I listened so hard because it felt like, while she was telling me stories, she was massaging my soul, letting me know that I was not alone, that I will never have to be alone, that there are friends and family and churches and coffee shops. I was not going to be cast into space.

And through a dark night of the soul, I came to realize that salvation happens through a mysterious, indefinable, relational interaction with Jesus in which we become one with Him. I realized Christian conversion worked more like falling in love than understanding a series of concepts of ideas. This is not to say there are no true ideas, it is only to say there is something else, something beyond.

It's funny how you can't ask difficult questions in a familiar place, how you have to stand back a few feet and see things in a new way before you realize nothing that is happening to you is normal. The trouble with you and me is we are used to what is happening to us. We grew into our lives like a kernel beneath the earth, never able to process the enigma of our composition...Nothing is normal. It is all rather odd, isn't it, our eyes in our heads, our hands with five fingers, the capacity to understand beauty, to feel love, to feel pain.

When something happens to you, you have two choices in how to deal with it. You can either get bitter, or get better.

If I use the Bible to prove I am right, I have yet to be humbled by the beautiful truths of the Bible.

You're always weighing whether you should be that accessible or not, but my personality is naturally just to throw it all out there, so I'm much more comfortable with doing thatmy personality is naturally just to throw it all out there, so I'm much more comfortable with doing that.

Half the time I don't know what I'm trying to say.