"A true work of art is shaped by the hands of another, and if in shaping us that 'other' is anything other than God, the piece will never touch the remotest periphery of its potential."

"Our prayers are something akin to delivering a list, verses surrendering a life. The former will always leave me creating the next list, while the latter will leave me creating a new life."

"You are greater than you can possibly imagine, if you would only free yourself up to imagine."

"If there's one thing that's irrefutably absurd, it's believing that we can separate intelligence from wisdom and still have it be intelligence."

"I will not find myself, nor will I obtain any precarious morsel of life in giving all of life to myself. If I am ever to find these things, I must first be willing to give these things away at the very moment that I come into possession of them."

"Often we don't see the majesty of God's design because we're caught up in the mediocrity of our own designs."

"I think myself so terribly 'clever' that the need for God is blatantly irrelevant. And all the while, in the rapidly growing mess that I'm 'cleverly' creating, I rather quickly begin to realize that the only thing that is relevant is His relevance."

"It was the greatest, most intricate, most ingenious and most costly rescue mission in all of human history."

"Ignorance is avoiding that which stands in front of me out of the misplaced hope that it will put what I'm ignoring behind me. Instead, it's most certain to drop it on top of me."

"Ignorance might be bliss, but it also has teeth."

"Independence that has declared its 'independence' from the sure and certain compass of sound morals is nothing more than rogue greed having scantily dressed itself in the garb of independence while running off the cliff of anarchy."

"If the truth gets in the way, I will remove it. But truth be told, removing the truth never removes the truth."

"If I see God as nothing more than a caricature of history or imagination I cannot do anything less than make myself my own 'god'. And once I realize that in doing so my rendition of being a 'god' is embarrassingly inferior to the very caricature I am mimicking, I quickly come to realize that maybe the only thing that can be 'god' is a God. And if that is the case, I suddenly find myself hounded by the stunning reality that God is not a caricature."

"The key to understanding if something is truly precious is to ask if we can hold it, for things truly precious cannot be held."

"With God, being lost is nothing more than an idea that never has and never will be anything more than an idea."

"To realize your potential you must look beyond the end of yourself, realizing that where you end is most likely where you actually begin."

"We can only get to God through God. Every other possible avenue is a dead-end before it even starts."

"Directing praise to oneself is to cash in on the ego in order to bankrupt the soul."

"The worst denial of all is being in denial that we're in denial in the first place. And I would wonder if that's not exactly where most of us live out most of our lives."

"It is at the precise moment that I take something for granted that I have placed myself in the precarious position of losing that very thing. And if that thing I risk losing is liberty, taking it for granted is foolishness of the most foolish sort."

"Real accomplishments do virtually nothing to serve me and they do everything to serve others. Anything less is nothing more than a meaningless task dressed in the deceptive finery of accomplishments."

"I pray that I am never so foolishly naive or roguishly pompous to think that I can be the captain of my own ship, for if God is not at the helm my ship will soon be at the bottom."

"To grow is not to timidly sit on some safe shore at water's edge and clumsily grab whatever happens to float by me. Rather, it is to deliberately step into waters both calm and turbulent in order to wrestle great things to shore."

"Let me be strong, for to be anything else is to languish in the abyss of compromise and to descend to places of impoverishment so destitute that they will squelch my soul and crush my heart."

"Sometimes the grandest of all events are described in the poverty of a few simple words."

"To judge someone is to say that I have the right to define who they are, verses understanding that God has handed me the priceless privilege of discovering who they are."

"I am what no one else is, and in the hands of God I can do what no one else does. And if I dare set such a truth in motion I will change my world."

"If truth is relative, then it's cousin is anarchy."

"Forgiveness allows the burdens that we carry to become the histories that we forget."

"We focus on the reasons why we 'can't' at the expense of the far greater reasons why we 'can'."

"Love in the service of self is greed in disguise."

"Opportunity is present is wreckage as much as it is in that which is wonderful. It's not so much how it comes to us, but what we do with it."

"To live a fantasy is to avoid a life."

"To grasp love, I must grasp the fact that it is a creation of God and therefore it is forever beyond me. But the very fact that it is forever beyond me is the very thing that prompts me to forever pursue it."

"Christmas embodies everything that I need. However, everything that I need is often made up of a lot of stuff I don't want."

"Judging others shackles them to the cold iron of our limited notions."

"Where there is no hope, there is Christmas. And where there is no Christmas, there is no hope."

"With God, the impossible is not an obstacle but an invitation."

"Surrender is a choice, it is never a calling."

"We are not built for mediocrity, but we build it into our lives nonetheless."

"Christmas is not something that sprang from the musings of some person who creatively devised caricatures of elves, spiraling candy canes, visions of a magical city whose foundation was nestled in the far reaches of the North Pole, or embellishments of a kindly bishop spun by myth into a bearded old man in a red suit."

"Oftentimes I think it is far better to listen for an answer, rather than talk out of an effort to create one."

"Too often it's about what stands before us, not what stands within us."

"The very places that we presume God not to be are the very places that are filled with His footprints and littered with His fingerprints."

"There's something tightly woven throughout the fabric of our humanity that runs entirely opposite to the baser instinct of looking out for our own good."

"Maybe we ought to consider that sometimes the most destructive outcomes in our lives are the ones that we've created."

"At the moment that everything goes dark, the sunset in front of us becomes the whole story. But if we find courage enough to wait until tomorrow morning, we will suddenly come to understand that in reality yesterday's sunset was only half of the story."

"Why does not the stunning evidence of the last miracle grant me confidence in the next crisis? Because my immaturity does not permit such a faith, my desperate prayer is that God would grant me a robust faith sufficient to trust Him not for one crisis, but for an eternity of miracles."

"We must leave Christmas to be what it is, for to reduce it to the stuff of myth and whimsy is take the single and sole hope of a dying humanity and obliterate it. And I would contend that such an action is insanity of the greatest sort."

"Easter is God throwing everything at death so that I can give everything to life."