I try to take a weekly digital Sabbath, batch my emails so I deal with them a few times a day rather than constantly, and increasingly give myself permission to ignore unsolicited communiques. I try, too, to give others more slack. The respond-now cu...
It's the opposite journey from what I've usually done with films. I find it very easy to go from, say, a lit, pleasurable environment, like what you see outside there, to a very dark place. But the opposite journey, which is what this movie takes, is...
We had so many dreams as children. Where do they go when we grow? Are they swallowed up by the mundane things of everyday life? Or do we lose them, leave them behind us in the dust, for new children to find and take up?
Godly relationships will help grow, replenish, and refuel us so we can continually move closer to our dreams... It's critical that we constantly evaluate whom we're in relationships with to ensure they're taking us toward our dreams and not holding u...
I can get really obsessive. I like writing many drafts, and I try not to because it is very time-consuming, especially when you're working on a novel. But I do like to take a story and reorder it, put things in different places. This allows me to see...
Obviously, there’s no way of making money that doesn’t hurt somebody somewhere, but there are degrees of scale and immediacy. A merchant prince or a banker or a wealthy landowner isn’t generally required to take responsibility for the people he...
Time slipped and slid around him, unanchored by any fact that could be verified. Perhaps it did not matter. 'Where does our story take place, and when?' asked Cocteau at the start of Orphée. 'It's the privilege of legends to be ageless. Comme il vou...
There is a powerful shifting that takes place as we abandon the right to understand and yield to God's working in our lives.
Words, then, are born of worlds. But they also take us places we can’t go: Constantinople and Mars, Valhalla, the Planet of the Apes. Language comes from what we’ve seen, touched, loved, lost. And it uses knowable things to give us glimpses of wh...
I have been blessed with friends who do things rather than buy things: friends who will change books at the library, take a bag of your old clothes to a thrift store, bring you cuttings and plant them in a window box, fill the bird feeder in your gar...
Initially, when I first became a Christian and got into ministry, my thought was that God existed to make my life better and to take me to Heaven. Now I realize that it is not about me at all. It is all about God and that He did this to display His p...
I always had a philosophy which I got from my father. He used to say, 'Listen. God gave to you the gift to play football. This is your gift from God. If you take care of your health, if you are in good shape all the time, with your gift from God no o...
I don't see myself racing at 50 years old. I enjoy racing, and that has been my whole life. But one day I will take time to look at other things. I know that everything has an end date, even life, and I also have a family and there are other things t...
I rarely sit down to write something. I usually have an experience and relate it to somebody and go, 'There I connected some dots,' you know? That's what makes people laugh. And then you go and take it on the stage, and sometimes it works, and someti...
That experience with 'Rent' went by so fast. I was younger. I didn't even really know what opening night was. And now I'm thinking back on the times I went to Broadway as a kid and the excitement I felt... And I'm realizing that I'm actually a part o...
For me, just being how old I am, I know I don't want to be a single mom. I really would rather make it a two-person job. But I've also come to terms with not being a mother at all. I'm actually really good with either direction that my life can take ...
As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - th...
Part of what my work has always been about is to show that the apocalyptic character of the gospel makes the everyday possible. It gives us the time that lets us care for one another as we are ill, helps us care for one another as we experience broke...
Something I learned when I was very young: with cooking, it doesn't matter where you are; you can always cook. You can end up in small village in Peru where somebody's cooking, take a spoon and taste it, and you might not be too sure what you're eati...
I love food. I mean, I really love food. I take pictures of my finest, funniest and most fascinating dishes, post them on Twitter, and send them to friends. I treat menus like classic literature, refusing to skip even one word. I read the description...
When you make a mistake and the devil comes and tells you 'You're no good,' you don't have to take on the guilt and condemnation he wants to put on you. No! You can immediately confess your mistake to God, thank Him for forgiving you and cleansing yo...
