If we only do what we're familiar with, we might miss what we've been made for.

God made beauty so we'd know how He felt about us.

Small streams don't plan to be mighty rivers. We just move in a direction; God decides what He'll have us become.

God isn't trying to make our lives easier; He wants to make them more meaningful.

Failure is just part of the process, and it's not just okay; it's better than okay. God doesn't want failure to shut us down. God didn't make it a three-strikes-and-you're-out sort of thing. It's more about how God helps us dust ourselves off so we can swing for the fences again. And all of this without keeping a meticulous record of our screw-ups.

No book is a chapter, no chapter tells the whole story, no mistake defines who we are. Hope makes our lives page turners.

I don't think anyone aims to be typical, really. Most people even vow to themselves some time in high school or college not to be typical. But still, they just kind of loop back to it somehow. Like the circular rails of a train at an amusement park, the scripts we know offer a brand of security, of predictability, of safety for us. But the problem is, they only take us where we've already been. They loop us back to places where everyone can easily go, not necessarily where we were made to go. Living a different kind of life takes some guts and grit and a new way of seeing things.