Reality, truth, and Jesus Christ are incredibly open-ended

When absolute control and rigid obedience pose as love within the family and the local faith-community , we produce trained cowards rather than Christian persons.

The loss of transcendence has left in its wake the flotsam of distrustful, cynical Christians, angry at a capricious God, and the jetsam of smug bibilolatrists who claim to know precisely what God is thinking and exactly what he plans to do.

The most powerful thing that can happen in the place of prayer is that you yourself become the prayer. You leave the prayer room able as Jesus' hands and feet on earth. This is what it means to pray continually (without ceasing), to see with the eyes of Jesus and to hear with His ears with every waking moment.

Sin and forgiveness and falling and getting back up and losing the pearl of great price in the couch cushions but then finding it again, and again, and again? Those are the stumbling steps to becoming Real, the only script that's really worth following in this world or the one that's coming.

The trouble with our ideals is that if we live up to all of them, we become impossible to live with.

God is loving us - you and me - this moment, just as we are and not as we should be.