If you aren’t telling a good story, nobody thinks you died too soon; they just think you died.
One of the things I love about our source text as Christians, the Bible, is that it teaches us not to avoid conflict. And it teaches us that before the fall of man, in Paradise, there was conflict. God wants conflict to be a part of your life.
Most of us are waiting. We’re waiting for something interesting to happen. And I think we’re going to wait forever if we don’t do something more interesting with our lives.
People who live great stories know failure isn’t a judgment, it’s an education.
In the age of information, ignorance is a choice.
Sometimes the story we’re telling the world isn’t half as endearing as the one that lives inside us.
Nothing is going to change in congo until you and i figure out what is wrong with the person inside the mirror.
Most great art is freedom within form. Without form, we are amateurs, without freedom, we are robots.
No love is conditional. If love is conditional, it’s just some sort of manipulation masquerading as love.
When we think too much about the opinions of others, we are letting them edit a book God has written.
If what you are doing is important, you will encounter resistance. If what you are doing isn’t important it will be easy.
Christians might say that you can’t live a more meaningful life without Jesus. Well, that’s absolutely not true. You can. You can enjoy a sunrise whether you know Jesus or not.
I started ‘Storyline’ after I’d accomplished all my goals and still wasn’t happy. I’d become a ‘New York Times’ bestselling author, which was my goal from high school, and yet I was less happy after accomplishing my goals than I was before.
I tend to write first drafts that are incredibly cognitive, very rational, very boring. They come off as justification. Like, ‘This is my idea and here’s all the reasons that it’s right.’ It doesn’t make for very compelling reading.
When we do what God wants us to do, we are blessed, we are spiritually healthy.
You cannot be a Christian without being a mystic.
Truth grew in my mind like a fungus, and though I tried to sleep it out, there was no resisting the epiphanies.
When one of my friends becomes a Christian, which happens about every 10 years because I am a sheep about sharing my faith, the experience is euphoric. I see in their eyes the trueness of the story.
By accepting God’s love for us, we fall in love with Him, and only then do we have the fuel we need to obey.
I need for there to be something bigger than me. I need someone to put awe inside me; I need to come second to someone who has everything figured out.