God only allows pain if He’s allowing something new to be born.

Our fall is always first a failure to give thanks.

Giving thanks is that: making the canyon of pain into a megaphone to proclaim the ultimate goodness of God when Satan and all the world would sneer at us to recant.

Maybe the man who said that his doctor had pulled him off Prozac because One Thousand Gifts and taking the dare to write 1,000 gifts was healing deep places in him and leading him to *experience* joy.

If trust must be earned, hasn't God unequivocally earned our trust with the bark on the raw wounds, the thorns pressed into the brow, your name on the cracked lips.

If the Church is a body, and the body is a business, isn't that the same thing as prostitution?

We can worship Christ in our sanctuaries and we can pray to God on our knees, but how we treat - or neglect - the person next door, the poor, every human being, this is how we truly speak to Christ and this is how we really treat Jesus.