I think the hardest questions had to do with suffering. It had to do with all of our church members and friends passing through difficult times. Sometimes it's the global climate: tsunamis, earthquakes, radiation. I think these kinds of questions are absolutely the most difficult, yet we need to be ready to respond to them because we have to be able as pastors to walk people through these valleys, these tough times in their lives.

No place is too common. No person is too hardened. No distance is too far. There's no person God cannot reach. There's no limit to his love.

Let your failures refine you, not define you.

God wants you to know that he gets you.

We refuse to believe that this present world is the sum total of human existence.

He came, not as a flash of light or as an unapproachable conqueror, but as one whose first cries were heard by a peasant girl and a sleepy carpenter. God tapped humanity on its collective shoulder, "Pardon me," he said, and eternity interrupted time, divinity interrupted carnality, and heaven interrupted the earth in the form of a baby. Christianity was born in one big heavenly interruption.

What you do for a tree, God does for you.