"I paved the path to the very place I don't want to be. But passing the blame off to someone else doesn't put me any place else."

"If Christmas is a universally comprehensive and keenly clandestine rescue mission strategically crafted by God Himself eons before the rescue was necessary, it would naturally follow that if it is doomed to anything, it is doomed to incontestable success."

"The restless adventurer within me stands eye-to-eye with the fear that has stepped directly in my path. And the thing I absolutely must not do is to blink first."

"The cross unerringly exposes this stunningly marvelous and abruptly exquisite declaration that God will not let this single life of mine, with all of its grotesque maladies and pathetic filth pass into oblivion without unflinchingly declaring that my life carries a value worth the expenditure of His. And if I dare look upon the cross, I am utterly perplexed but wholly enraptured by the immensity of such a love as this."

"The wisdom to be on the throne of one's life must surpass the wisdom of the one being ruled, otherwise I will squander the whole of my life in the most appalling ways. By virtue of that reality, I would be wise to get out of the chair and invite God to have a seat."

"God emptied out that first tomb so that He could turn around and empty out me."

"The reason my life has wandered to nowhere is likely due to the fact that the focus of the moment has dictated the destination of my life, when the destination of my life should have been dictating the focus of the moment."

"Most often, what I don't know will have a vastly greater bearing on my life that what I do know."

"Through the eyes of men an utterly irrational birth followed by a terribly improbable execution are miscues of the most pathetic sort. And all I can say is that I'm immeasurably thankful that I've been given access to the eyes of God."

"We have the power of the pen to write the next chapter, and the privilege to author the page in whatever fashion we choose. Yet, seldom do we understand the power of the pen and the privilege of the page."

"If I wholly unleash my imagination and forcefully stretch it out beyond its own edges, even at such a point I can only imagine a thin shard of this most immense God. And even though it is but a thin shard, it will nonetheless be mesmerizingly colossal."

"If you think you can stand to know what you're made of, try kneeling before God."

"I have forged many things that I believe to be things of great beauty. Yet if God is not a part of them, they are entirely counterfeit and I have been robbed blind by the work of my own hands."

"Oh that I had the opportunity to rethink so many of my decisions, for the pitfalls into which I have so frequently fallen were often dug with the shovel of those very decisions."

"I spend my life constantly calling in 'imaginary' debts that aren't owed to me in order to avoid the 'real' debts that I owe to others, and so everybody ends up bankrupt."

"Ignorance is not bliss. Rather, ignorance is blistering."

"To enjoy beauty in the company of myself is to experience beauty bound by the limits of the sole person that I am. But, to experience beauty in the company of God is to experience beauty bound by the limits of Who God is, which is to experience beauty without limits."

"Ethics are the things that say, 'Don't stick your finger in the socket.' The world says, 'It's okay because we've shut off the electricity.' And at the point that we've chosen to listen to the world and ignore our ethics, we say, 'I'm having a really hard time getting back up."

"Looking back, I now realize that I left home in search of all the things that were right in the very place I left."

"When I find that stubbornness continually overrides common sense regardless of the logic of my argument, it seems that the only effective solution is to tell them to go ahead and stick their finger in the socket. And what I find is that what my argument failed to solve, electricity does quite nicely."

"I am selfish by habit, but sacrificial by nature. Therefore, I'd be wise to develop the habit of following my nature."

"If God created great things with a point of vulnerability, it would lie in the reality that great things die in the hands of great ignorance."

"Although I regularly convince myself otherwise, because I aim at something doesn't necessarily mean I have a target."

"The reason placing blame repeatedly fails to work is that I repeatedly place it on everyone else instead of where it actually belongs."

"The true sign of a robust and mature life rests in how many times that life has been knocked down, for to be incessantly knocked down and yet find oneself still standing means that someone had the resolve to get up that many times plus one."

"There is that gnawing feeling that we are far more than what we believe ourselves to be. Maybe it's time to believe the gnawing."