Pleasure represents a great good but also a grave danger.

When I am tempted to complain about God's lack of presence, I remind myself that God has much more reason to complain about my lack of presence.

Whatever else we may say about it, the atonement fulfills the Jewish principle that only one who has been hurt can forgive. At Calvary, God chose to be hurt.

When suffering happens, it forces us to confront life in a different way than we normally do.

Power, no matter how well-intentioned, tends to cause suffering. Love, being vulnerable, absorbs it. In a point of convergence on a hill called Calvary, God renounced the one for the sake of the other.

I rejected the church for a time because I found so little grace there. I returned because I found grace nowhere else.

Indeed we are all in peril if the flawed messenger invalidates the message.