God in these circumstances.

There is no person without a world.

In this cosy, noisy, gregarious world of the “all-chinese” sickbed, so different from the stark, sterile solitude of the American hospital room, her life had assumed the astounding quality of a continuous farewell party.

Envy, the attendant of the empty mind.

When I desire you a part of me is gone.