Instead of giving someone a piece of your mind, it turns out far better if you give them a piece of your heart.

From all of our beginnings, we keep reliving the Garden story.

I think God calls us to small things, to faithfulness right where we are, to just do the next thing. I was simply writing out our family stories in my online journal, scratching out what I want to remember, what I was wrestling out with God.

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

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.

Are stress and worry evidence of a soul too lazy, too undisciplined, to keep gaze fixed on God?

We don't see the material world for what it is meant to be: the means to communion with God.... There is a belief missing, that God is good and that he gives good gifts.