Day by day we are given not what we want but what we need. Sometimes it is a feast and sometimes...swept crumbs, but by faith we believe it is enough.

I love being alone. I learned that from my father, I think, who loved his own company.

Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.

The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self - to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.

I found myself in a maze where I'd taken the wrong turn. In my wish to do well for that congregation I wasn't doing particularly well for myself or my friends or my family, and I even found that the work for God was taking me away from God.

I'm leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.

Salvation happens every time someone with a key uses it to open a door he could lock instead.