Doctrine is a wonderful servant and a horrible master.

To elevate abstract doctrines and dogmas over living, breathing, embodied experiences of God's love and grace, then, is going the wrong direction. It's taking flesh and turning it back into words.

Your job is the relentless pursuit of who God made you to be. And anything else you do is sin and you need to repent of it.

The fundamental story arc of the Bible is God is passionate about rescuing this world, restoring it, renewing it.

Grace is when you know you're loved exactly as you are.

What if tomorrow someone digs up definitive proof that Jesus had a real, earthly, biological father named Larry, and archeologists find Larry's tomb and do DNA samples and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the virgin birth was just a bit of mythologizing the Gospel writers threw in to appeal to the followers of the Mithra and Dionysian religious cults that were hugely popular at the time of Jesus, whose gods had virgin births? Could you still be a Christian? Is the way of Jesus still the best possible way to live?

Many people confuse religion with God and walk away from them both. The point isn't Christianity, the point is being a Christian.