"I while away my time wishing I were someone else when simply being me is the most magnificent thing I could ever wish to do."

"Whatever the item is that I have chosen to give you, it is nothing more than the receptacle within which I have placed the whole of myself. If it is empty, it is not a gift."

"If I worship the fact that I don't worship anything, amongst other things what I'm worshipping is denial."

"The best way to see majesty is to strip away everything that pretends to be majestic so that which is fake wholly collapses in the face of that which is majestic. And God in a manger is likely the most remarkable example we have of such a monumental truth."

"In choosing to exchange precious principles for worthless impulses, I have far too often bankrupted my soul in order to bankroll my ego."

"It wasn't until I slowed the car and rolled down the windows that I realized I spend most of my days driving 'through' life without driving 'in' life. So, I've decided to walk because the pace is slower and the windows are always down."

"The love hidden within is always greater than the hate displayed without."

"It is in opposing the world's lies that we impose truth in our hearts."

"Purpose declares that the trajectory of my existence and the course of human history were intentionally set to collide at this precise moment in time because what I have to offer human history is desperately needed at this precise time."

"Humanized gods are too small to captivate my imagination, or be worthy of my fullest allegiance."

"A conviction borne of God amply possesses the potency and power to brazenly reach beyond the possible in order to topple the impossible."

"It's not about the elimination of fear. Rather it's about the elimination of the feeling that the elimination of fear is necessary before we take the next step."

"Faith is rare because fear is rampant. For faith will demand that I step into places that fear itself fears to go."

"With God, a mountain is only a road waiting to happen."

"To take this one shot at life and live it with God is to take this one shot and have it reverberate across and around my world as if it were a million shots and more."

"If the road behind me is not growing ever longer, then it is likely that the feet underneath me are not moving any longer. And if my feet are not moving, I have somehow, somewhere traded this most glorious journey for lesser endeavors."

"I'm in a hole because at some point I found a shovel and started digging. Maybe I should trade my shovels for ladders and start climbing."

"Sacrifice is a noun in my vocabulary that should be a verb in my life."

"When I read the ghastly lines of tragedy darkly penned into my life, I turn and notice that the pen in my hand is wet."

"There was a moment when any hope within me froze solid and I was finally emptied of all energy to fight the cold. And at the very point of that very surrender, when I became convinced that I must bow to a world that would be forever frigid, God cupped the hands of my soul and poured in the warmth of Christmas."

"An idea without sacrifice, regardless of grand it might be, will never be anything more than an idea."

"We want a fresh start only because we didn't sufficiently care for the last fresh start."

"Why is it when I pursue the praises of men I find myself with everything that I've looked for but nothing that I need? That's because I have an extraordinary habit of looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place."

"If I can somehow focus on the pain of not focusing on my pain, I will soon find that pain healed simply because I forced myself to do the exact opposite of what my core humanity demanded I do I sought to heal the pain of someone else instead."

"If I look closely, my failures are less about my inadequacies and more about the fact that I channel my abilities into the wrong places."

"May we know fear, but may we always refuse to court cowardice."

"The father who has selflessly poured himself into the life of his children may leave no other monument than that of his children. But as for a life well lived, no other monument is necessary."

"Risk is the stuff that sucks the predictability right out of the very things that we desperately wish were predictable."

"I decry the injustice of my wounds, only to look down and see that I am holding a smoking gun in one hand and a fistful of ammunition in the other."

"I would be an utter fool to let my journey be defined by the denial of the journey."

"Discouragement is the cancer of great things."

"We know enough to know that all of this is not quite right. And we know enough to know that settling for what's not quite right is quite wrong."

"To fall is not to fail. To fail is to never fall because I never got up in the first place."

"Everything that I hold will eventually be gone. Subsequently, the quality of my life will depend on whether I choose to appreciate those things 'now' or wait until 'then."

"What rubs off on me is hard to rub off. So, I'd better figure out what I rubbing up against."

"The problem that I think I have with God is often not a problem at all. Rather, it is most frequently a tired misperception where I have made God what I need Him to be in order to justify my rejection of Him."

"In too many instances we have settled for a world of our own shaping that is shaping up to be in terrible shape."

"If I am sufficiently brave to extract the cancer of fear, I have effectively gutted my conviction that what stands before me is impossible."

"To embrace the message of Christmas is to throw off my hedonistic rebellion and bow before the chafing reality that I can't save myself, and in that very act to be suddenly taken aback in that I've stumbled upon the very freedom I've longed for in the very place I'd least expected it."

"I am always trying to figure God out so that I can figure Him in. But after a while I figure that I should just let God be God, and figure that He'll figure it all out anyway."

"God chose to deliberately venture into and intentionally occupy depths far below and infinitely beyond that which any human has ever descended, and then to raise Himself back up to glory from those horridly dark places. And I pray that we never miss the fact that Christmas is God's invitation for us to join Him in the rising."

"Apathy is giving up when we need to get up."

"I have both the violent turbulence of the storm and the quiet promises of God in the storm. And what I must work to remember is that something is not necessarily stronger simply because it's louder."

"The greatest imagination in all of existence is one that would be able to take 'nothing' and imagine 'something' from 'nothing.' And that is God."

"I would much prefer to enlarge your life by giving you the gift of my life, rather than gifting your life to material obesity with frivolous trinkets."

"Being a mother is not about 'birthing a child into the world.' Rather, it is about repeatedly 'birthing into the child' a steady sense of their inestimable worth, a prized understanding of their authentic self, a conviction that the impossible is largely the stuff of myth, and an utterly unwavering belief that cold actions of men never represent the warm heart of God. It is the relentless act of birthing these things into the innermost soul of a thirsty child that makes a woman a mother."

"We have a choice. We can be jaded by what we've lost, or joyous over what that thing had accomplished while we had it."

"If the light we have is continually engulfed by the darkness in a way that makes the darkness even darker, maybe we should think about getting our light from Someone else before it gets a whole lot darker."

"We can't even remotely fathom that whatever is ending for us is always more than an ending."

"The barrier to our future is often the very plans that we've created to get there."