My job [as a teacher] is to love the Scriptures in public. And then sit down.

The Spirit is the reason we can build a church and have confidence that we will get it at least a little bit right.

The only other person I have fallen in love with that way is Jesus, and I hope that goes more smoothly. I hope I remember, when I'm bored with Him, and antsy, and sick of brushing my teeth next to the same god every morning, I hope I remember not to leave Him. I am not so worried that He will leave me. The Bible, after all, is full of stories about God sticking with His Bride, no matter how stiff-necked and prideful and unfaithful she may be.

I feel annoyed that in His wisdom, [God] chose to reel me in with middle-brow Christian fiction. It could be worse, I suppose. I could have come to faith while reading Left Behind.

The church has long used the concept of sacraments--outward signs of inward grace--to name the spaces where God meets us in an especially present way. For many Christians, however, that language seems abstract, even (sadly) foreign. Dean Nelson lovingly explores those spaces of encountering God; his luminous book has helped me see anew the sacred in the ordinary. I am grateful.

I am not a saint. I am, however, beginning to learn that I am a small character in a story that is always fundamentally about God.

Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith.