"If we've somehow become convinced that the script we followed 'yesterday' can't be edited, it will be incredibly difficult to tell the difference between 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow'."

"The yardstick that we frequently use to determine if something can be restored is based on the handful of inches that we bring to the process, when God shows up with an infinite amount of miles."

"What is fear but that 'thing' that we believed to be as powerful as it pretended to be."

"So, there's this hornet's nest. And there's this long stick. And then there's me. How I walk away from all of this will depend on whether I realize that some things go together and some things don't no matter how hard you try."

"Our actions in the present build the staircase to the future. The question is whether that staircase is going up or down."

"Christmas is a bold act of emboldening sacrifice and the most selfless gift ever granted the rebellious lot that we are."

"I simply can't look into the heavens on a crisp starry night and somehow bring myself to believe that the gaping expanse that engulfs the whole of me is the product of chance happenstance. And neither can I believe that the gaping expanse that rests within me is anything less."

"One of the most terrifying questions of all might be, 'Will I unleash myself to live before death unleashes me from the ability to be unleashed?' And in retrospect, maybe it's not the question that's terrifying. Maybe what's terrifying is the answer."

"More times than I can remember I look around and I ask why the hole I'm in looks so strangely familiar. Probably because it looks a whole lot like all the other ones I dug before I got around to digging this one."

"God's genius is as wide as the cosmos, while by comparison our intelligence can find room on the head of a pin."

"Every tomorrow is an outcome of what I do today, and the beauty of it all is that today is happening all the time."

"What I've yet to realize is that each time I work to avoid that which I fear, I have in that very same action forfeited the blessings that my fear blinded me to. And I've yet to realize that with God, the blessings will always and forever eclipse whatever I fear despite how absolutely imposing those fears might be."

"My worth is not based on the 'work of my hands' despite how feverishly I might work and how audaciously successful I might be. Rather, my worth is based exclusively on the astonishing fact that I am the 'work of God's hands."

"Where am I? you ask. Where you are is where the things you've denied worshipping have taken you."

"For love to eliminate pain is to waste it, for it is love alone that possesses sufficient force to bend pain against everything that would break us."

"In many instances, the failures of my greatest schemes ultimately lead to the fulfillment of my greatest successes. Therefore, God will allow our most cherished dreams to perish so that we might turn and seek out His most cherished plans."

"The world screams, 'Stay down, it's safer.' My soul screams, 'So is being dead."

"A consequence may be the very thing that saves us because it was the only thing loud enough to get our attention."

"To assume that I can even begin to chart a 'straight' path is probably the best way I can take myself 'straight' to the very place I don't want to go."

"We can certainly run from a lot of things. But when we eventually pull up exhausted and entirely out of breath, we are rather shocked to discover that we haven't been able to create any distance between ourselves and what we've been running from regardless of how fast we might have been running and how far we think we might have gotten."

"If safety is my goal, living life is not."

"If God has the answer to every question, maybe my appreciation for God should be shaped more by the number of questions and less by the wisdom of the answers."

"Good tells us that our agenda is the agenda of the person next to us."

"The shortest short-term investment is to serve ourselves."

"What we're searching for will determine where we arrive, or if we arrive. And right in the middle of such risky choices, Christmas is God perfectly solving the problem by showing us what to search for and then bringing it to us."

"It is not that you give birth to a child that matters most. Rather, it is what you birth into them."

"If we dare examine our decisions, we will see our values woven in and through every single one of them. Therefore, it would do us well to take an occasional peek to insure that our values remain at their peak."

"Will I someday pass into history having passed by God and therefore forfeited the opportunity to change my world and reap the blessing of being able to do so because I saw myself as inadequate to achieve either? And how long will it take me to realize that if I doggedly refuse to pass by God, my inadequacy is instantly irrelevant and I have in actuality begun to achieve these very things."

"The clash is born of the fact that the child within me sees with undiluted clarity what the adult within me is incessantly working to deny. And in these most vexing moments, to be the adult is to defer to the child."

"Far too often the 'things' that men define as success do little more than successfully destroy the lives of the very men who achieve those 'things.' And while I must admit that there is an authentic element of success in all of that, it's the kind of success that I would much prefer to successfully avoid."

"Easter is the invulnerable tale of utter selflessness where at an inestimable cost God did for us what He did not need done for Himself. And that kind of 'doing' happens every day."

"Perfect majesty that deliberately chose to be born into abject poverty, walk a road of perpetual poverty, and be unjustly executed in the raw nakedness of poverty is utterly ludicrous unless I realize that this is the single and sole way that God can reach me in the suffocating poverty that I myself have created."

"Given the lethal enormity of sin and the inestimable value of a single soul, a baby in a manger and a man on a cross makes more sense that anything else I will ever be able to possibly imagine."

"We really can't afford to live our lives walking in some sort of introspective darkness as if the darkness is the only thing that we can walk in."

"When we actually refer to God's blueprint, we gladly work in fascinated conjunction with it, suddenly realizing that any other action outside of that blueprint is foolhardiness and lunacy of the worst sort."

"I ask, 'Is the cup half-empty or half-full?' And when I ask that question, I am amazed at how many people have no cup."

"Without a doubt, the most ingenious plan I could ever hope to devise would be to trade my plans for God's."

"To fill the fathomless caverns of my thirsty soul I must work entirely contrary to impulses of my own humanity, for it is in emptying myself at the very point where I am most empty that I fill myself."

"Easter is a time where we are reminded that conclusions in man's mind are beginnings in God's plan."

"If I see only my bias, I have surrendered to a single myopic lens through which to view the world. If I dare to surrender my bias, I will spend the rest of my life seeing the world and throwing away lenses."

"Calm for too long begs the question of whether we're in an all-out pursuit of life, or we're all-out of the pursuit of life."

"Without an imagination we would be irreparably shackled to what is, and never be released to what could be."

"Impulsivity is something akin to spontaneously jumping out of an airplane and not realizing that you forgot something until about five seconds before impact."

"If I have forfeited the ability to wonder so as not to offend the tenets of the culture, and if I have sacrificed warm dreams on the cold altar of conformity, it is likely because I have somewhere traded the marvel of the infinite for the malaise of the finite."

"It's thinking that I had the solution that probably created the problem in the first place."

"Shame is embarrassment multiplied against itself until it dies under it's own weight and we with it. Forgiveness is freedom multiplied against the Cross until it flies under it's own liberation and we with it."

"Prayer is one action where I lay aside my abilities to immerse myself wholly in God's capabilities. And the liberation found in such an action is less about being engaged with God and more about being freed from myself."

"Imagination envisions what could be. Reality states what is. And when my journey is shaped by one of these at the exclusion of the other, I will eventually wake up on some road facing the 'reality' that I'm far more lost than I could have 'imagined'."

"Arrogance is a map of a road that leads to bridges that are out."

"Life is not about getting everything right, as much as it's about working to live right."