Everybody wants to be fancy and new. Nobody wants to be themselves. I mean, maybe people want to be themselves, but they want to be different, with different clothes or shorter hair or less fat. It's a fact. If there was a guy who just liked being himself and didn't want to be anybody else, that guy would be the most different guy in the world and everybody would want to be him.

I am a person of faith, so I come from a community that's involved in 360,000 churches across the country, that is an institution that could, in a relatively short period of time, provide hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of positive male role models.

They are lonely. I'm not talking about lonely for a lover or a friend. I mean lonely in the universal sense, lonely inside the understanding that we are tiny people on a tiny little earth suspended in an endless void that echoes past stars and stars of stars.

Meaningful stories have lots and lots of conflict. If we avoid conflict, our stories won't be meaningful.

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

I asked God to help me understand the story of the forest and what it means to be a tree in that story.

Truth grew in my mind like a fungus, and though I tried to sleep it out, there was no resisting the epiphanies.