To focus on how I'm doing more than what Christ has done is Christian narcissism

Hollywood is not known as a culture of grace. Dog-eat-dog is more like it. People love you one day and hate you the next. Personal value is very much attached to box office revenues and the unpredictable and often cruel winds of fashion.

I got my first tennis racket on my seventh birthday. And because we had a tennis court in our backyard, I played every day. By ten I was playing competitively.

When I was 25, I believed I could change the world. At 41, I have come to the realization that I cannot change my wife, my church, or my kids, to say nothing of the world. Try as I might, I have not been able to manufacture outcomes the way I thought I could, either in my own life or other people's.

We are broken people living in a broken world with other broken people. We all need grace.

The Christian life has been nothing more and nothing less than a daily dependence on and a rediscovery of God's grace.

Grace is thickly counter-intuitive. It feels risky and unfair. It's dangerous and disorderly. It wrestles control out of our hands. It is wild and unsettling. It turns everything that makes sense to us upside-down and inside-out.