Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.
The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
Go where your best prayers take you.
Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day's chalking.
The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you.
Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.
Coincidences are God's way of getting our attention.
The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.
It is as impossible for man to demonstrate the existence of God as it would be for even Sherlock Holmes to demonstrate the existence of Arthur Conan Doyle.
A miracle is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A miracle is when one plus one equals a thousand.
To be wise is to be eternally curious.
Joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes....
The place to which God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.
It’s less the words they say than those they leave unsaid that split old friends apart.
Thus, when you wake up in the morning, called by God to be a self again, if you want to know who you are, watch your feet. Because where your feet take you, that is who you are.
Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world's deep need.
Lust is the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst.
Remember me not for the ill I've done but for the good I've dreamed.
If you have never known the power of God's love, then maybe it is because you have never asked to know it - I mean really asked, expecting an answer.
If you don't have doubts you're either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants-in-the-pants of faith. They keep it alive and moving.
God himself does not give answers. He gives himself.
Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.
Listen to your life. All moments are key moments.
You can survive on your own; you can grow strong on your own; you can prevail on your own; but you cannot become human on your own.
Whether you call on him or don't call on him, God will be present with you.
Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp.
... in the long run, there can be no joy for anybody until there is joy finally for us all
Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens.
You enter the extraordinary by way of the ordinary
Lord, I believe; help my unbelief' is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough.
The story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all
Listen. Your life is happening. You are happening. Think back on your journey. The music of your life...
The life thatI touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt.
The place God calls us to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
It is within the bonds of marriage that I, for one, found a greater freedom to be and to become and to share myself thatn I can imaine ever having found in any other kind of relationship.
The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment.
He also said we should carve in the year and place where I was born, but I said no. As a man dies many times before he's dead, so does he wend from birth to birth until, by grace, he comes alive at last.
Words spoken in deep love or deep hate set things in motion in the human heart that can never be reversed
. There are perhaps no more human words in all of Scripture, no prayer we can pray so well. ){kind=small}
Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,' the good thief said from his cross. (Luke 23:42). There are perhaps no more human words in all of Scripture, no prayer we can pray so well.
The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around.
There's no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth.
What's lost is nothing to what's found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.
Jesus didn't come to merely speak words that were true, He is the Word that makes us true.
God in his unending greatness and glory and man in his unending littleness, prepared for the worst but rarely for the best, prepared for the possible but rarely for the impossible.
The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's hunger meet.
There is always the poet, the lunatic, the lover; there is always the religious man who is a queer mixture of the three.
It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God's presence.
What keeps the wild hope of Christmas alive year after year in a world notorious for dashing all hopes is the haunting dream that the child who was born that day may yet be born again even in us.
Theology, like fiction, is largely autobiographical.
To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.
In other words to live Eternal Life in the full and final sense is to be with God as Christ is with him, and with each other as Christ is with us.
If we are a people who pray, darkness is apt to be a lot of what our prayers are about. If we are people who do not pray, it is apt to be darkness in one form or another that has stopped our mouths.
You have to suffer in order to be beautiful.
... the preacher speaks both the word of tragedy and the word of comedy because they are both of them the truth and because Jesus speaks them both...
Who can say when or how it will be that something easters up out of the dimness to remind us of a time before we were born and after we will die?
O thou who art the sparrow's friend," he said, "have mercy on this world that knows not even when it sins. O holy dove, descend and roost on Godric here so that a heart may hatch in him at last. Amen
I find I need to put things into words before I can believe that they are entirely real.
To confess your sins to God is not to tell God anything God doesn't already know. Until you confess them, however, they are the abyss between you. When you confess them, they become the Golden Gate Bridge.
So ever and again young Godric’s dreams well up to flood old Godric’s prayers, or prayers and dreams reach God in such a snarl he has to comb the tangle out, and who knows which he counts more dear.
Once we have seen Him in a stable, we can never be sure where He will appear or to what lengths he will go or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation He will descend in His wild pursuit of men.
With words as valueless as poker chips, we play games whose object it is to keep us from seeing each other's cards.
It was not so much that a door opened as that I suddenly found that a door had been open all along which I had only just then stumbled upon.
One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God.
We are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our own lives but reactors.
The real turning point in human history is less apt to be the day the wheel is invented or Rome falls than the day a boy is born to a couple of hick Jews.
 he was not prescribing a periodic slug of nostalgia. ){kind=small}
When Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of me” (1 Corinthians 11:24) he was not prescribing a periodic slug of nostalgia.
This side of Nirvana, there is no such escape for any of us as far as I know.
Vocation is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.
It is out of the absence of God that God makes himself present,
It is more than just memory, I think, that binds us to the past. The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around...
I hold my plush monkey over the bannister and let it drop. Its eyes light up when you squeeze its kidneys as whose eyes, I suppose, would not.
Because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known
Life without death has become as unthinkable to me as day without night or waking without sleep.
