“I don’t have time for a job that doesn’t leave me time to be quiet or still or to pray.”

I began to get notes from people saying they were sorry to hear I’d left ministry. And for a while, I halfway believed they were right, that I’d left.

I’m leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.

The great wisdom traditions of the world all recognize that the main impediment to living a life of meaning is being self-absorbed.

I found myself in a maze where I’d taken the wrong turn. In my wish to do well for that congregation I wasn’t doing particularly well for myself or my friends or my family, and I even found that the work for God was taking me away from God.

Most of us will have more than one job in our working lives, which means we will have more than one opportunity to seek meaningful work at different stages of our own deepening humanity.

Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right, and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails.

I am always surprised by people who speak of faith as if it happens in the air somewhere. Our bodies are God’s best way of getting to us. Revelation begins in the flesh.

To be in the mainline is to have a history and not simply to be an amalgam, a community church of who knows what that came from who knows where.

We are born seekers, calling strange names into the darkness from our earliest days because we know we are not meant to be alone, and because we know that we await someone whom we cannot always see.

You only need to lose track of who you are, or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you end up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart. Do this, Jesus says, and you will live.

With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore.

Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.

To be fully human is perhaps why I’m Christian, because I see in the life of Jesus a way of being fully human.

I don’t miss the ministry, because I’m completely engaged in it. In terms of parish ministry, I miss the intimacy with a group of people.

The value for me being in a mainline tradition is history and memory, which is not just Christian tradition but denominational tradition, and characters, you know, with real distinct flavors of ways to be Christian.

The church grew, and I gained a reputation for preaching, and people came, and it was a wonderful community. But we had a building that seated 82 people, and with a congregation then approaching 400 we were up to four services on Sunday, and everyone was tired.

Marketing’s job is never done. It’s about perpetual motion. We must continue to innovate every day.

The United States didn’t create religious liberty. Religious liberty created the United States of America. It’s the reason we are here today.

When you did the job, you thought you were just trying to amuse your friends who are all on the job. I’m just trying to make the sound guy laugh, the script supervisor.

When I was a baby I had no teeth. I couldn’t get a job and I couldn’t eat meat.

Just to keep up with population growth, on average our economy needs to be adding about 125,000 jobs per month.

Our job is not to answer questions, its to ask the right questions…that get us to the right answer.

What I learned was to live in my heart and to do what will make my happy, and that was not selfishness. It didn’t matter what job I took, my mother’s answer was, “Do what will make you happy.”

I’ve found that when you roll up your sleeves and join people in their daily work, they tend to open up quite a bit and let you know what they really think about the issues facing our country and what kind of job they think the government is doing.