Courage was no that hard to come by for children. No matter the hardships they faced, given a little love and encouragement, their spirits rebounded and thrived. Adults were different. Their habits and experiences made them inflexible, welding their ...
Not to be with the one you love, Laura, the one person you should be spending your life with--it’s like a kind of living death. To wake up every morning and know you are still here. To have that brief, sweet moment of blankness, before your mind re...
Sometimes things happen. Things happen even when you don't intend them to happen. Maybe at the beginning you had good intentions, or no intentions, or intentions you thought were harmless, but before you knew it things got out of control. ...Sometime...
Spirituality without a prayer life is no spirituality at all, and it will not last beyond the first defeats. Prayer is an opening of the self so that the Word of God can break in and make us new. Prayer unmasks. Prayer converts. Prayer impels. Prayer...
Khattam-Shud,' he said slowly, 'is the Arch-Enemy of all Stories, even of language itself. He is the Prince of Silence and the Foe of Speech. And because everything ends, because dreams end, stories end, life ends, at the finish of everything we use ...
I felt somehow happy to be so high above the world - a childish feeling, I grant, but we can't help becoming children as we leave social conventions behind and come nearer to nature. All life's experience is shed from us and the soul becomes anew wha...
It couldn't be an all-bad world, could it, not with birds who warble and call? Maybe that was the secret - to find the few things that made life just a fraction better, and to focus on those. Bird warbles. Peach fuzz. Puppies barking as if they're fu...
Why d’you think she did it?” I told him I had no idea. He seemed disappointed that I shouldn’t know. “A broken heart,” I suggested. “Do people suffer so much?” “For love? Oh, I imagine so.” “To drown herself?” “Why does that a...
Sorel's basic character flaws had all cemented by the age of fifteen, a fact which further elicited my sympathy. To have all the building blocks of your life in place by that age was, by any standard, a tragedy. It was as good as sealing yourself int...
The feeling of righteousness is the core mood alteration among religious addicts. Religious addiction is a massive problem in our society. It may be the most pernicious of all addictions because it’s so hard for a person to break his delusion and d...
I had a dream about you. You were a soldier, and I was a war. You thought I was all there was to life, and I didn’t think anything about you. Why would I? I exist to end existence, and yet people still seem to glorify me.
I had a dream about you. I was tall in years but short in inches. I was 75 years old and 31 inches tall, which is the reverse of what I am in real life. Still, I have to say I enjoyed the ability to look under women’s skirts without having to bend ...
A corollary of this has been that Christians have thought that they should only create art with a Pollyanna quality to it: paintings of birds and kittens, movies that extol family life and end happily, songs that are positive and uplifting – in sho...
But the fact is that the gospel demands everything of all of us. If someone thinks the gospel has slotted into their life quite easily, without causing any major adjustments to their lifestyle or aspirations, it is likely that they have not really st...
The thrill of falling in love is often the thrill of being loved; the thrill of marriage is the thrill of loving someone for the rest of your life. Each day - and year - that passes is a triumph of this act of loving.
Introverted seekers need introverted evangelists. It's not that extroverts can't communicate the gospel, either verbally or nonverbally, in ways that introverts find appealing, it's that introverted seekers need to know and see that it's possible to ...
When introverts go to church, we crave sanctuary in every sense of the word, as we flee from the disorienting distractions of twenty-first-century life. We desire to escape from superficial relationships, trivial communications and the constant noise...
In post-Christendom, the church is that community of people who look to discover what God is actively doing in the world around them and then join themselves to that work. The church is that community of people gathered around Jesus Christ in order t...
Once a day, especially in the early years of life and study, call yourselves to an account what new ideas, what new proposition or truth you have gained, what further confirmation of known truths, and what advances you have made in any part of knowle...
Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life. And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination ...
There are times when even I, a mere cat, can put two thoughts together. "Teachers have it easy. If you are born a human, it's best to become a teacher. For if it's possible to sleep this much and still to be a teacher, why, even a cat could teach" Ho...
