Pick up a yardstick to measure your life against anyone else's, and you've just picked up a stick and beaten up your own soul.

When I fully enter time’s swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here.

The wrinkled man in the wheelchair with the legs wrapped, the girl with her face punctured deep with the teeth marks of a dog, the mess of the world, and I see - this, all this, is what the French call d'un beau affreux, what the Germans call hubsch-hasslich - the ugly-beautiful. That which is perceived as ugly transfigures into beautiful. What the postimpressionist painter Paul Gauguin expressed as 'Le laid peut etre beau' - The ugly can be beautiful. The dark can give birth to life; suffering can deliver grace.

The busyness of your life leaves little room for the source of your life.

Parenting is about preparing children to get along with each other, to get along with you and without you, and that it's impossible to get along without God.

Maybe the woman who was handed the book [One Thousand Gifts] by a friend the morning before she had an abortion scheduled - and read the book and realized that this pregnancy that she didn't want - perhaps it too could be a gift from God? And then she said showed me the photo of this laughing 5 month old boy.

Of asking nothing of the reader - but offering a still, quiet oasis in the cybersphere to go vertical with God. An island of stillness to know that He is God.