Most of us like thinking we are God's only children...At least one of the purposes of church is to remind us that God has other children, easily as precious as we. Baptism and narcissism cancel each other out.

I thought being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was...it wasn't until I failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness.

As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.

The beauty in the losing is a loss finally of self-consciousness. There's a gorgeous moment that can happen in all kinds of places. It can happen with people, it can happen with nature, and it can happen with my eyes shut anywhere I am.

The abundance of our lives is not determined by how long we live, but how well we live. Christ makes abundant life possible if we choose to live it now.

It's difficult for me to ignore how many conflicts locally and worldwide have religion tagged to them.

I'm in a mainline church, I'm very aware, especially as I move through community churches and new-start churches that are making real efforts not to associate themselves with traditional denominations - very often they have no history. They have no institutional memory.