"If my heart is set on pursuing real treasures, my mind must be fixed solely on the privilege of enjoying them and freed of the obsession of owning them."

"It's not about some principled debate as to whether I should focus on what I have, or on what I don't have. Rather, it's about being thankful that I have the privilege to enjoy the former, and the opportunity to contemplate the latter."

"The adult within me would be much wiser to learn from the child within me rather than focus on the demand that the child within me grow up."

"Discerning the difference between a dictator and a leader is quite easy. The former cannot help but see 'leading' and 'serving' as stark contradictions that by their very nature are utterly incompatible. The latter can't tell the difference."

"To ascend the mountain, we must descend to our knees."

"The greatest gains that we will ever experience arise from the greatest sacrifices that we have ever known."

"Despite my best effort to make myself as large as absolutely possible, life will always be larger than me. That simple fact makes God not only a likelihood, but a necessity."

"It might behoove us to realize that isolation is the absence of all the senseless clutter, and all the incessant racket that would keep God from having ample room to show up and sufficient silence to be heard. Therefore, isolation may actually be the place where we are least isolated."

"To say that my existence is entirely inconsequential is to utterly ignore the amazing reality that life is a masterful story penned by a brilliant God who wrote me into the story in such a way that my absence would literally diminish the whole of the story."

"The present is too often squandered grieving the past or fearing the future, which makes the present nothing more than a cheap facsimile of what was or what will be instead of what it could be."

"Somewhere, somehow, something arises out of the ashes of our losses to remind us that nothing ever ceases. Nothing ever vanishes. Nothing ever comes to nothing."

"The worst of it is that while we continue to sink deeper into the muck and mire that we've created, in the very descent itself we ignorantly declare that in reality we are rising. And until desperation has crippled us sufficiently to confess the lie that we are lifting ourselves out of this mess, and until the panic of utter hopelessness has driven us to completely surrender all of the pathetic contrivances that we've fashioned that have put us there, we will never realize that God has readied solid ground that stands but a single step away."

"I cannot calculate nor attempt to manage sacrifice, for to do so is to attempt to sacrifice comfortably. And it is in the attempt to sacrifice comfortably that I begin to realize that the desire for comfort is in reality the demand that I put myself first, and there is nothing of sacrifice in that."

"Simply giving something 'a shot' is not giving something our 'best,' for our best is made up of as many 'shots' as it takes in order to be our best."

"I suppose that one of my greatest problem lays in the fact that I have assumed a blessing to be something that is mine for the taking, verses being something that by sheer exposure to it takes me."

"Once I finally understand the immensity of my own impoverishment, I am finally in a position to see the enormity of God's majesty."

"Easter is the final solution to the finality of death."

"If I continually focus on what I don't have, my life will always be completely empty despite the fact that it's completely full."

"To live safely within the realm of possibility is to know nothing other than that which is possible. To live boldly within the realm of God is to experience everything that's impossible."

"Self-serving biases and self-centered agendas are cotton jammed in the ears of our conscience. Even if truth shouts, we can't hear it."

"The best I can do is to 'pretend' that I'm my own god. But in the pretending I have to pretend that I'm not pretending, and somehow that doesn't sound very god-like to me."

"Sometimes consequences are building blocks fashioned of granite when successes are shaped of clay."

"A god of the 'possible' is no God."

"True evil is unlikely to receive an invitation from us, so it clothes itself in just enough truth to make itself look appealing and then it looks to unpeel us."

"It's not a lack of opportunity around me. Rather, it's a lack of faith within me."

"Maybe we don't ever feel that sweetly untainted and wholly majestic kind of love that takes every longing captive because we are hopelessly entangled in the illogical fear that despite all of love's grand goodness, it might not be good enough to keep us safe."

"To put others in front of ourselves is to put God in front of everything."

"The sacrifice 'of' self for the greater good is the greatest calling imaginable, and it is the bedrock of the greatest nations. The sacrifice 'for' self is the most pathetic calling imaginable, and it is the quicksand within which nations perish."

"I would surmise that we must cherish the resources that God has given us to achieve a goal more than we cherish the goal itself. For if we fall victim to the pursuit of the goal alone, then the goal has suddenly become our god."

"God beckons me to exhilarating adventures that are without number, beyond all conceivable boundaries, and effortlessly eclipse the furthest reaches of my imagination, all while I sit languishing in stifling adventures of my own limited creation."

"If I scan the expanse of my heart and find it empty of everything except emptiness, it is because I 'poured' the whole of my passion into something other than God. And anything other than God will always be too 'poor' to be able to 'pour' back anything that can fill that kind of emptiness."

"Christmas was a response of the choice of mankind to take its existence into its own hands and chart its own course, liberally scripting its own ethics, crafting its own moral system, and choosing to believe that it was the creator and therefore master of its fate. Christmas is a response to mankind reeling off the pages of history and splattering the blood of lives and generations wasted along its free-wheeling course."

"To calculate sacrifice is to attempt to sacrifice safely, and safe sacrifice is one of the most outrageous oxymoron's I can think of."

"To blithely discard the spent kernels of something that has ended is to discard the very resources that have painstakingly been harvested from that ending from which a spirited new beginning will be cultivated."

"Although it would lead me to believe otherwise, fear has little interest in intimidating me. Rather, it much prefers to enslave me."

"As utterly irrational as it might seem, the greed within me has the most limited vision I can possibly imagine as it has eyes only for the few things it doesn't have, and it is completely blind to all the many remarkable things that it does."

"When surrounded by the ashes of all that I once cherished, despite my best efforts I can find no room to be thankful. But standing there amidst endless ash I must remember that although the ashes surround me, God surrounds the ashes. And once that realization settles upon me, I am what I thought I could never be ... I am thankful for ashes."

"Be confidently assured that any 'gods' that we build will always have veracious appetites, and sooner or later they will gorge themselves on that which built them."

"Is my faith so terribly pathetic that I have diminished God to the point that I doubt His ability to survive in the very world that He came to save? Indeed, I have done exactly that. And all I need to do to beat that mentality is to remember that a baby born in a manger with every disadvantage imaginable stills lives today."

"The service of self terminates at our own death."

"If the baser instinct of rampant self-preservation adamantly refuses to surrender itself to the infinitely greater call of self-sacrifice, in attempting to save our lives we will have in reality completely destroyed our lives."

"More times than I'm willing to admit I am my own worst enemy, which suggests that more times than I'm willing to admit I should allow God to be my own best friend."

"If I am not touching a life, I am not touching life."

"Real patriotism embraces the wholly immovable belief that without freedom, the essence of the human soul and the life-breath of the human spirit is doomed to perish for lack of space and absence of light."

"Maybe the truth of it all is that we're just too fearful to give our faith enough running room to realize that this precariously thin path that led us to the end of this life is dwarfed to obscurity by the infinitely vast byway that begins immediately on the other side."

"Surrendering is intentionally laying down the power I possess. And have I considered that the power I lay down is often more powerful than that which I'm laying it down in front of? Therefore, I would be wise to recognize that surrender is less the absence of power and more the presence of fear."

"The image of God infused in us never sees the light of day in the service of self, but it becomes the light of day in the service of others."

"The dark might be dark, but at least we don't have to look at ourselves when we're standing in it."

"Bravery is not found in getting knocked down. Rather, bravery is found is getting back up knowing that you're going to get knocked down again."

"We want to 'write in' our plan and 'write out' the consequence. When we do that, we're headed 'right back' to what we foolishly thought we could 'write out."