I never told anybody I wanted to write, I kind of fell into it backwards.

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

Discover this mystery: as you help others face their days, you put life into your own. And life is exactly what many people need.

A split second is nothing compared to twenty-four hours. On God's clock you're in the middle of your millisecond. Compared to eternity, what is seventy, eighty, ninety years?

We serve a good God who oversees the affairs of mankind.

And we need to share our story. Not with everyone but with someone. There is someone who is like you were. And he or she needs to know what God can do. Your honest portrayal of your past may be the courage for another's future.

It works well for me to go ahead and prepare the sermon with a chapter in mind. What that does is to force me to be very thrifty in my language, tighten up my words and not ramble so much. It puts some fiber in the sermon.