It's great that you can listen and be a shoulder to someone, but what about when someone doesn't need a shoulder? What if they need the arms or something like that? You can't just sit there and put everybody's lives ahead of yours and think that coun...
Sometimes when we say "God is silent," what's really going on is that he hasn't told the story the way we wanted it told. He will be silent when we want him to fill in the blanks of the story we are creating. But with his own stories, the ones we liv...
As we wait and pray, God weaves his story and creates a wonder. Instead of drifting between comedy (denial) and tragedy (reality), we have a relationship with the living God, who is intimately involved with the details of our worlds. We are learning ...
...the very greatest satire, I came to think -- the kind that lives forever -- ultimately grew out of a debunking attitude toward the self. To see the world mock-heroically was necessarily to engage in a sort of preliminary self-burlesque. You couldn...
God also puts His people in the middle of things for the same reason that He put the tree of temptation in the middle of the garden--so that our choice to follow Him would be a conscious, daily one. Every time we publicly choose to live for Christ, H...
...'undertow'. It describes (...) how underneath our own everyday lives - the shopping and squabbles and weeding and trips to the vet - there's a sense of being dragged slowly off, not against our will but regardless of it. And fighting the undertow,...
Once I heard my mother say that each of us lives in a separate universe, one we have dreamed into being. We love pople when their dream coincides with ours, the way two cutout designs laid one on top of the other might match. But dream worlds are not...
You make no sense! You went somewhere to discover your place in history? How can that be? History is what is done and behind us.” He shook his head, slowly this time. “History is what we do in our lives. We create it as we go along.” He...
The universe will never 'take away' something that is for our highest and greatest good so when we 'lose' something, or our lives shift, it is always for our benefit. It’s unwrapping a surprise present from the universe.
We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again, and that sense of fear, of furtive unrest, struggling at length to blind unreasoning panic - now m...
The urge to let go of the wheel and just see what happens is compelling. If I live, I’ll wake to find myself in hospital. I won’t have to do anything, deal with anybody, talk, be scared anymore, because I will have become somebody else’s respon...
We live in a world packed with desensitising forces, that strip the world of magic. The world is full of negativity, but we fight back with positivity. We're inspired by oceans, forests, animals, Marx Brothers films. We can't help but project uplifti...
... when it seemed at every turn that the winds of fate had blown our lives afoul, financially, emotionally, or idealistically. Look at all that we endured. Look at all we managed to light along our path through the long shadow of adversity. Look at ...
Believe me, once you have tasted worship—the kind of worship that captures your heart and rivets your full attention on the living Lord—nothing less satisfies. Nothing else even comes close. Once you have tasted true worship, you will never want ...
Writing, painting, singing--it cannot stop everything. Cannot halt death in its tracks. But perhaps it can make the pause between death's footsteps sound and look and feel beautiful, can make the space of waiting a place where you can linger without ...
Writing, painting, singing- it cannot stop everything. Cannot halt death in its tracks. But perhaps it can make the pause between death’s footsteps sound and look and feel beautiful, can make the space of waiting a place where you can linger withou...
I love you, Tyler. I always have and always will. I can’t let you go because you’re the only person who can breathe oxygen into my lungs, blood to my beating heart, thoughts into my brain. I live only for you, Tyler. Can’t you see that? You wer...
Under chronic stress, your body is more apt to enter a state of dis-ease. Unable to achieve its natural balance, it can’t function the way it should. The ripple effects can be profound. And yet Western medicine has trained us to focus on symptomsra...
You are equipped with strong bodies and educated minds. Add to these an unshakable faith in a divine providence and you have the tools by which you may build a successful life. Make each day your masterpiece and live so nobly that you may witness hon...
It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s ...
My breath is halted, like grasping for air after crying far too long and hard. It is like a hiccup, with a shivering sharpness of nerves. It is like icicles running down your spine or aluminum in your mouth, an eerie amount of emotions that cannot co...
