When the lab rats hear the bell ringing, they freeze. That's what fear does to you - fear stops you dead in your tracks. Fear can keep you from harm, but fear can also rob you of your potential. Fear can rob you of an experience. Fear can rob you of happiness. Fear can rob you of real life... Darkness has a way of scaring us.

We live in the midst of a creation that is groaning.

A lot of Christians have been taught a story that begins in chapter 3 of Genesis, instead of chapter 1. If your story doesn't begin in the beginning, but begins in chapter 3, then it starts with sin, and so the story becomes about dealing with the sin problem. So Jesus is seen as primarily dealing with our sins.

Everybody is following somebody. Everybody has faith in something and somebody. We are all believers.

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.

Doctrine is a wonderful servant and a horrible master.

Whether we are reading the Bible for the first time or standing in a field in Israel next to a historian and an archaeologist and a scholar, the Bible meets us where we are. That is what truth does