"Without unreservedly surrendering myself to God, whatever place I might raise myself to remains nothing more than a step or possibly two off the hard basement floor of life, for of myself I can be utterly assured that I will never step out of the basement."

"The darkness that follows a sunset is never so dark that it can change the inevitability of a sunrise."

"Shrewdly crafted political agendas, innately complex philosophies, man-made religions, governments and regimes of every sort, and all the endless volumes of man-manufactured wisdom and penned prose all completely failed to redeem mankind and make us better. When the best of our efforts failed to redeem the worst of our behaviors, God declared enough as enough and a baby was born."

"My fear of standing alone often pressures me to stand with a rather unsavory group that embraces a rather unsettling belief system which leaves me wondering why I left the promises of God for the company of people."

"Undoubtedly, failure is growth in pain's disguise."

"Starting over begins when I develop a reawakened appreciation for what I already have, a renewed recognition of what I've recklessly forsaken, a rehabilitated understanding that I foolishly do both of those things, and a revitalized commitment to live the rest of my life never doing either of them again."

"Maybe my greater fear should not be fear itself, but what I will lose should I submit to fear."

"If there's any redeeming quality that I can find in running away from something, it's that I'm on my feet. Now all I've got to do is alter my direction."

"Being our best involves walking away from every situation with less than what we had when we encountered it because we left something behind in the exchange."

"To be an end in myself is to bring an end to myself."

"To pretend is to do nothing more than imagine life as something wonderful so that we don't have to incur the pain that it takes to actually make life wonderful."

"I too often allow people to become a sterile commodity to be bartered in the service of my greed, and in doing something so absurdly reckless I foolishly barter away everything that meets my need."

"If it has anything to do with me, it has nothing to do with sacrifice."

"Easter says that every ending ever experienced by man is exquisitely crafted to find its own ending at the feet of a fresh beginning."

"We might do well to take a look at what we've crammed into our pockets as it will say much about what we've crammed into our hearts."

"Maybe the thing that we're losing is the very thing that has caused us to lose everything else in the first place."

"Thankfully, the nature of pain reminds us of what the ease of pleasure foolishly allows us to forget."

"Pain is nothing but growth waiting for us to give it permission to grow us up."

"My life is too often driven by the fear of the next moment verses focusing on the privilege that I have the next moment."

"Great difficult is the dogged bedfellow of great wealth, which always renders great wealth as less than great. Yet, great wealth as bequeathed by God is robustly free of such travails, which always renders it greater than great."

"We're making our decisions - or so we think. Yet in truth, ignorance, greed, and the scourge of immediate gratification are often the things that are making them. So if we're going to truly live well, maybe the first thing we need to decide is who's deciding."

"Fear is my mind painstakingly creating the worse-case scenario and then putting it on steroids."

"There is a deep dryness of the soul and all of the recalcitrant contrivances of man to quench his own thirst will bring not a single drop of moisture to those parched places, for God and God alone holds the water that satiates the soul."

"Blindness is a choice born of fear, nursed by complacency and groomed by comfort. And what I often don't see in my blindness is that 'choice' evidences the existence of other options."

"The legacy I leave will be unimaginably enhanced by the legacies I received. Therefore, I must be wise enough to embrace the history of those who have gone before me so that I can shape the future of those who will go ahead of me."

"Prayer is knowing that what I ask for is always far bigger than what I could ever articulate, but it is never too big for God to understand nor is it ever too vast for Him to deliver."

"It would be infinitely more prudent to be a single "David standing with God, than a million "Goliath's standing without Him."

"I do not walk into the storm unless I have been called into the storm. For the former is arrogance and the latter is obedience."

"This is the wonder of Christmas, that in the solitary form of an impoverished infant God has handed me everything that I could never create so that I can be everything that I could never be."

"It's not about describing someone as that's typically an attempt to make whatever they are comfortable for whoever we are. Instead, we may wish to skip the agenda of the description and embrace the wonder of the person."

"I often wonder if my imagination is one of God's choicest gifts bestowed upon me to deliberately break me free from the frequent doldrums of my humanity."

"I can attempt to stay on the fence. However, the problem is that the fence is a figment of my fear not a reality of my journey."

"A lie is my attempt to tamper with the truth so that I need not face the truth. Yet as shrewd as I think myself to be, I would be wise to understand that God designed truth as ultimately tamper-proof."

"I can only begin the process of saving myself when I surrender to the reality that I can't. And what greater place to surrender that reality than to an infant who surrendered Himself to me so that I might surrender myself to Him."

"Tragedy cleans the windows of the soul by washing away the bias of our lives in the detergent of pain."

"Ego is borne of the need to 'prove' oneself instead of making the choice to 'be' oneself. And so maybe we need to begin curbing the birthrate."

"Although it pains me, I must admit that I have never found what I 'need.' And I am in this place because long ago I took it upon myself to decide what I 'want' to need, verses surrendering to what I 'need' to need. And thankfully I have realized that God made Christmas everything that I 'want,' but more so He made it everything that I 'need."

"The thing that I'm most likely to collapse under is not the weight of the stresses that stand around me, but the ego that sits within me."

"The world is shaken by major events, but it is 'transformed' by slight subtleties. And while we may be far too small to create even one major event, we are just the right size to craft a thousand subtleties."

"When my vision is numbed by apathy and narrowed by mediocrity, I can stand in the presence of great things and fail to see even the smallest of things."

"The greatest loss lies in our inability to accept loss."

"The assumption of 'rights' is the cancer of privilege."

"The line that we chart into our future is often more a circle that brings us back to our past. And it might be that there is some hidden intent in charting circles in that we can feel like we're moving when we actually have no intent of doing so."

"If you want to completely destroy a child, all you have to do is mold them into your vision of what you want them to be. If you want to completely liberate a child, all you have to do is grow them into the person they were created to be. The former cannot see God in the child. The latter can see nothing less."

"Although I rail against it, death is the dark demarcation beyond which I am at the mercy of my own end. To the contrary, an empty tomb says that my end is at the mercy of God's beginning."

"I am not the sum total of my accomplishments, for no matter how much I exhaust myself acquiring those accomplishments, the sum total of them will always be far too trifling to ever reflect my true value. My value rests in the fact that I am an accomplishment of God so incalculably valuable that He gave up Himself rather than give me up."

"Disappointment focuses on 'what is not,' and completely misses the far greater reality of 'what now is."

"Betrayal dressed in love and trimmed with the facade of good intentions is the most barbaric of all betrayals."

"If you can get others to believe that your random guesses are actual answers, they'll never guess that you never understood the question in the first place."

"Intelligence and wisdom are certainly compatible, however they are rarely seen in each other's company."