The magic of words is that they have power to do more than convey meaning; not only do they have the power to make things clear, they make things happen.
Frederick BuechnerWithout somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.
Frederick BuechnerI think most people, if I asked, would say, "Yes, of course I believe." But I think for a great many of them it doesn't really make much difference in terms of either what they do with their lives or with their own inner well-being. They believe because so did grandfather, and that's the same church they've been going to all these years.
Frederick BuechnerWe 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.
Frederick Buechner