Your life is a gift. Before anything else can be said about you, for some reason the universe (or God, or being, or force, or reality, or whatever you name it) chose to give you life.

That breath that you just took, that's a gift!

To me some of the greatest writing is when somebody puts something in words that you felt and experienced and you go, that's it.

Faith can take many different forms and expressions.

To make it really clear and simple, let's call this movement across history we see in passages like the ones we just looked at from Exodus and Deuteronomy clicks. What we see is God meeting people at the click they're at, and then drawing them forward.When they're at F, God calls them to G.When we're at L, God calls us to M.And if we're way back there at A, God meets us way back there at A and does what God always does: invites us forward to B.

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?

I'm very comfortable in a room with thousands of people.