“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 effort to untangle the human words from the divine seems not only futile to me but also unnecessary, since God works with what is. God uses whatever is usable in a life, both to speak and to act, and those who insist on fireworks in the sky may miss the electricity that sparks the human heart.

Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.

Beliefs have become unimportant to me. Faith as radical trust became even more important to me.

Salvation happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door he could lock instead.

When I talk about losing myself, which I did, it’s losing my idea of who I was and my idea of what I was supposed to be doing and the idea of what my value was to God. I lost all of that at least.

In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life

I became so attentive to the souls of other people that I was not as attentive as I might have been to my own.

As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.

I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.

There comes a time when it is vitally important for your spiritual health to drop your clothes, look in the mirror, and say, ‘Here I am. This is the body-like-no-other that my life has shaped. I live here. This is my soul’s address

When I forget the power of the word, I read Frederick Buechner. When I forget the deep relief of telling the truth, I read Frederick Buechner. When I forget to look for the holiness all around me, I read Frederick Buechner. When I forget why the gospel matters, I read Frederick Buechner.

I love being alone. I learned that from my father, I think, who loved his own company.

Whoever you are, you are human. Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it.

I think we d like life to be like a train..but it turns out to be a sailboat.

It’s difficult for me to ignore how many conflicts locally and worldwide have religion tagged to them.

Divine reality is not way up in the sky somewhere; it is readily available in the encounters of everyday life, which make hash of my illusions that I can control the ways God comes to me.

What have I done with my baptism and confirmation? Is Christ really at the center of my life? Do I have time for prayer in my life? Do I live my life as a vocation and mission?

I always respect right off the bat because we are human, but then over time you learn who the person truly is, just like they learn about you.

Baptism is an outward expression of an inward faith.

There are two sides to this Baptism: The first is, you possess the Spirit; The second is that the Spirit possesses you.

I settled down in the full persuasion, that the immersion of a professing believer in Christ is the only Christian baptism.

After many painful trials, which none can know,

The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.

Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.