"We cannot humanize the fact that the story was penned to have the eternal God, Who Himself knows no beginning nor is in need of one, choose to experience a beginning. That is genius in and of itself."

"Comfort is not a goal that I seek, rather it is a place that I hide."

"We incessantly vacillate between what's behind us and what's before us depending on the current barometer of our courage and the ambivalent nature of our vision."

"If I simply look at the map that I've so tediously created, it will explain why I'm laying at the bottom of this cliff looking up."

"What would behoove me to instantly declare God not to be God unless He followed my script in some tediously exacting manner? I must confess that I am less likely to believe that it's a matter of some narcissistic demand that I freely pen my own script. Rather, I think it's fear that I'm too inadequate to follow God's."

"Love never lives on a one-way street, for it will always come back up the road bigger than how we had sent it down the road."

"I can bow to fear and flee the pursuit of great things. I can bow to God and engage in the pursuit of making things great."

"We're constantly presented with opportunity, or the opportunity to create opportunity."

"Sadly, I put my dreams to bed long before they ever had the chance to get tired."

"The strewn and tangled wreckage that litters our lives is the precious raw material from which great beginnings are forged."

"Fate' and 'coincidence' are the mythological derivatives authored by those who refuse to see a 'greater purpose', because such a conclusion would naturally suggest a 'Greater Being'."

"I cannot create greatness as I can only create weak facsimiles. And in sorting through the innumerable facsimiles around me, I will only happen upon true greatness when I happen upon the true God."

"The priceless lesson in the New Year is that endings birth beginnings and beginnings birth endings. And in this elegantly choreographed dance of life, neither ever find an end in the other."

"Christmas was an ingenious plan designed by God to lay siege to the hearts of all men by submitting Himself to the greed of all men."

"The hand of God is wonderfully evident at those times when He pens stories whose lines we ourselves are far too fearful to pen or whose imaginations are far too limited to envision. And I would unashamedly suggest that the Christmas story is that very story."

"Oh God, please find it within your heart to grant me a heart that looks after itself only because it has first looked after others. And help me to realize that anything less is not a heart."

"The worst thing that I can do is humanize God. The second worst thing that I can do is deify myself. And the best thing that I can do is to avoid both."

"However far I've come, it's probably somewhere less than halfway of where I could be if I simply believed in myself."

"If as an adult I have scolded and then silenced the child within me, I contend that I am neither an adult nor a child. Rather, I am just plain ignorant."

"The problem with the 'herd' is that our voice is never 'heard'."

"There's not much that I can find in places where there is nothing to find. However, to avoid facing God I find myself spending a lot of time in those very places."

"No person, collection of people, institution, government or organization of any kind can in any way promise to meet all of my needs for no person, collection of people, institution, government or organization possesses the array of resources necessary to do that. And so, I am left with the reality that either there is a God who can meet all of my needs, or I've been stranded in an existence that created me with needs that the existence itself cannot meet."

"In the thoughtlessness of my incessant hurry, I have made God an 'addendum in' my life verses the 'agenda of' my life. And what I need to hurry up and realize is that with these priorities positioned as such, what I am hurrying to is my own demise."

"We've yet to comprehend the impervious reality that to gain 'life' we have to do the most scandalous thing imaginable, and that is to work 'against' the whole of our humanity and give everything away. And yet to give everything away is to work 'with' the whole of God's character."

"If I'm asking what kind of 'return' I should be expecting on the sacrifices I'm making, I have in that question revealed the need to 'return' that question to wherever I found it and have the word 'return' edited out of it."

"Hate feeds on itself, while love will always find itself fed."

"Loss is an invitation to a journey of unparalleled growth, yet we seldom RSVP the invitation."

"I fear that should I seek out the treasures around me, they might by comparison reveal that I have not cultivated the treasures within me."

"There's something inherently majestic about Christmas that seems to have been abandoned by us; something flippantly cast aside, something that was foolishly abandoned and was tragically forgotten in the abandonment."

"To fall down is to face the weakness of my humanity, test the mettle of my character, and push the limits of my strength. Therefore, falling down will tell me who I am far more clearly than most things I might learn when I'm standing up."

"Dream extravagantly, for God has imbued us with ample imagination to dream out to and across the very periphery of the impossible."

"It has nothing to do with who I am as compared to everyone else. It has everything to do with who I am in companionship with God."

"God is able to fix that which is broken so that what stands repaired is immeasurably greater than that which stood before it needed repair. Therefore, the most staggering brokenness conceivable is in reality the greatest opportunity imaginable."

"Real, lasting closure is never secured through retribution or retaliation."

"Despite all of our incessant tinkering, we can't manufacture the things we most desperately need. And if perchance we do, they will never be more than pathetically emaciated facsimiles that will leave us emaciated. And until we finally realize that we can only 'find' these things, we will never sense any compulsion to 'find' God."

"What is life but God's daring invitation to a remarkable journey? And what is human nature but a staunchly inbred tendency toward self-preservation? And because of the rigidly paradoxical nature of these things, the road of life is seldom trod beyond a few scant steps."

"To fully understand how utterly amazing we really are we must first understand all of the things about us that are not, and then we must make our habitation where they are not."

"Decisions are the privilege we've been granted to have a hand in penning the script of our lives. And in the writing, the question is not the availability of the paper or the pen. The question is the wisdom to use them rightly."

"With the gentle force of their words, the dogged warmth of their embrace, and the assuring touch of souls softly bared, mothers are silently shaping whole societies and authoring entire cultures that sit poised on the horizon of the future. And although we ignorantly relegate such roles to some lower caste status, we would be wise to understand that the role of a mother sets the cadence of the future."

"Of course love is blind, it keeps me blind to myself."

"We myopically stare at the gaping hole left in our lives and see nothing but the hole, not realizing a hole is defined by everything around it that is not a hole."

"We are always immeasurably bigger than the little person we've too often doomed ourselves to be."

"While we tediously check our weaponry before entering into battle, do we check our hearts? For without exception, that is the greatest weapon of all."

"Whatever the depth of our darkness, God navigated it eons before it was dark. And whatever the duration of our nights, God was there long before it ever turned to night. Therefore, despite our frequent feelings to the contrary, there is no place we might be where God was not lovingly waiting for us an eternity before we got there."

"Risk is uncertainty injected into our most vulnerable places. And because that's the case, we may choose not to risk."

"Denial is a seductive ruse of our own making, force-fitting our agendas by forcing out truth all because we bent to fear rather than bowed to God."

"To attempt to know myself 'apart' from God is to choose to know nothing more than 'a part' of myself."

"My vision of what God can do is nothing more than a fleeting glance of the backside of the 'possible,' while God is inviting me to the forefront of the 'impossible."

"I am so often the architect of my own pain and the engineer of my own failures."

"If there is any solace to be found in the carnage of September 11th, may I find it in understanding that the potential to do great good can handily rival the tendency to carry out great evil. And out of that understanding may I commit in my own life to make certain that in such a critical rivalry I will ensure that towers will never fall because of me, but people will be raised up due to me."