“This is the end. For me the beginning of life.”

When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.

The fact that we do not speak it but sing it only expresses the fact that our spoken words are inadequate to express what we want to say, that the burden of our song goes far beyond all human words.

Jesus is the only significance. Beside Jesus nothing has any significance. He alone matters.

A pastor should never complain about his congregation, certainly never to other people, but also not to God. A congregation has not been entrusted to him in order that he should become its accuser before God and men.

Through our daily meals He is calling us to rejoice, to keep holiday in the midst of our working day.

The Church is the Church only when it exists for others, not dominating, but helping and serving. It must tell men of every calling what it means to live for Christ, to exist for others.

When all is said and done, the life of faith is nothing if not an unending struggle of the spirit with every available weapon against the flesh.

Absolute seriousness is never without a dash of humor.

Your life as a Christian should make non believers question their disbelief in God.

If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.

God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world. What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love.

There is a wrong way of staying in the world and a wrong way of fleeing from it. In both cases we are fashioning ourselves according to the world.

In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others.

Any honours that come our way are only stolen from him to whom alone they really belong, the Lord who sent us.

If my sinfulness appears to me to be in any way smaller or less detestable in comparison with the sins of others, I am still not recognizing my sinfulness at all. How can I possibly serve another person in unfeigned humility if I seriously regard his sinfulness as worse than my own?

Jesus himself did not try to convert the two thieves on the cross; he waited until one of them turned to him.

We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be.

Begin to listen to what you say. Don’t say anything that you don’t want to become true for you.

When the air begins to turn colder, a warmth grows in my core that says – it’s time to start new.

Prayer begins by talking to God, but it ends by listening to Him. In the face of Absolute Truth, silence is the soul’s language.

An affirmation opens the door. It’s a beginning point on the path to change.

When the leaves begin to fall, I find myself returning to old playlists in hopes that I can feel you holding my hand, or kissing me goodnight, or hear you singing my name into songs and blueing when it makes no sense.

Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.

Life is a book that never ends. Chapters close, but not the book itself. The end of one physical incarnation is like the end of a chapter, on some level setting up the beginning of another.