I want a real take-home quality to the sermon, so I built the whole sermon series around the word grace, those five letters.

God is God. He knows what he is doing. When you can’t trace his hand, trust his heart.

The Lord is near! You're not alone. You may feel alone. You may think you're alone. But there's never a moment in which you face life without help. God is near. God repeatedly pledges his proverbial presence to his people. Don't assume God is watching from a distance. Avoid the quicksand that bears the marker "God has left you!" Don't indulge this lie. If you do, your problem will be amplified by a sense of loneliness. It's one thing to face a challenge, but to face it all alone? Isolation creates a downward cycle of fret.

I guess grace doesn't have to [be] logical. If it did, it wouldn't be grace.

You are God's child. His creation. Destined for heaven. You are a part of his family.

I do not know when Christ is coming back. No one knows. But I do think the environment is getting more and more to the point where we can look for his return.

I spent the better part of a week trying to figure out how to organize these stacks of 30 years of conversations and dialogues. I finally began clustering them in these different categories, and I ended up with the ones you listed.It's interesting to me the kinds of questions I haven't been called to wrestle with. For example, I don't know what this says, but I'm not asked a lot of political questions.