I think that at the core of faith is trust.

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.

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

When someone sets out to be controversial or provocative or shocking as an end in itself, I don't think that's a noble goal.

For many people, God is primitive, behind, trying to drag everything back to some prehistoric era as opposed to spirit, force, love, drawing us into a better future, which to me is - that story has done something in me and I've seen it do things in other people.

Times change. God doesn’t, but times do. We learn and grow, and the world around us shifts, and the Christian faith is alive only when it is listening, morphing, innovating, letting go of whatever has gotten in the way of Jesus and embracing whatever will help us be more and more the people God wants us to be.

We all want to make a difference, to live in peace, to have joy each morning that we get to live this day and see what it brings.