Pay attention to the people God puts in your path if you want to discern what God is up to in your life.

Is my growing old making me any closer to Christ? Am I only getting older or am I getting more godly?

If fear is the great enemy of intimacy, love is its true friend.

Who can take away suffering without entering it?

I speak of God's love and grace and redemption and freedom, but when I say "in the context of this community," it is heard differently. To be with people so obviously broken, so obviously handicapped, and here to discover real joy and peace - that makes the Word of God come alive.

Solitude does not pull us away from our fellow human beings but instead makes real fellowship possible.

It is this nothingness (in solitude) that I have to face in my solitude, a nothingness so dreadful that everything in me wants to run to my friends, my work, and my distractions so that I can forget my nothingness and make myself believe that I am worth something. The task is to persevere in my solitude, to stay in my cell until all my seductive visitors get tired of pounding on my door and leave me alone. The wisdom of the desert is that the confrontation with our own frightening nothingness forces us to surrender ourselves totally and unconditionally to the Lord Jesus Christ.