And when you find love, or when you are mature enough to understand it, the feeling you get is gratitude.
In exchange for our humility and willingness to accept the charity of God, we are given a kingdom. And a beggar’s kingdom is better than a proud man’s delusion.
Instead of asking what it feels like to follow God or be used by God, we should be asking who God is, and whether we really know Him. Everything else will take care of itself.
The people I used to be surrounded by are getting along without me. Somehow, that really bugs me.
If you want to bond with your friends, do something very hard with them, something that you won’t be able to do alone.
It is worthy of note that the Chinese and Japanese characters for money and gold are the same.
We shouldn’t be afraid to embrace whimsy, that nagging idea that life could be magical; it could be special if we were only willing to take a few risks.
I stay away from churches in which I feel like I have to pretend I’m a better person than I am. That sort of thing moves my faith backwards.
For me, the beginning of sharing my faith with people began by throwing out Christianity and embracing Christian spirituality, a nonpolitical mysterious system that can be experienced but not explained.
People love to have lived a great story, but few people like the work it takes to make it happen.
The times in my life when I have been most happy haven’t been the times when I have had the most money or the most freedom or the most anything, but rather when I’ve been in love or in community or right with people.
There’s no authoritarian structure at Reed College, but the education is conservative. So what you have is a lot of students who are very authentically looking for truth.
Good stories must travel through conflict. And in epic stories, the conflict must become unbearable.
We don’t know how much we are capable of loving until the people we love are being taken away, until a beautiful story is ending.
Too much of our time is spent trying to chart God on a grid, and too little is spent allowing our hearts to feel awe. By reducing Christian spirituality to formula, we deprive our hearts of wonder.
The more I try to impress people, the more I separate myself from them. Vulnerability attracts love.
I heard once that real love doesn’t ask what is in it for me; it just gives unconditionally. It just tries to take the weight out of somebody else’s pack, lessen his load, and if it gets reciprocated, that’s great, but that isn’t what you did it for.
All relationships are living and alive and moving and becoming something.
I think our society puts too much pressure on romantic love, and that is why so many romances fail. Romance can’t possibly carry all that we want it to.
Suffering ceases to be suffering when you have a redemptive perspective.