"To be blessed and yet permit gluttony to blind me to the blessings is to banish myself to a life of unrelenting poverty even though I might be utterly engulfed in the embrace of a million marvelous blessings."

"We are living out the drama of a pathetic story whose pages are smeared with our own handwriting."

"Choosing a life of safety is safely choosing something other than life."

"The length of the fall is dictated by how far we had climbed. The outcome of the fall is dictated by whether we're holding on to that which we're climbing, or we're letting God hold onto us."

"Every advancing step I take toward my goal of comfort is yet another retreating step I take away from God's goal of the impossible."

"We can live out our lives, and in the end realize that we never really 'lived' a day in our lives."

"I am thankful that sacrifice is non-negotiable, and that counting the cost in giving to another is foolishly assuming that we can put a price on sacrifice."

"Love is a perpetual journey that is extraordinary because it will never find itself terminated by a destination."

"I am most thankful for what I don't have, for had my life's wish list been filled in the manner I had chosen I would be steeped in meaningless trinkets verses bathed in God's treasures."

"A label locks me into a definition that people use to control me. A vision graces me with an idea that serves to release me."

"Any dream that I am absolutely confident I can achieve should immediately be discarded for the simple reason that it is simply too small."

"Although I've been thoroughly conditioned by pain to see it otherwise, an ending is nothing more than the backside of a beginning."

"To build refuges of my own making is to construct fortresses of sand at ocean's edge, where the relentless tides of time will leave my most magnificently constructed walls as perfectly flat sand. And now that I am subject to the very tides that destroyed these walls of mine, I am left with the reality that my single and sole refuge can only be the God who created both tides and sand."

"To 'live' is to realize that without the journey the destination is nothing more than a task rigorously completed rather than an experience riotously lived."

"Truth speaks for itself if we'd just let it speak."

"To lust for something is desire turned selfish and gone mad. To embrace God's passion is desire turned selfless and gone mindful."

"And so, it is always the case that the past is irreparably land-locked, and the future has yet to land. And here we are, living out our lives on the precariously thin line which separates the two."

"I take my cues from the world around me and carefully paint a self-portrait that the world can't help but accept. However, I would be much wiser to put down all such artistic notions and hold up the portrait of me painted by God simply because that is a picture at which the world can't help but marvel."

"Sadly, it seems that I have the proclivity to create plenty of devils, but most of the time I don't even go looking for angels."

"What in the world would ever lead to me believe that life is a series of opportunities that are readily available to everyone else but me? What really leads me to believe such an atrocious lie is that I don't believe in myself sufficiently to engage those opportunities in the first place."

"The common theme of common sense is that it's commonly rejected as uncommonly demanding."

"Mediocrity is the companion of passivity and will not heed the call of great things. Courage is the companion of sacrifice and cannot help but heed the call of great things. And we are left of our own accord to choose one or the other."

"Minutes remain the same length whether they are held against the span of years or minutes themselves. Yet, when minutes are held against themselves, they seem so terribly brief. Therefore, we'd be wise to celebrate life before minutes are all that's left."

"I can arrogantly brag that the doors I choose in life open wide and grant me unobstructed passage. But the widest doors tend to lead to the worst places."

"Contrary to popular opinion, we are all a vast brotherhood of human beings whose very survival hinges not on what we keep, but on what we give. And it is in the giving that we not only survive to live another day, but we thrive to celebrate another day."

"If truth be told, the easy road is nothing more than an armchair in clever disguise. And if you look around, it seems that there are a whole lot of people in the furniture business."

"I huddle in the dark with a mass of burnt matches strewn at my feet. And yet, for all of those matches I've not been able to light a single candle. And huddled in such deep darkness, I've somehow yet to realize that Christmas made both matches and candles forever obsolete."

"If the pursuit of perfection is a way to prove our worth, in the end the pursuit will only prove our imperfections."

"I am the greatest obstacle to my greatest dreams."

"Authorship of anything apart from God is nothing more than a tragedy in the making."

"To love those who hate us is to refuse to borrow their hatred."

"We may find great relief and inexplicable solace in purposefully looking beyond grief in order to determine the provision made within it."

"My heart says, 'This way.' The world says, 'That way.' God says, 'I am the Way.' And if perchance I choose to listen to the first two, I'm going to find myself so far off the 'way' that being lost becomes the 'way'."

"True peace cannot be found in a 'place'. Rather, it is found in a Person who can be with you in any 'place'."

"In a relationship with God, our most secret places once thickly cloaked and meticulously hidden away now stand before us utterly and entirely exposed. And it may be that this dreaded fear is the single thing that keeps us an arm's length from God, and forever a single step away from His blessings."

"If life is nothing more than a journey to death, autumn makes sense but spring does not."

"If the amount of times we get up is just one less than the amount of times that we've been knocked down, then we're spending our lives lying down."

"At the point that it dawns on me that I am not God I have finally made room for God."

"If I have not been both soothed by love and on the opposite extreme left devastated by it, I will never understand its power nor respect its majesty."

"Intelligence without wisdom is nothing more than stupidity that looks smart."

"Today I must look in the mirror and be thankful for the person who I find staring back at me. For although the reflection is terribly imperfect, and I know that full well, God created it with enough room that one day it would be perfect. And if there is nothing else I can find to be thankful for, let me begin here."

"In case you're short on definitions, here's one. Insanity: 'Destroying the very things that sustain us.' And if we're so short-sighted so as to make such preposterous choices, then it's not all that preposterous to believe that shortly our end will be in sight."

"To simply survive appears to be the choice of the plodding hoards that wander all around me. Therefore, I've adamantly committed to never hoard hoards."

"If I'm chasing the wrong thing, what I'm chasing will end up chasing me. And in the end, I'm less likely to be the one doing the catching."

"To spin the tale with great flourish but never live the tale is the power of vision strangled to fiction by the fiction of fear."

"To assume that I and I alone have all the answers is to eventually find myself entirely alone without any answers."

"The presence of a path doesn't necessarily mean the existence of a destination."

"What excites us the most or likewise scares us the most is when something is exactly what it says it is. And when it comes to Christmas, we're going to end up finding ourselves on one side of that line or the other."

"To strategize a rescue mission irrefutably capable of saving every human being is leagues beyond our ability to comprehend, and enormous beyond any resource we possess to execute. And to embark upon just such a mission fully knowing that without our death the mission will fall to failure is bravery of the greatest sort imaginable. Yet, that is exactly what Christmas is."

"Christmas was about understanding that servanthood would win the hearts of men for eternity, where raw power might win them only for a moment, if at all."