When you build a city near no mountains and no ocean, you get materialism and traditional religion. People have too much time and lack inspiration.
...burying themselves in his arm was more about feeling his love in the confusion, in the difficulty, than it was about having moved past it.
All this beauty exists so you and I can see His glory, His artwork. It's like an invitation to worship Him, to know Him.
I fell in love with books. Some people find beauty in music, some in painting, some in landscape, but I find it in words. By beauty, I mean the feeling you have suddenly glimpsed another world, or looked into a portal that reveals a kind of magic or ...
But playing your music as loud as you want and coming home drunk aren't real life. Real life, it turns out, is diapers and lawnmowers, decks that need painting, a wife that needs to be listened to, kids that need to be taught right from wrong, a chec...
At the time, I didn't know what forgiveness meant. I wouldn't really know what forgiveness meant for another year, until my pastor, Rick McKinley, happened to spell it out in a sermon. He said that when you forgive, you bear the burden somebody has g...
Meaning is something we experience more than we attain. It's like finding a nice, easy current in a river that carries you through life.
Without a positive male role model in your life, it is extremely difficult to become a man who benefits his family and benefits society.
People are lonely. They want company and your book can provide them company and a little bit of hope. And there's nothing wrong with that.
There's no authoritarian structure at Reed College, but the education is conservative. So what you have is a lot of students who are very authentically looking for truth.
If you have a beautiful story, it has to have conflict. If you don't have conflict, it can't be a good story.
We don't naturally want to take responsibility for our lives. We want to give the responsibility to someone else. We blame them when our lives aren't good.
It confuses me that Christian living is not simpler. The gospel, the very good news, is simple.
One of the things I love about our source text as Christians, the Bible, is that it teaches us not to avoid conflict. And it teaches us that before the fall of man, in Paradise, there was conflict. God wants conflict to be a part of your life.
One of the things I associate with God is a sunrise. How many sunrises have you missed over the years, and God created that?
Life is a story. You and I are telling stories; they may suck, but we are telling stories. And we tell stories about the things that we want. So you go through your bank account, and those are things you have told stories about.
I think understanding your life as a story is a really terrific way of kind of knowing where you are and knowing who you are.
Christians might say that you can't live a more meaningful life without Jesus. Well, that's absolutely not true. You can. You can enjoy a sunrise whether you know Jesus or not.
I love writing books - I really do. If I could just quit everything and work on a book every day, I would love that most.
The most important thing that happens within Christian spirituality is when a person falls in love with Jesus.
I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me
