"Chilled ice tea that tempered tepid summer days lathered thick with humidity. Frothy hot chocolate that cut winter's chill. Bedtime prayers that sent our fears scrambling in panicked flight. Golden bouquets of dandelions aromatically rich with the gift of summers scent. Family meals that wove yet another binding thread in and through the tapestry of those seated around the table. These are but the slightest sampling of the innumerable gifts my mother handed to this child of hers. And without them, my life would be impoverished beyond words to describe."

"The extent of God's grace always eclipses the extent of my grotesqueness. Therefore, I can never be bad enough for God to tell me that He's had enough."

"If you haven't figured it out yet, an absolutely certain way to lose something as quickly as possible is to forget the privilege you have to possess it in the first place."

"Romanticizing comes with colored glasses of the most colored sort."

"If it's the benefit to myself that drives my decisions, I can know that I'm driving down a long road with a short bridge."

"In one way or another, every mission that I have ever set out on to rescue myself is yet another mission that I end up needing to be rescued from. Hence, there is God."

"In God's vocabulary, 'lost' is an unnecessary adjective that is easily erased by the adjective 'found' if we would simply be brave enough to hand Him the eraser."

"I hold in my hand a million ideas and more. But if I am puzzled as to why they have never leapt out of my hand and been birthed into the realities they were crafted to be, it is likely because the other hand has withheld the sacrifice that is necessary to birth an idea."

"To focus solely on endings is to trade conclusions for the very beginnings that created them. And if this cycle should persist, we will likewise miss the beginning that will follow this ending."

"God invites. We decline. And because of that single foolhardy decision we spend the rest of our lives 'declining'."

"Maybe we need to reflect on the fact that the patience of God always outruns the impatience of our greed, and that His love always outweighs the greed that outweighs our love for Him."

"The Christmas story is penmanship of the most brilliant sort, where God crafted a beginning that would never be subject to an ending."

"One of a mother's greatest gifts is to teach her child that to grow is not to timidly sit on some safe shore at water's edge and clumsily grab whatever happens to float by. Rather, it is to deliberately step into waters both calm and turbulent in order to wrestle great things to shore. And that lesson can be best taught by a mother who stands before her child dripping wet."

"Abundant living is realizing that life is a privilege whether it's adhering to our scripts or not."

"Being lost without grasping the rather obvious fact that we are lost is by far the best guarantee we have that we're going to stay lost."

"If I get up just one less time than the number of times I've been knocked down, I have done one of the most devastating things possible; I have halted my life at that very spot."

"Every parent is an artist, for the bared canvas of a newborn's soul begs for the artist's touch. And because this is so, a parent must prepare the palette with the utmost care, choose the brushes with poised caution, and mindfully attend to every brushstroke regardless of how slight. And such caution is utterly imperative for the emerging rendering will be both a legacy borne of the parent, and a life lived by the child."

"To save myself I must face myself, which may be the hardest of all things to face."

"To 'pretend' is to say that I'm willing to waste the precious energy that it takes to pretend, and I'm unwilling to cultivate the bravery that it takes to be real. And I am at a complete loss to pretend that either of these aren't true."

"Contradictions are the impossible chasms that create forever separations. God is the forever bridge that creates impossible reunions."

"I would be dreadfully remiss not to think that God would painstakingly craft something an intimately ingenious and inexplicably intricate as my life, and that by virtue of such sheer brilliance I should not examine it with the greatest precision and unleash it with the fullest abandon."

"God's decision to reach out in such dramatic fashion as to lay all rightful privilege aside and be born into abject destitution tells us that His passion for us exceeds our desire for Him. And maybe we should commit to evening that up a bit."

"In the absence of faith, our dreams will move from feasible aspirations to implausible fantasy."

"To be found is to be exposed. No wonder so many of us are still lost."

"To incessantly blame others for my shortcomings is cowardice borne of fear, fed by fear, and haunted by fear. To be steadfastly accountable for my shortcomings is bravery borne of God, fed by God, and blessed by God."

"Ignorance is my refusal to think outside the box of my fears."

"Starting over is an acceptance of a past we can't change, an unrelenting conviction that the future can be different, and the stubborn wisdom to use the past to make the future what the past was not."

"Once I have impounded love and towed it into the confine of words, I have lost it altogether."

"The more we construct lives that prioritize safety, the bigger the prison we construct around ourselves."

"If I've prayed, I never have to worry about being the first one to show up."

"To forgive is to refuse to contaminate the future with the errors of the past."

"Vulnerability creates unimaginable space to build each other up, as much as it creates ample room to tear each other down."

"In the deepest darkness God tenderly grasps my hand and whispers that darkness is nothing more than a place that He is preparing for the arrival of light."

"While real sacrifice is committed to the result, it relishes the effort."

"It's about recognizing that the great movements and moments in history laid on the backs of ordinary people who simply chose to do extraordinary things."

"I cannot be afraid of being afraid. Rather, I need to realize that it is my fear that gives me the energy to wrestle that which I fear into the dirt that is soon to become the road underneath my feet."

"The drum to which we march reveals the conductor to whom we're listening."

"A parent holds within their hands the gift of a child to which they must expend the gift of themselves. And in such a monumental outpouring, the parent will lose both the child and the gifts given, but they will possess the far greater gift of knowing that they gave both."

"Either we are running 'from' what we fear or running 'to' what we fear. The former is a choice controlled by fear, the latter is an action inspired by it."

"You are silent now who once stood on battlefields ravaged by destruction unimaginable, holding in those desperate places the line of freedom for others you would never know, and who would never know you. And being one of those you never knew, I would give all I have to clasp your hand one single time, look into eyes that witnessed the bloodied carnage that results when freedom refuses to bow to chains of any kind, and simply say 'thank you."

"The burdens I carry on my back are in direct correlation to the weight of my ego."

"The greatest prayers that I could ever utter come from the heart. And when I pray that way, I rarely need to open my mouth. Therefore, maybe I should think about talking less."

"A commitment to never getting knocked down is in reality a decision to never stand up."

"Faith revels in the liberating fact that only a terribly miniscule part of life lies within the constricted confines of my reach, and that I am graciously invited out to live in a place beyond my grasp."

"Underneath the chaos there stirs a great plan. And it will be birthed only if I give it permission to do so because I have exercised the faith that it's there."

"We are about the hurried business of living life while missing it in the very process of living it."

"Too often fear is fiction madly running amuck, all the while madly tracking 'muck' across the floor of fact."

"Because I have 'chosen' to see something as impossible, there's a good chance that it's not."

"A cause that only serves me is much like a door on the edge of a cliff, it doesn't open to anywhere good."

"We can fill our lives with 'stuff,' but as we do we're concurrently filling our lives with the obligation to maintain that 'stuff."