To love with expectations is, in the end, an oppressive, driven thing, and people know it when they receive it. To love as God loves us--in freedom and with no strings attached--is a way to grant others a liberating gift.

This is part of what it means to become holy, to be refined by fire. Difficulties and sufferings are God's form of hazing. Sometimes it gets so hard, we think Him cruel. But He's only looking for men and women who will keep their cool when things go horribly wrong, a people prepared to dash into burning rooms to rescue those about to be engulfed in flames.

The Good News does not hinge on words like do or change but on the powerless, irrelevant, and frightening words like belief and faith.

The Old Testament does, in fact, seem to make a distinction between the life of a child and the life of a fetus.

I sometimes wonder whether our churches--living as we do in American death-denying culture, relentlessly smiling through our praise choruses--are inadvertently helping people live not as much in hope as in denial.

The cost of discipleship is to live the life God has given us, serving in mundane ways the people he's put in our path.

To paraphrase Paul, God often uses the cheesy to confound the sophisticated. He regularly honors those who are confused about his leading as if they have nailed it.