Friendship is an art, and very few persons are born with a natural gift for it.

Wariness about change is a kind of prairie wisdom.

Only Christ could have brought us all together, in this place, doing such absurd but necessary things.

True hospitality is marked by an open response to the dignity of each and every person. Henri Nouwen has described it as receiving the stranger on his own terms, and asserts that it can be offered only by those who 'have found the center of their lives in their own hearts'.

You can only see one thing clearly, and that is your goal. Form a mental vision of that, and cling to it through thick and thin.

I was taught that I had to 'master' subjects. But who can 'master' beauty, or peace, or joy?

But it is daily tasks, daily acts of love and worship that serve to remind us that the religion is not strictly an intellectual pursuit, and these days it is easy to lose sight of that as, like our society itself, churches are becoming more politicized and polarized. Christian faith is a way of life, not an impregnable fortress made up of ideas; not a philosophy; not a grocery list of beliefs.