The message of Christmas is not that we can make peace. Or that we can make love, make light, make gifts, or make this world save itself. The message of Christmas is that this world’s a mess and we can never save ourselves from ourselves and we need a Messiah.

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.

When you're most wounded by words run to the only Word that always brings healing.

Thanksgiving creates abundance.

God appoints people who do disappoint - to point to a God who never disappoints.

The greatest compliment of the book [One Thousand Gifts]? Maybe the Muslim man in Iraq who was given the book and came to a saving knowledge of Jesus, wanted to live his life in thanks to God?

No one told me that it would all happen at the same hallowed time: Mothering is at once the hardest and the holiest and the happiest.