When you forgive somebody, when you are generous, when you withhold judgment, when you love and when you stand up to injustice, you are, in that moment, bringing heaven to earth.

The life that you want begins the moment you embrace the life you have because all of it is a miracle.

We can choose the way of compassion, the way of forgiveness, the way of generosity. Or we can choose other paths and those have very real consequences in the world. This is absolutely crucial.

When people use the word hell, what do they mean? They mean a place, an event, a situation absent of how God desires things to be. Famine, debt, oppression, loneliness, despair, death, slaughter--they are all hell on earth. Jesus' desire for his followers is that they live in such a way that they bring heaven to earth. What's disturbing is when people talk more about hell after this life than they do about Hell here and now. As a Christian, I want to do what I can to resist hell coming to earth.

Look at the size of the universe and look at what we're discovering about string theory. There's a wide-eyed sense of we're just getting started here.

The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God.

Love frees us to embrace all of our history, the history in which all things are being made new.