"The message of Christmas is a message of hope when all other such messages created by men can do nothing more than be hopeful."

"The roads of life are paved wide and skirt the mountains. And these very roads are choked with a steady stream of pathetically pedantic travelers who in reality have no intent of traveling. And if we are to discover the real travelers, much less join them, we will find them out on precarious paths that defy the roads and scale the mountains."

"At this moment God might not necessarily be a necessity, but know that His absence will of necessity eventually result in His necessity."

"Eons ago, the creative genius of God foresaw that it would take the shattered pieces of my 'yesterday' to construct the sturdy portal to my 'tomorrow."

"If I were to sit down and count them, how many of my prayers were tainted by the seduction of greed? None, simply because nothing of that sort is a prayer."

"Christmas is a response to bring mankind back, to restore some original intent that could never be even remotely restored by any effort of mankind regardless of how grand or majestic any such effort might be."

"Despite my incessant desperation, I simply cannot paint the perfect picture within which I would wish to live out my life. And because I cannot, God picked up the brush of love, positioned the canvas of history and painted a manger."

"Making oneself large involves intentionally making oneself small."

"I ruthlessly expend my time and my energies seeking many random things, none of which will bless me in the way that I suppose they will, for despite my frequently stubborn resistance to the thought, the single and sole blessing that I can be utterly confident in is found in seeking God alone."

"Too often fantasy is not a rich elaboration of life designed to enhance our existence, rather it is our pell-mell escape from life with the intent of exiting this existence. And the most imaginative fantasy of all is to somehow think that I can do that in the first place."

"Christmas is God being relentless to the point that He would die in that relentlessness."

"My goals exceed the reach of my energies, but my God exceeds the reach of my goals."

"Despite how utterly massive they might be, it is never the size of the arsenal nor the strength of the warrior. Rather, it is a heart bent on sacrifice that is the most potent weapon of all."

"That which I cannot hold is that which I can treasure the most because it affords me no burden other than to enjoy it."

"The only things I truly keep are those things that I give away."

"Thanksgiving is an attitude that must be rooted in the 'gift of life' if we ever hope to be thankful for the 'gifts' of life."

"Failure is a friend if we can see past the face of the foe that we project on it."

"If I had any hand in it at all there's a chance that it might be beautiful, but it simply cannot not be majestic."

"Sometimes things that appear completely irreconcilable and mutually exclusive serve a shared purpose that could not be achieved except through their contradiction."

"In our frenzied attempts to catch up with life, we run right past it. Once we have run past it, what we are in reality attempting to catch is ourselves."

"I can be absolutely assured that any endeavor of which God is not a part is most certainly a step backward. And any step backward is at least two steps behind where I'd be if I'd have gone forward in the first place."

"Tragedy descends, and in the carnage our enraged cynicism screams 'If there was a God, He would not have allowed this!' And somehow we've conveniently forgotten that once upon a time He allowed us to tell Him to go away, and once upon that time we allowed ourselves to take Him up on that offer."

"I am only one, but that is infinitely better than being none."

"It is my wish and most cherished hope that God would be pleased with my legacy, that lives would be changed by it, and that the world would be immeasurably better because I was privileged to leave a legacy at all. And if perchance I am fortunate enough to have these things come to pass, I can then rest in the fact that I have lived well."

"Words can be honed to crafted perfection by the finest wordsmiths. Yet, if we trust solely in the expanse of them to explain this God of ours or articulate our experience of Him, we will have brutally destroyed the very things we are attempting to explain. And if I should do that, no words can describe how badly I wish I had no words."

"Once faith dies, the death of hope follows hard on its heels."

"We want greatness, but we prefer it tamed and on a leash short enough for us to control it, yet long enough to allow it to retain some remote yet diminished flavor of greatness."

"Maybe what I need to be rescued from is the feeling that I don't need to be rescued, for without a doubt this is the most difficult rescue of all."

"A nation aimlessly drifting away from God is a nation for which prayer is a rudder and praise is a sail. And it is the man or woman on their knees that builds the former and gives wind to the latter."

"I don't know that love is freedom. Rather, I think it's more a force to preserve freedom."

"If in fact it's not too late to realize that something's 'too late', then there's a good chance that it's not."

"I feign fullness, but in reality I am achingly empty. And it is because I too often sit at the table of the world instead of the feet of God."

"The step that we are on is only a step to the next place, and no step regardless of how massive is ever a destination."

"I think that it is infinitely wiser to accept the fact that we're afraid, for in accepting our fear we are in no way granting it the power to crush us. Rather we are finally empowering ourselves sufficiently so that we can crush it."

"We have errantly romanticized love as something we freely get verses something we sacrifice for in the giving."

"If I assume the 'truth' to be negotiable based on whether or not it serves my agenda, then my agenda has become my 'truth.' And the 'truth' of the matter is, when I do this I've chosen to take a treacherous path through some very deep woods where neither path nor woods exist."

"Dreams are ideas where the collar has been removed and the leash has been thrown away."

"It's not about inviting great things into our lives. Rather, it's about accepting the invitation of great things to step out of our lives."

"The art of living is to rise above lesser things so that we can truly enjoy great things. And the message of Christmas is the greatest of all things."

"Because a door slammed shut, we assume that our dreams were slammed shut with it. Yet before we surrender to a closed door, it might be wise to take a moment and consider the fact that any dream is far too big not to have a couple of back doors."

"Why in the world have we never found what we're really looking for? Because what we need is often the very thing we won't accept. And sadly, in turning away the God we need, we need to understand that we have chosen to live without everything we need."

"To be bold is to be wise enough to realize that fear is the energy that fuels action."

"Avoidance is paying forward that which I would be much wiser to pay off."

"The problem is not that we don't recognize the truth when we hear it. The problem is that we don't want to recognize what the truth might mean for us if we hear it."

"Possibly the most debilitating deception of all is to create a god of my own making, fool myself into believing that this limp god of mine is the true God, and then construct the entirety of my life on this flamboyantly fictional character. Possibly the most devastating realization of all is when the real God shows up, and in the showing up all of this come crashing down."

"If I am always standing at the bottom of the mountain longingly looking up, in all probability it is because I have heeded the pillaging dogma of mediocrity which persistently tells me that the dream is not worth the climb."

"Commitment is a promise to a cause. Being non-committal is a promise to catastrophe."

"Who you are is too vast to be captured by the reflection of a mirror, classified by the state of your attitude, or categorized by the opinions of others. Therefore, if any of these are defining you, you have yet to be defined."

"There are an incalculable number of things within me that I frantically wish to be emptied of, and despite my most earnest efforts to remove them, they remain. And it is Easter that reminds me that God empties out tombs."

"We tend to perseverate on the fact that as far as we might have fallen, there's always another bottom underneath the one we're laying on. Yet, for every bottom underneath us, there's always endless opportunity above us."