"Christmas is a clandestinely ingenious script that outlines a plan to reclaim mankind through a strategy unimagined and unimaginable. This strategy involved God writing His own death into the script."

"If I choose to take the pen from God and write the story of my life without Him, I better have plenty of erasers and a whole lot of white-out. Better yet, I should invest in a good shredder."

"If I give with the motive to get, regardless of the degree to which that motive besets me, I will walk away impoverished and I will leave those to whom I have given just as impoverished as I have now found myself."

"In evaluating ourselves, we tend to be long on our weaknesses and short on our strengths."

"With God, the fear of failure is slain cold by success that is already hot on the way."

"The paralyzing fear of being lost is fed solely by the irrational fear that we will never be found."

"I craft most of my own tragedies without ever having even the remotest understanding that it is I myself who have done the crafting."

"What is an adventure, I might ask? And in the asking, I might begin to understand that my adventures are sorely limited to the confines of my lackluster imagination. Therefore, an adventure of the most robust and wild sort must be constructed by an unlimited imagination. And unless I am mistaken, only God has an imagination like that."

"The war on Christmas is waged of weakness and fed by vision blinded. It is a war of intellect blunted to stupidity and calling begging at the feet of cowardice."

"Loving those who hate us means wantonly setting the stage and orchestrating the situation in a way that's sure to result in a production of great personal calamity. But to not love them is an even greater calamity."

"Humility is the greatest shaper of souls and crafter of character, for it wipes away all the grandiose things that we spend so much of our lives pretending to be, so that we can spend all of our lives being the exceptional person that we were actually created to be."

"Loss eventually arrives when something departs. Grief is working through both."

"If it's about me, I can be assured that there will be a bunch of empty chairs in the auditorium of my life; save the one I'm sitting in."

"More often than not, rejecting rescue is in reality rejecting our need to be rescued. And it may very well be that is why so many reject Christmas."

"Peace is achieved when our conscience rests in the fact that we've engaged in 'right' living, verses believing that living is a 'right."

"God's absence in the carnage is due to one single rather unnerving fact; that at some time past He honored our request that He leave. And if we are not brutally honest with ourselves regarding that choice, it is we ourselves who have set the stage for the next tragedy."

"Kicking the can down the road implies that we're accepted the galling reality that whatever it is that we've avoiding, it's something that's not going to go away; at least on its own."

"If I have attached anything to sacrifice other than loss, I have at some level assumed a pay-off. And if I've assumed a pay-off, I'm only assuming a sacrifice."

"Everything I touch makes me a little bit more like the thing I'm touching, so I'd better start paying attention to what I'm touching."

"To destroy that which seeks to destroy me, God invites me to stand against it until it stands down and then falls down."

"When wisdom gives way to whimsy and ethics fall to excitement, it is highly likely that the ground beneath me will 'give way' and it is I who will 'fall."

"I've always marveled that geese can feel a call stirring, rise on hardy wings to engage it, and without contemplation, compass or map complete the feat. And could it be that they achieve this astounding accomplishment because far too often contemplation, compass or map rob the call by sterile analysis when we should liberate the call through expectant obedience."

"To forget is to render the pages of history as entirely blank, and the lessons of history as never taught."

"To my own demise, I rarely ask why I'm hungry because I'm focusing all of my energies on getting fed. And if I persist in such a diminishing cycle, in all probability I will eventually starve to death because I have chosen to gorge myself on the very things that will keep me empty."

"Maybe consequences are dear friends in stealthy disguise."

"The assumption is that if I expend myself for myself in the end all I'll be left with is myself, and that alone is frightening. But what I've failed to consider is that I have to expend so much of myself living for myself that in the end I'm really left with very little of myself, and that is unimaginably frightening."

"It is the state of the heart within us that determines the nature of the triggers we will pull outside of us."

"Although we may face untold numbers that by their sheer mass appear to render us as little more than a speck in the face of them, a single person standing with God amidst any mass will always be an indomitable majority."

"My first mistake is to humanize God. My second mistake is to hold those wretched human characteristics up against all of the majestic things that I sense God should be. The blatant discrepancy which is certain to ensue then allows me to not only justify my rejection of Him, it grants me unbridled permission to discount His existence altogether. And that third and final mistake is without a doubt the most costly of all."

"The greatest abuse that we perpetrate on liberty is our assumed right to it."

"Too often we want to take stands to elevate us rather than elevate a cause."

"I find that I spend a tremendous amount of time chasing the praises of men rather than sitting with the praises of God. The former is something I attempt to catch, the latter catches me."

"One of the most terrifying things I fear is not my potential, but how much regret I'll die with should I never use it."

"To wait is to wisely resign myself to the fact that my 'timetable' is too often a 'table' with two legs that won't stand up no matter how much 'time' I give it."

"I don't necessarily sit around inviting life to knock me down, but when it does I don't wait around for an invitation to stand back up either."

"We work hard to believe that our actions really don't affect others all that much because we want the license to act without thinking all that much."

"An ending is only happening because at some point it was a beginning. And if an ending is dependent upon a beginning, I would be well advised to focus on the miracle of beginnings verses the pain of endings."

"Sacrifice is a passion that unleashes everything away from us so that it can be drawn into everyone around us."

"We have forfeited our calling for the simple reason that we've ignored the God who says that the 'possible' is never bound by the 'probable,' and instead we've dutifully heeded the god of fear that incessantly says the 'possible' is anything but 'probable."

"Real relationships are the product of time spent, which is why so many of us have so few of them."

"Too often the spotlight that highlights our successes burns out quickly, while the spotlight that scrutinizes our failures is a long-life bulb."

"Vigilance of the wisest kind is to incessantly remain open to the reality that what I 'see' is but a single thread and solitary shard of what 'is', for to assume otherwise is to surrender the wisdom of vigilance to the decay of ignorance."

"God has given me both the right and privilege to outrun Him if I so choose. Yet, if I do so, I will have lost the race."

"A 'good' father will tenderly cultivate his children. But a 'good' father who is also a 'brave' father will let the children without cultivate the child within."

"If I have found my journey to be a maddening tangle of wandering 'rabbit-trails,' a labyrinth of incessantly circular passages to nowhere and back, and a plethora of assorted 'dead-ends' fraudulently disguised as paths of great promise, it can only be because I have mindlessly exchanged God's compass for mine. Therefore, it would appear that another exchange might be in order."

"If we limit love to being nothing more than a feeling, we have no real feeling for what love is."

"Maybe the greatest hope of Christmas is that what it purports to be is exactly what it is."

"Rhetoric can be easily recognized for it is delightfully sweet sounding but it is utterly void of sacrifice, which means it is utterly void of substance. Christmas is irrefutable evidence that God never engages in rhetoric."

"In my impatience I become convinced that this desire of mine should have been fulfilled yesterday, when it belongs to a tomorrow that yesterday would have killed had I had my way."

"Many of our efforts to intentionally craft and subsequently force our limited vision on life has more often than not resulted in some degree of cataclysm or schism or division or any number of other things that aren't all that savory."