Life sneaks up on us every once in a while and gives us something we didn't ever know we wanted, and lights within us a love we didn't even know existed.

Life hands us opportunities at every turn to get over ourselves, to get outside ourselves, to wake up from our own bad dreams and realize that really lovely things are happening all the time.

I'm a reader and a storyteller, and God chose literature and story and poetry as the languages of my spiritual text. To me, the Bible is a manifesto, a guide, a love letter, a story.

There are times when the actual experience of leaving something makes you wish desperately that you could stay, and then there are times when the leaving reminds you a hundred times over why exactly you had to leave in the first place.

The grandest seduction of all is the myth that DOING EVERYTHING BETTER gets us where we want to be. It gets us somewhere, certainly, but not anywhere worth being

That's why it's hard, I think, to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn. I love that line from the Bible, but it's so incredibly difficult sometimes, because when you've got reason to rejoice, you forget what it's like to mourn, even if you swear you never will. And because when you're mourning, the fact that someone close to you is rejoicing seems like a personal affront.

I believe that God is making all things new. I believe that Christ overcame death and that pattern is apparent all through life and history: life from death, water from a stone, redemption from failure, connection from alienation. I believe that suffering is part of the narrative, and that nothing really good gets built when everything's easy.