"I yearn not for the easy path, but for the right path. For 'easy' and 'right' are rarely compatible."

"If I'm conceited enough to believe I'm invincible, then maybe it will take me doing the very thing I swore I would never do to understand that I'm not as wonderful as I thought I was."

"Am I a storm-waster? For it is within the fury of the very storms within which I cower that I find resources for my growth that are entirely absent on calmer days."

"Maybe the real miracle in any miracle is our ability to believe that despite our own depravity, in the eyes of God we are worthy of a miracle."

"Sometimes we are so caught up in the disappointment of plans gone astray that we fail to recognize the potentially new options that might now exist."

"Whatever I 'align'' myself with are the very things that will create a 'line' into my future."

"I pray for sufficient wisdom to understand that wisdom apart from God is the stuff of opinion tainted by the rot of bias. And if I am somehow apt to confuse such rubbish with wisdom, I will think myself wise but find myself living in a landfill."

"Truth even in the most whispered tones will always roar."

"Timeless principles never age, and truth is as young as the day it was spoken into existence."

"What insanity causes a king abandon the comforts of his kingdom and willfully discard the privileges of royalty in order to save an ornery and rebellious people who have spent a lifetime rejecting him? We have yet to understand that such an action is nothing of insanity. Rather, it is everything of love."

"Anything great will only be appreciated if I am given the opportunity to feel the absence of it, or experience the reversal of it. It is only then that I can even begin to understand its majesty and cherish it in the manner I should have all along."

"Self-preservation is to hunker down in the suffocating confines of this infinitesimally tiny existence that I define as 'me,' instead of letting 'me' run through the infinitely massive expanse of everything that is not me. And if the beast of self-preservation does not permit such freedoms, I will preserve myself to my own death."

"To look beyond our horizons is to acknowledge that we've hemmed ourselves in by creating them in the first place."

"Denial is fear gone delusional. Acceptance is fear given to God. Engaging is fear overruled by God. Victory is fear banished by God."

"I cannot live without you. For to attempt to do so would be to rob both of us of each other, and that is thievery of the greatest sort."

"If I am indeed my own god, I'd better start praying to myself to get myself out of myself."

"A goal lacking a sense of ethics is a goal that lacks any sense."

"Despite our battered exterior and in spite of the festering scars and rank filth that overlays it, there is underneath it all the pristine likeness of God Himself. And we would be wise to cast an eye not on the marred exterior, but to be fixed on the glorious interior."

"God has hewn out a hidden path more glorious, tantalizing and adventuresome than the path trod by most, and it is a path seen only through the eyes of our wounds, felt solely through the heart of our losses, and singularly traversed by those with a limp in their step."

"If I have become so pathetically dulled that I hold freedom as my right and the privileges of liberty as my due, I can stand beside the stilled graves of a thousand soldiers fallen in defense of freedom and not feel a thing. And my most solemn prayer is that I will never be this."

"Doing life without God is not doing life."

"I want to stand on the foundation of ethics and morals when the world around me would assault that foundation with all of its collective might, and in the standing I want to stand on the truth that that foundation will stand long after everything that has assailed it has itself has ceased to stand."

"You can dress up greed, but you can't stop the stench."

"Faith is the resplendent key that liberates me from the impregnable confines meticulously constructed from the raw material of my disbelief."

"To dream only of what is 'possible' is to be fooled into believing that one is dreaming in the first place."

"We opt to be seen as 'right' in the eyes of everyone else, rather than doing what's 'right' in light of the situation."

"My life is a series of invitations accepted and invitations rejected, and the place I now find myself is often a result of accepting the wrong invitations and rejecting the right ones."

"Apathy is unconditional surrender where we are driven into hiding by unrealistic fear, and firmly held there by the misinformed belief that we are helpless to do anything other than hide. Therefore, apathy survives solely on lies and can be completely abated by truth."

"Christmas is God deciding to become what He never had been, so that we can become what we never could be. And so, God does the most improbable thing imaginable. He orchestrates His own birth."

"The problem with holiness is that once we look into the face of it we are no longer capable of taking that which is odious and filthy and somehow pretending that it's translucent and clean. In other words, we have to do one of the most revolting things possible; we have to face ourselves."

"To abandon the child 'within' means that the adult 'without' will be an adult in name only. And frankly, I can only name a handful of things that are that tragic."

"Due north' on my compass is largely 'due' to the fact that in 'due' time I have been 'unduly' lax in recalibrating my compass. And I'm apparently ignorant enough to wonder why I'm lost."

"God would have us cherish even the smallest of blessings, for in taking a blessing for granted we are well on our way to taking it to its grave."

"Although I'm seldom aware enough to see it, the greater cost regarding that which I possess was not what I paid for it, but what someone along the way sacrificed so that I might have the opportunity to pay for it."

"Life however is teeming with vitality and is likewise terribly tenacious, holding on against impossible odds in impossible situations over impossible lengths of time."

"The greatest men stand on their values and pray on their knees."

"The most elusive and ultimately impossible act of liberation is freedom from sin and self, and no document or declaration of man regardless of how exquisitely penned can do that. Such an astonishing act of liberation could only have been penned in one place: the cross."

"The power of a thing is not based on the power it actually possesses. Rather, it is much more about the power that we permit it to possess."

"Suddenly finding myself imprisoned in the ruins of the fortresses I created, I realize that that which I built to protect me has now become a labyrinth that is set to destroy me. And laying spent in the rubble, I finally realize that there is only one fortress and I cannot create it because there is only one God."

"Too often my solution is to let something die because I can't keep it alive, when God's solution is to let something live because His Son already died for it."

"To assist us in climbing the mountains is marvelous. To level the mountains and altogether eliminate the climb is miraculous. And at times I think that God prefers the latter because it emboldens us to face the former."

"Things that are truly great need nothing from me, and to somehow think that they do speaks to my utter lack of greatness."

"Christmas was an intentionally intentional decision of the greatest sort ever devised that would result in the greatest cost ever conceived, God would die."

"Maybe it's a whole lot less about focusing on the fact that we're all victims and a whole lot more about the changing the fact that we're all careless, as that is what victimized all of us in the first place."

"Expectations are the shackles that will not permit something to be what it actually is."

"My wisdom absent of God's wisdom is nothing more than a best-guess."

"The goal of comfort is at the self-same time the abandonment of great accomplishments."

"If I must know something in order to believe in it, what I am able to believe in will be severely limited. If I choose to believe in something in order to know it, then what I believe in can be boundless."

"Without mountains, we might find ourselves relieved that we can avoid the pain of the ascent, but we will forever miss the thrill of the summit. And in such a terribly scandalous trade-off, it is the absence of pain that becomes the thief of life."

"Too many of us view liberty as something that 'just is,' and too few see it as something that 'is' only because someone, somewhere was faced with the formidable reality that to keep liberty meant paying a stiff price."