"The hands of man can manufacture many things both penetratingly brilliant and utterly astounding. Yet, despite their amazing dexterity and profound skill they cannot manufacture hope. Such a masterpiece as that is left for the hands of God and a manger crafted by those hands."

"I am amazed that without any hesitation whatsoever I can completely believe myself to be on a grand journey of massive vistas and bold ascents, only to find that they are nothing more than a figment of a frightened imagination that needed a journey but could not admit to the fear of actually taking one."

"Our imagination is God's ingenious gift that hands us the privilege of romping and playing in realities that we can't see only because we've yet to create them."

"The promises of God hold up long after the promises of the world have blown up."

"Forgiving others simply means that you refuse to be a prisoner of a past that you can't change, and shackled to decisions that you didn't make."

"We can hide a lot of stuff until God shows up, for when God shows up nothing is hidden, which includes both our embarrassment and His forgiveness."

"I can confidently state that the greatest rescues in my life have occurred when I've been saved from myself."

"Authentic love is deciding to live on a one-way street where all the arrows point down the street and not a single one of them point back up to where I'm standing."

"Yet, there is a sense of some deep sort that runs entirely contrary to human nature; that in putting ourselves first, we must by necessity put others first."

"Each day hands me a clean sheet of paper upon which to write. Therefore, I would be wise to write without ever having the need to erase."

"Faith means I chose not to know, which is different than ignorance which refuses to know."

"My definition of success is not based on achieving the impossible, but rather surviving the probable. And with a threshold that horribly low, simple survival cannot help but become my highest aspiration."

"It is the restraint of patience that yields the magnificent in life."

"By choosing comfort we are in the very same decision choosing to miss every great thing in life, and that thought should be anything but comforting."

"In the end, if we don't have God we don't have anything other than an end."

"Until I realize that it's all I gift, I can hold all of it and yet receive none of it."

"To recklessly excuse a failure is to believe that I've effectively erased it from the story of my life, when I've actually imprinted it in indelible ink."

"I must not imagine what is 'not' as a means of escaping what 'is'. Rather, I must understand what 'is' and imagine how I can make it what it is 'not'."

"There appears to be value in getting past a mentality that good things can only rest in good things."

"Rather than being incensed by the nature of the bruise, maybe we should be inspired by the possibilities in the bruise."

"I would suggest that the prisons I incessantly create are not designed to lock me in, rather they are designed to lock the world out. And the oddity is that either way, I am a prisoner who has sentenced himself to a prison within which I do not belong."

"I often ask to what place I am running, for if I am unable to identify that place it is likely that I am running in a circle of the most circular sort."

"I'm not the author of my fears, but I sure feed them really well."

"It is when I am cold, alone, bitterly forlorn and shuttered from all hope that you will see who I truly am. And my goal is that at those most precarious of moments, what you will see is Jesus holding you through my tears."

"One of the greatest lies is to believe that we don't have value. One of the greatest mistakes is to act on that belief. And the greatest liberation is found in looking at the cross of Christ and realizing the enormity of the lie."

"Most of our fears are borrowed. Since that's the case, we should get busy returning them."

"A life that chooses not to grow is a life that died long before it ever lived."

"Faith is the most unexercised muscle known to man."

"I must never equate the degree of pain as evidencing the incorrectness of a decision, for if I do I will default on some of the most critical decisions I should have ever made."

"Rarely do I truly understand the disease which ails me. Therefore, rarely do I truly understand the fix that would cure me. And so maybe I should truly contemplate how rarely I recognize that God understands both."

"In the midst of our worried searching we recklessly abandon the treasures that life has bestowed upon us in the mad hunt for that which we wish to bestow upon ourselves."

"If we're honest, what makes something impossible is not our fear. Rather, it is our indifference."

"I can ruthlessly press my imagination out beyond its very edges, and even in such a remote place I have not begun to touch the barest periphery of God's imagination."

"To live a lie may allow us to avoid the truth, but the real lie lays in believing that we can avoid the truth in the first place."

"The romantic within us is a harbinger of our deepest desires."

"Heaven shows up all the time. But we plan our time so that we show up in other places."

"A hole is a space where everything has been moved out so that opportunity has space to move in."

"A compass calibrated by my greed is a rather shrewd way to legitimize my agenda. However, true north on a compass such as this is a straight line to the edge of a really big cliff."

"I want to have the eyes of an adult to see the world as it is, but I more desperately want to have the heart of a child to make certain that I never forget what it could be."

"A father teaches his children that the battle is not determined by the enemy that stands around them, but by the God Who stands within them. And that lesson can only be driven home as they watch their father stand around them, while God stands within their father."

"What I do is the truest mirror of who I am."

"Happenstance is the myth of the simple mind, for it is the deliberate genius of God that what appears entirely disjointed always reveals itself to be stunningly seamless. And it is in reflecting on such stunning ingenuity that our faith becomes seamless."

"Fear left unrestrained always leaves us running 'from' something. Fear harnessed compels us to run 'to' something. And fear denied leaves us running in circles."

"Whatever might be taken from me need not leave me with a deficit in its wake."

"We got where we are because our choices mapped the route and paved the road."

"To 'stop and smell the roses' we must first believe that there's a rose garden out there somewhere. And in this jaded world of ours, the refusal to believe in gardens leaves most of us ref of roses."

"The issue is becoming so absorbed in positioning ourselves ahead of everyone else that life becomes nothing more than an endless strategy."

"If I'm my biggest fan, the only person in the stadium is probably me."

"If I had a single wish, I would wish sixty seconds of total depravity upon myself. For one of the greatest gifts of all is to have 'nothing' so that I can finally learn how to appreciate 'everything'."

"It's not that I can't remember. It's that I prefer not to remember, which means that I prefer not to remember what not remembering did to me the last time I did it."