In the story of the good Samaritan, Jesus not only teaches us to help people in need; more deeply, he teaches us that we cannot identify who “has it”, who is “in” with God, who is “blessed”, by looking at exteriors of any sort. That is a matter of the heart. There alone the kingdom of the heavens and human kingdoms great and small are knit together. Draw any cultural or social line you wish, and God will find his way beyond it.

Play is the creation of value that is not necessary.

Your mind will really talk to you when you begin to deny fulfillment to your desires, and you will find how subtle and shameless it is.

Many people have found prayer impossible because they thought they should only pray for wonderful but remote needs they actually had little or no interest in or even knowledge of. Prayer simply dies from efforts to pray about ‘good things’ that honestly do not matter to us. The way to get to meaningful prayer for those good things is to start by praying for what we are truly interested in. The circle of our interests will inevitably grow in the largeness of God’s love.

And the God who hears is also the one who speaks. He has spoken and is still speaking. Humanity remains his project, not its own, and his initiatives are always at work among us.

We are becoming who we will be-forever.

The truly powerful ideas are precisely the ones that never have to justify themselves.