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.

There's way too much wonder and mystery all around us to not stay open to more that's going on here. You can wake up, and sense and feel and taste and hear a whole world right here within this one, right here in this breath you're about to take.

Celebrity seems totally at odds with authentic community and honest, real sorts of relationships.

Christian is a great noun and a poor adjective

At the center of the Christian tradition since the first church have been a number who insist that history is not tragic, hell is not forever, and love, in the end, wins and all will be reconciled to God.

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's interesting is, if you take the scientists and the theologians, the really good ones, they end up both filled with this wide-eyed sense of wonder and awe about look at this world we live in.