If anything matters, then everything matters.

It is so easy to get sucked into the if-only game, and playing it is a short and slippery slide into despair.

My dad was a preacher. My relationship, for example, with my father -- very difficult, and very painful, and it took me 50 years to wipe the face of my father off the face of God.

Every human being is a universe within themselves. Your mother and father participated with God to create a soul who would never cease to exist. Your parents, as co-creators, supplied the stuff, genetics and more, uniquely combined to form a masterpiece, not flawless but still astounding; and we took from their hands what they brought to us, submitting to their timing and history and added what only we could bring to them -- life. You were conceived, a living wonder who exploded into being.

Today's minor irritations may become tomorrow's treasured memories. We often don't know what we are missing, until it's missing.

Healing is as incremental and mysterious as the damage ... what took time, takes time.

Religion and anger has gone together a lot, historically. My father, being very religious and angry, was trying to reconcile the ideas of love and forgiveness with damage in his own heart. We historically create God in the image of someone who will redeem us, or someone who has damaged us. A lot of my imaginations of God was a projection of my own damage because of my father. God is good but he has a lot of expectations, of which I have failed -- just like my dad. But I don't think it's truthful to create God as a projection of either our damage or our altruism.