When you pray, you are not starting the conversation from scratch, just remembering to plug back into a conversation that's always in progress.

Pastor Veronica told the story of a sparrow lying in the street with its legs straight up in the air, straining. a warhorse walks up to it, and says, 'What on earth are you doing?' The sparrow replies, 'I heard the sky was falling, and I wanted to help.'The warhorse sneers-- 'Do you really think you're going to hold back the sky, with those scrawny little legs?' And the sparrow says, 'One does what one can.'

The real payoff is the writing itself, that a day when you have gotten your work done is a good day, that total dedication is the point.

Little by little, in telling Sam all these details, I got to see the bigger point of baseball, that it can give us back ourselves. We’re a crowd animal, a highly gregarious, communicative species, but the culture and the age and all the fear that fills our days have put almost everyone into little boxes, each of us all alone. But baseball, if we love it, gives us back our place in the crowd. It restores us.

We're out there somewhere between the known and the unknown, trying to reel in both for a closer look.

A big heart is both a clunky and a delicate thing; it doesn't protect itself and it doesn't hide. It stands out, like a baby's fontanel, where you can see the soul pulse through.

Don’t underestimate this gift of finding a place in the writing world: if you really work at describing creatively on paper the truth as you understand it, as you have experienced it, with the people or material who are in you, who are asking that you help them get written, you will come to a secret feeling of honor.