“I think my idea of God was much more directive than my idea of God now, that is, a God who had one plan in mind for me, perhaps, and my job was to find out what it was and obey.”

Most of us spend so much time thinking about where we have been or where we are supposed to be going that we have a hard time recognizing where we actually are.

I have learned to prize holy ignorance more highly than religious certainty and to seek companions who have arrived at the same place.

Having been brought up with a definition of faith as adherence to a set of beliefs, I have more and more begun to turn instead toward a definition of faith as openness to truth, whatever truth may turn out to be.

I think a toxic message in a lot of Christianity has been that the self has to be annihilated in order for God to be found. I think that has been a toxic message.

I’m a follower of the Christ path, and that opens a huge discussion about what we even mean by words like “Christian.”

For a long time I listened to other people to decide whether I was still Christian or not, and I would sort of vet myself by the traditional formulae.

I can’t help but note that God is being useful to a lot of people trying to do harm to one another.

Most of us like thinking we are God’s only children…At least one of the purposes of church is to remind us that God has other children, easily as precious as we. Baptism and narcissism cancel each other out.

The great thing about civility is that it does not require you to agree with or approve of anything. You don’t even have to love your neighbor to be civil. You just have to treat your neighbor the same way you would like your neighbor to treat your grandmother, or your child.

Kindness is not a bad religion, no matter what name you use for God.

I wanted to be as close as I could to the Really Real, and I’ll capitalize both of those R’s, because God is a word that means different things to different people, but we might all agree it’s what is most real.

The boundaries became constrictive in what I was doing, and if my faith grew, it was because I pressed some of the boundaries in ways I hadn’t felt comfortable or responsible doing that before.

I thought being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was…it wasn’t until I failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness.

That’s enough, and I have a ministry as a neighbor as well. A ministry as a friend and a ministry as an aunt and a godmother, and family is very much in the circle of my vocation.

Church can be extremely boring. It can be very meaningful, it can be character forming, but can be have very little fizz in it.

There was no time anymore to be quiet or still or pray. So, in many ways, that’s what led to my downward spin.

I think the internet is a great marketing tool–but marketing is not my job. I’m a writer. My job is to write novels.

The Revelation was my master’s project, and after I finished it, I thought I’d send it off to a publisher and within a year or so be a rich and famous writer.

You never can take for granted that you have a job.

If I did not believe God healed, I’d quit tomorrow and go get a job.

Starting a company is a cause, not a job. Once it becomes a job, that’s when you lose

Get a Job’ is about all the rich kids we knew when we were younger, kids who never had jobs but always had money for partying or getting their hair done.

In order to bring down the incarceration rate, you’ve got to start with the beginning of life. You’ve got to make sure that parents and schools are prepared to prepare young people for success. You’ve got to deal with the next stage of life.

Basically, I have no place in organized politics. By coming to the British Parliament, I’ve allowed the people to sacrifice me at the top and let go the more effective job I should be doing at the bottom.