"The problem with wearing a facade is that sooner or later life shows up with a big pair of scissors."

"At the end, a journey based on my imagination will leave me imagining that I should have engaged the very thing I used my imagination to avoid."

"Darkness should never be an excuse to quit, for with God, darkness is the exact stuff that light was built for."

"More often than not, the foolishness of our humanity drives us to destroy the very things that we need to keep ourselves from destroying ourselves. And because that's the case, God will never allow us to destroy Christmas."

"I would suggest that our imagination is a tiny shard of God's infinite genius that we have within us simply because we were created in God's image."

"To label myself is similar to thinking that I can come up with a single phrase to explain the universe."

"Safety is not a destination that we reach for, rather it is a retreat that we escape to. And if our lives are marked by the incessant search for safety, we will live the whole of it going in reverse."

"I often think myself to be so ingenious that I don't even realize that my own plans may actually be my own undoing. Therefore, I might be wise to realize that God's plans undo what I've done that's undoing me."

"I am wholly deserving of all the consequences that I will in fact never receive simply because God unashamedly stepped in front of me on the cross, unflinchingly spread His arms so as to completely shield me from the retribution that was mine to bear, and repeatedly took the blows. And I stand entirely unwounded, utterly lost in the fact that the while His body was pummeled and bloodied to death by that which was meant for me and me alone, I have not a scratch."

"At the very point that I've taken something for granted, I have at that same moment taken it to its grave. And if I look around, I realize I've cultivated quite a cemetery."

"An obese ego is just about the heaviest thing you'll ever carry. So maybe you should stop feeding it."

"To understand the mysteries of God we must move past the logic of men."

"Hope is not some thin thing that is subject to the winds of fate. Rather, it is something crafted hard by the hands of God."

"To intentionally pass on opportunity is to intentionally pass on living."

"Too often we make it more about what stands before us, and we miss all that stands within us."

"What I would be quite wise to remember is that 'pieces' are not the end of what was, but the beginning of what is to be."

"The 'deep pause' needed to cultivate wonder is far too often back-filled with an incessant busyness, as busyness errantly presumes a 'deep pause' to be deeply wasteful."

"If I can draw the slightest smile across a single face obliterated by pain, in that act I will have begun to understand the power of an ordinary human being to perform the seemingly impossible in the life of another human being. And how can that experience do anything less than drive me to try and make the world smile."

"Easter is a marvelous affirmation of the genius of our design, but it is likewise the blunt acknowledgement that left to its own devices, the genius of our design will result in the destruction of our lives."

"If we ignorantly act to solely serve our agenda, we're simply slogging around in the egocentric and brackish backwaters of selfishness. Any response that comes out of that kind of cesspool will be vulgarly irresponsible."

"To embrace an attitude of humility is to free myself from myself. And that is likely the great liberation of all."

"To be 'one' in one's own hands is to be 'one.' To be 'one' in the hands of God is to be 'one' that is far too vast to be counted."

"With God, anything that stands against you will always be inferior to what resides within you."

"There are often two sets of goals in life: those that we establish, and those that really matter."

"I have finally come to realize that it's being forced to be honest with myself that's made my pain painful all along."

"The most formidable way to lead is to serve. And while the perplexing oxymoron of such a grinding statement absolutely cripples us, it birthed a Savior."

"The anticipation of loss is much more frightening than the actual loss as anticipation leaves room for the imagination to create that which, in all likelihood, will never transpire."

"Lies are like paper-Mache in a rain storm."

"We can only climb the mountains because there's a valley that makes the mountain a mountain."

"I pray that I am sufficiently stirred by the rumor of great things to seek the God who created this single thread that I am, and to marvel at a vision magnificent enough to cause this God to weave from this single thread a tapestry most resplendent."

"If I so much as dare to intimately probe the reflection I see in the mirror, I am filled with the tormenting fear that I might be repulsed. God invites us to boldly probe the reflection in the mirror so that we might be released."

"Failure is not the deterrent for the next try. Rather, it is information that empowers the next step."

"Love knows nothing of short hauls because it has committed itself for the long haul."

"Although I am far too frequently convinced otherwise, with God a dead-end is only the death of an end."

"I want to 'think' that I have all the answers. But if I 'think', I soon realize that what I thought to be answers were guesses. And if I 'think' yet again, I begin to realize that since God has all the answers He never hands me a guess."

"No, I am not powerful nor do I wish to be, for it is God using my weakness that makes me potent and I would never wish to surrender that."

"It is inevitable that I will leave a legacy simply because I cannot walk through life without leaving footprints as I walk. Therefore, I would be wise to consider the path before I make the prints."

"Mediocrity is a path cleared by fear, leveled by apathy and paved by comfort."

"It would do me well to realize that the path that has led me to where I am was mapped by those who taught me and paved by what they taught me. Therefore, if God is not my teacher and His truth is not my topic I will find myself where I don't want to be, having trod a path I didn't want to take."

"I might define a 'journey' as something that life itself calls me to. And I might then define a 'trip' as something I create to avoid a journey by mimicking a journey. And while fear is most certainly part and parcel of both, the latter is emboldened by fear while the former surrenders to it."

"The birthplace of anarchy is the cemetery of freedom."

"We can be seized with panic of the fall, or inspired by the potential that lies within the fall."

"Our experiences are the building blocks of the future hewn out of the granite of the present."

"Without a beginning I am pouring the whole of my existence into the building of endings, while the cross and the resurrection declare that God is incessantly building beginnings from the collapse of endings."

"Raw power without Godly obedience is a long walk off a short conscience."

"A lot of the situations that we put ourselves in are similar to a cat in a yard full of dogs. We rarely ask ourselves how we got here, (which doesn't help with the question of how we get out of here), all of which rarely keeps us from finding ourselves in the next yard asking the same questions."

"It is in building the best of our abilities that we ultimately destroy the worst of our liabilities."

"Maybe I need to immerse the fabric of my soul in torrential nature of Christmas, and in doing so to finally understand that it is the very thing that can make the world what I so wish it were."

"Sacrifice and "self both begin with the same letter, but the spelling is way different after that."

"Too often our lives are soiled to desperation by endings that in reality are magnificently outnumbered by beginnings. And unless we become convinced that an ending is always the birthplace of a beginning that is on its way, we will live terribly soiled lives."