The presence of another caring person doubles the amount of pain a person can endure.

The proof of spiritual maturity is not how pure you are but awareness of your impurity. That very awareness opens the door to grace.

Some of us seem so anxious about avoiding hell that we forget to celebrate our journey toward heaven.

In the move The Last Emperor, the young child anointed as the last emperor of China lives a magical life of luxury with a thousand eunuch servants at his command. "What happens when you do wrong?" his brother asks. "When I do wrong, someone else is punished," the boy emperor replies. To demonstrate, he breaks a jar, and one of the servants is beaten. In Christian theology, Jesus reversed that ancient pattern: when the servants erred, the King was punished. Grace is free only because the giver himself has borned the cost.

As Ecclesiastes tells it, a wholesale devotion to pleasure will, paradoxically, lead to a state of utter despair.

I ask God most often that we would be an unbroken line of Christians until Christ shall return.

When he lived on earth, [Jesus] surrounded himself with ordinary people who misunderstood him, failed to exercise much spiritual power, and sometimes behaved like churlish schoolchildren.