Here Spring just grows and greens and warms, spreading life, wrapping us in her arms, until suddenly we realize that she's not a girl anymore. She's a woman. A woman named Summer.

As long as I'm dealing in honesty, I may as well admit that I have been more influenced (as a person) by my childhood readings of Tolkien and Lewis than I have been by any philosophers I read in college and grad school. The events and characters in Narnia and Middle Earth shaped my ideals, my dreams, my goals. Kant just annoyed me.

Understand this: we are both tiny and massive. We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits, huffing and puffing along the mountain ranges of epic narrative arcs prepared for us by the Infinite Word Himself.

Man is born to trouble. Man is born for trouble. Man is born to battle trouble. Man is born for the fight, to be forged and molded--under torch and hammer and chisel--into a sharper, finer, stronger image of God.

Glory is sacrifice, glory is exhaustion, glory is having nothing left to give.

Do not slip into writing for the mind and the mind alone. In other words, do not play merely upon our ability to reason. And do not focus only on visuals. Write for the whole person.

It is hard to stay focused with so much swirling around me. God is distracting. He never stops talking, and I can never stop listening. There is a reason we sleep.