My mother might find a thin gold chain at the back of a drawer, wadded into an impossibly tight knot, and give it to me to untangle. It would have a shiny, sweaty smell, and excite me: Gold chains linked you to the great fairy tales and myths, to Arabia, and India; to the great weight of the world, but lighter than a feather.

Most marriages are a mess, and the children get caught between two bitter, antagonistic parents. My parents stayed married for 27 unhappy years, till their kids were grown, and this was a catastrophe for us.

Your experiences will be yours alone. But truth and best friendship will rarely if ever disappoint you.

Mine was a patchwork God, sewn together from bits of rag and ribbon, Eastern and Western, pagan and Hebrew, everything but the kitchen sink and Jesus.

I do not at all understand the mystery of grace - only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.

When we did art with the kids, the demons would lie down.

You just have to keep getting out of your own way so that whatever it is that wants to be written can use you to write it.