... the world can give you these glimpses as well as fairy tales can--the smell of rain, the dazzle of sun on white clapboard with the shadows of ferns and wash on the line, the wildness of a winter storm when in the house the flame of a candle doesn't even flicker.

There is no event so common place but that God is present within it, always hidden, always leaving you room to recognize Him or not to recognize Him.

What makes me a believer is that from time to time, going back almost as far as my memory will go back, there have been glimpses I've had. Sometimes literally a glimpse which made me suspect the presence of something extraordinary and beyond the realm of the immediate. That's what I think a lot of what my writing has been, my preaching has been - trying to listen to that voice again, to see those moments again.

I pray for people I love when they are sick. I pray that way.

. . . [T]o live not with hands clenched to grasp, to strike, to hold tight to a life that is always slipping away the more tightly we hold it, but . . . to live with the hands stretched out both to give and receive with gladness.

Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom, the good thief said from his cross (Luke 23:42). There are perhaps no more human words in all of Scripture, no prayer we can pray so well.

No words come easily to my lips. I think ultimately - what I like to think is that I'm in some sense hearing the mystery itself.