Pain narrows vision. The most private of sensations, it forces us to think of ourselves and little else.

Christians are simply pilgrims who acknowledge their lostness and their desire for help in finding the way.

Doubt always coexists with faith, for in the presence of certainty who would need faith at all?

Politics deals with externals: borders, wealth, crimes. Authentic forgiveness deals with the evil in a persons heart, something for which politics has no cure. Virulent evil (racism, ethnic hatred) spreads through society like an airborne disease, one cough infects a whole busload. When moments of grace do occur, the world must pause, fall silent, and acknowledge that indeed forgiveness offers a kind of cure. There will be no escape from wars, from hunger, from misery, from rancid discrimination, from denial of human rights, if our hearts aren't changed.

I say this with care, but I wonder if a fierce, insistent desire for a miracle - even a physical healing - sometimes betrays a lack of faith rather than an abundance of it. When yearning for a miraculous resolution to a problem, do we make our loyalty to God contingent on whether he reveals himself yet again in the seen world?

By focusing too myopically on what we want God to do on our behalf, we may miss the significance of what he has already done.

If Jesus had never lived, we would not have been able to invent him.