"The choice to avoid risk is the choice to avoid living, and to avoid living is one of the greatest risk of all."

"I thought myself sufficiently shrewd to make whatever decisions I wanted to make, and then to be able to sufficiently steer those decisions away from the rather dark and nasty places they would naturally take me. And I stand oddly perplexed that suddenly everything around me is dark and nasty."

"I think we need to consider a radical rewrite of any form of patriotism that serves the individual at the expense of the community, as that is nothing more than patriotism to one's own small and solitary cause."

"It may be that we're not seeing the wonder in life because all we're doing is wondering how we're going to survive life."

"Forgiveness means that you will not allow a temporary event to have "forever repercussions."

"There are consequences to ignoring consequences that are a consequence of my blatant unwillingness to learn from my consequences."

"If I have never had, or worse yet, I have lost the conviction that life (despite all of the blows it wields and the savagery that it spawns) is nonetheless an incalculable privilege, I will have in that single loss forfeited the whole of my life and effectively wiped out any hope that I can or will do anything other than exist."

"Risk is the clue that our dreams are both real and great."

"Comfort is a stance of avoidance rather than the pursuit of excellence."

"Failure is information encased in a shell of pain."

"We desperately want to believe in something. To simply live out our lives believing in nothing is to live as if this thing we call life is filled with nothing but nothing."

"The difference between a 'man' and a 'father' is that the former shares his genes, but latter gives his life."

"We would prefer all gain and no loss in life, yet that would gain us nothing more than great loss."

"Jesus was and is the greatest restoration specialist of all time."

"We look around us and we find ourselves confused as to why the world has fallen into such deep darkness. And standing in this descending darkness, what we need to realize is that the farther we move from God, the darker everything gets. And no light of man can illuminate that kind of darkness."

"In my desperation, I have finally discovered that the only way that I can begin to fill the gaping hole within me is to be thankful for what's there, and not angry for what's not."

"It would be advisable to realize that we will eventually become whatever it is that we've created. And too often what we've created is a massive mess."

"It might not be about perfection. Rather, it may be that that which is imperfect is that which has the most character."

"Christmas is God saving mankind from the folly of mankind's grandiose sense of greatness."

"I say that my value is based on my accomplishments. Christmas is God saying that I am His accomplishment and that will forever be enough."

"Common sense is one of the most unused commodities available to man."

"To avoid the cost incurred in pursuing great things we opt for ease and blithely abandon great things. The sheer recklessness of such a pathetically apathetic trade-off will eventually cost us a life squandered, which in the end is the greatest cost of all."

"The child you hold in your arms is your gift to a future that you will not see. Therefore, we must turn a blind eye to ourselves and selflessly pour the best of ourselves into our children while rigorously sifting out the worst of ourselves. And once we are utterly spent by such daring gestures, we will shockingly discover the resulting emptiness as astonishingly filled."

"I can amass countless fortunes and yet stand with empty hands. I can seek God and have fortunes that fill countless hands."

"If I'm perplexed by the fact that I'm constantly lost, maybe somewhere in my head I've determined that being lost serves a greater purpose than being found."

"Sometimes the very things that we're expending our lives to sustain are the very things that are killing our ability to live. And against our blind and frequently raging protests, these are the very things that God let's die so that we can live."

"I am likely to fail if I have determined the cost as too high or my intelligence as too low. Yet, if I think about it, the real failure rests in believing either of these to be true."

"Death reminds us that life is a temporary privilege, not an endless right."

"The road ahead is not some predetermined path that I am forced to trod, but it is a rich byway that I can help create."

"My sin murdered Him. And out of this self-loathing shame borne of the understanding that I could perpetrate such a heinous act, I am barely able to raise my head sufficiently to ask what crazed insanity would prompt Jesus to walk out of an empty tomb for the single purpose of pursuing a decaying soul that murdered Him? And I would be wise to consider that the question itself is asked only because I have yet to touch the barest periphery of God's love despite the fact that because of an empty tomb it stands right in front of me."

"Today's ashes are tomorrow's soil."

"Rights' are 'privileges,' and if I am arrogant enough to demand the former without respecting the latter I will lose both."

"Sure, things die. Yet hard on the heels of every death there comes a birth. And if the life around me is being perpetually refreshed in such a relentless manner, why would I think that the life within me can't have the same experience."

"To make a choice not to sacrifice is to decide that I am better off allowing a life to perish than release the resources I possess that might allow it to thrive. And because of choices such as these, the life that I am really allowing to perish is mine."

"Love that is fueled solely by feelings will suddenly find itself out of gas on a long road with no gas stations."

"The worst defeat of all is to surrender without having been defeated. And it is Christmas that obliterates both."

"We can only be our best by giving, and so we always need to be in the process of giving or preparing to give."

"Running' is driven by panic. 'Destination' is driven by thought. And while it's terribly painful to admit, incessantly pretending that I do the latter doesn't replace the fact that I'm constantly doing the former."

"To maximize our lives we think that we should get up and join in the race. Yet, we rarely consider that maybe it's less about joining a race and more about actually creating one."

"Instead of the weight that sinks us, consequences are often the life preserver that saves us."

"To let something go is to participate in a much greater dance that we call life."

"We live with this tortured feeling that we must create that which in reality we have the privilege of finding."

"Thankfulness is an attitude of possibilities, not an attitude of liabilities."

"Fairness is not something to which we are entitled. Rather, it is something for which we hope."

"Greed is the fast-track to poverty."

"I constantly pack my pockets full of worthless trinkets, and in such misguided gorging I leave my heart empty and my soul emaciated because I have forgotten everything but trinkets."

"Eternity is the end of the end."

"Sometimes what is said to be a gift may appear more of a curse only because the greatest gifts of all are the gifts that have enough disruptive force to break us out of everything that's breaking us. And God loves us far too much not to give us exactly those kinds of gifts."

"Every life is a canvas and every interaction is a brush, therefore we'd be wise to consider how we handle the paint."

"I am pressed to admit that I don't have the capacity to understand the bloodied horrors of a cross and the wild exhilaration of an empty tomb. But at the point that I think I completely understand God, I have at that very point humanized Him and in that very action I have lost Him. Therefore, I much prefer to simply marvel."