All this beauty exists so you and I can see His glory, His artwork. It's like an invitation to worship Him, to know Him.

I stay away from churches in which I feel like I have to pretend I'm a better person than I am. That sort of thing moves my faith backwards.

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

Relationships unlock certain parts of who we are supposed to be.

It wasn't necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.

And there is something profoundly humbling about knowing God. I’m not talking about the trinket God or the genie-in-a-lamp God. I mean the God who invented the tree in my front yard, the beauty of my sweetheart, the taste of a blueberry, the violence of a river at flood. There are a lot of religious trends that would have us controlling God, telling us that if we do this that and the other, God will jump through our hoops like a monkey. But this other God, this real God, is awesome and strong, all-encompassing and passionate, and for reasons I will never understand, he wants to father us.

It comforts me to think that if we are created beings, the thing that created us would have to be greater than us, so much greater, in fact, that we would not be able to understand it. It would have to be greater than the facts of our reality, and so it would seem to us, looking out from within our reality that it would contradict reason. But reason itself would suggest it would have to be greater than reality, or it would not be reasonable.