What gets me back to church, I think, is thinking maybe this time that question "Is it true?" will be answered, not just in terms of somebody saying, "Yes, it's true," but something will happen in a sermon or maybe shuffling up to the Eucharist, or in the old lady who's sitting beside me with a Bible - maybe something will happen which will show me that it's true. So I go back thinking, maybe this time I'll be lucky.

Preaching and writing - it's the same. Whether I'm writing to speak or writing to be read in a book, it's the same thing.

The first ministers were the twelve disciples. There is no evidence that Jesus chose them because they are brighter or nicer than other people. Their sole qualification seems to have been their initial willingness to rise to their feet when Jesus said, "Follow me."

Listen to your life. All moments are key moments.

The pride that keeps us from forgiving is the same pride which keeps us from accepting forgiveness.

We are children, perhaps, at the very moment when we know that it is as children that God loves us - not because we have deserved his love and not in spite of our undeserving; not because we try and not because we recognize the futility of our trying; but simply because he has chosen to love us. We are children because he is our father; and all of our efforts, fruitful and fruitless, to do good, to speak truth, to understand, are the efforts of children who, for all their precocity, are children still in that before we loved him, he loved us, as children, through Jesus Christ our lord.

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.