City and country -- each has its own beauty and its own pain. Some of the smallness of small towns -- cattiness, everybody knowing everybody's business -- that can be challenging. And cities can be challenging, because no one can connect except electronically.

Forgiveness is not about forgetting. It is about letting go of another person's throat.

I make a distinction between true and real. I think that the story is true, it’s just not real. That’s what a parable is. It takes things that we all know are real, and it takes life events that actually happens, and it weaves them into a fiction that allows truth to actually be embedded.

Relationships are never about power, and one way to avoid the will to power is to choose to limit oneself - to serve.

Why would the God of the universe want to be submitted to me?' Because we want you to join us in our circle of relationship. I don't want slaves to my will; I want brothers and sisters who will share life with me.

In seminary he had been taught that God had completely stopped any overt communication with moderns, preferring to have them only listen to and follow sacred Scripture, properly interpreted, of course. God's voice had been reduced to paper, and even that paper had to be moderated and deciphered by the proper authorities and intellects. It seemed that direct communication with God was something exclusively for the ancients and uncivilized, while educated Westerner's access to God was mediated and controlled by the intelligentsia. Nobody wanted God in a box, just in a book.

I don't see the Father pouring out his wrath on the Son. I see the human race pouring out their wrath on the Son. So I see the only hope for the entire cosmos is what the Son chooses to accept, crawling upon the instrument of our greatest wrath. He met us at the deepest, darkest place.