Even if you know you're sleeping, you're still at the mercy of your dreams. People who are asleep can't simply decide to wake up. Nightmares don't let you off that easily. They hold you in their clutches until they decided, in their own good time, to let you go.

God can only be of service to me and I to him, not in the past, nor in the future, but only right now in this moment.

Christianity is wild. It’s intimate. It’s heartbreaking and soul-mending. It’s the wings to rise above the everyday and hope of a honeymoon with the God who has loved you forever. The party has just begun, and the best is yet to come.

Plastic people flashing fake smiles at a pretend world.

If you go out and have unprotected sex with lots of people, that behavior puts you at risk. Similarly, violent behavior can spread. One violent act can elicit a response. It can spread to people in a peer group so that they feel that they have to respond. It can pass generation to generation almost like a genetic disease.

Here is the paradox of the thing we call freedom: the farther we wander from God and the more we try to break free from him, the more enchained we become. Every step we take away from Him leads us farther from the freedom of Jesus and closer to the cruelty of Cain.

Violence can behave like a disease. That insight gives a different frame of reference that is designed to take the judgment out of it, to take the good-versus-bad-people view out of it.