I think good creative writing opens up space for people to come into. Let God reach out and touch the human soul. That's not my job. I get to be present and create as much space as I can ... That frees me up just to be creative in the way I want to be.

I want to tell you about the God that actually showed up and healed my heart. Not the God I grew up, because the God I grew up was fundamentally, and I use the word advisedly, fundamentally untrustworthy -- schizophrenic, narcissistic, unreachable, unknowable, and my concept within which I grew up was that Jesus -- He likes me -- but He came to save me from God the Father -- who was the one who was angry and distant, and unreachable, unknowable. All of that had to come crashing down.

"So, why do I have so much fear in my life?" "Because you don't believe. You don't know that we love you. The person who lives by his fears will not find freedom in my love. I am not talking about rational fears regarding legitimate dangers, but imagined fears, and especially the projection of those into the future. To the degree that those fears have a place in your life, you neither believe that I am good not know deep in your heart that I love you. You sing about it, you talk about it, but you don't know it."

It's always been you know, religion that has been the primary impediment to actual relationship with God, because it creates a mythology about performance -- that you can perform your way into the appeasement of the deity. And you know, when you're born inside the cultural framework that I was, and you're born inside the religious traditions that I was, that becomes your understanding of spirituality: That it's about trying to please God. So, it's really not about God at all; it's about our ability to perform according to whatever the expectations are.

If anything matters, then everything matters.

Paradigms power perception and perceptions power emotions. Most emotions are responses to perception - what you think is true about a given situation. If your perception is false, then your emotional response to it will be false too. So check your perceptions, and beyond that check the truthfulness of your paradigms - what you believe. Just because you believe something firmly doesn't make it true. Be willing to reexamine what you believe.

I think that most creative fiction involves the transformational process, whether it is Dickens or Dostoyevsky and the writer in some sense is expressing their own journey through such a wilderness.