He said to me I was a tree in a story about a forest, and that it was arrogant of me to believe any differently. And he told me the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree.
She knows who she is. She just forgot for a little while.
I’m the kind of person who wants to present my most honest, authentic self to the world, so I hide backstage and rehearse honest and authentic lines until the curtain opens.
A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.
Job found contentment and even joy, outside the context of comfort, health or stability. He understood the story was not about him, and he cared more about the story then he did about himself.
If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation.
Christian spirituality was not a children’s story. It wasn’t cute or neat. It was mystical and odd and clean, and it was reaching into dirty. There was wonder in it and enchantment.
All this beauty exists so you and I can see His glory, His artwork. It’s like an invitation to worship Him, to know Him.
I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.
I asked God to help me understand the story of the forest and what it means to be a tree in that story.
It occurs to me it is not so much the aim of the devil to lure me with evil as it is to preoccupy me with the meaningless.
I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made fo figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.
I am something of a recluse by nature. I am that cordless screwdriver that has to charge for twenty hours to earn ten minutes use. I need that much downtime.
It wasn’t necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.
You never question the truth of something until you have to explain it to a skeptic.
I think it’s very hard for us, for Christians, to understand that it’s okay to read a book, for instance, on how to manage your time. There’s nothing wrong with that.
I’m just trying to make the point that the story we’re telling ourselves is often very different from the story we’re telling the people around us.
The ambitions we have will become the stories we live.
I think, in the grand epic, Jesus is the hero of our stories. And our stories, as they were, are subplots in a grand epic and our job is not to be the hero of any story. Our job is to be a saint in a story that he is telling.
Telling the truth is the slow, mundane, difficult route to a meaningful life. Anything else is cheating.