Power can do everything but the most important thing: it cannot control love.

The things, good Lord, that we pray for, give us the grace to labour for', as Sir Thomas More expressed it. The inner voice of prayer expresses itself naturally in action, just as the inner voice of my brain guides all my bodily actions.

I never see God. I seldom run into visual clues that remind me of God unless I am looking. The act of looking, the pursuit itself, makes possible the encounter. For this reason, Christianity has always insisted that trust and obedience come first, and knowledge follows.

When I pray for another person, I am praying for God to open my eyes so that I can see that person as God does, and then enter into the stream of love that God already directs toward that person.

Whoever desires to remain faithful to Jesus must communicate faith as he did, not by compelling assent but by presenting it as a true answer to basic thirst. Rather than looking back nostalgically on a time when Christians wielded more power, I suggest another approach: that we regard ourselves as subversives operating within the broader culture.

... learning humility is a prerequisite for grace.

... the core problem with Christians communicating faith: we do not always do so in love. That is an indispensable point to presenting faith in a grace-full way.