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.

Projects of personal transformation rarely succeed by accident, drift, or imposition.

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.

Our failure to hear His voice when we want to is due to the fact that we do not in general want to hear it, that we want it only when we think we need it.

The core of the person is what he or she loves, and that is bound up with what they worship - that insight recalibrates the radar for cultural analysis. The rituals and practices that form our loves spill out well beyond the sanctuary. Many secular liturgies are trying to get us to love some other kingdom and some other gods.

When Jesus directs us to pray, "Thy kingdom come," he does not mean we should pray for it to come into existence.

You can live opposite of what you profess, but you cannot live opposite of what you believe.