I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are yours. Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it means to be human.
Like Adam, we have all lost Paradise; and yet we carry Paradise around inside of us in the form of a longing for, almost a memory of, a blessedness that is no more, or the dream of a blessedness that may someday be again.
Listen to your life. All moments are key moments.
You can kiss your family and friends good-bye and put miles between you, but at the same time you carry them with you in your heart, your mind, your stomach, because you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.
Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.
Jesus didn’t come to merely speak words that were true, He is the Word that makes us true.
If preachers decide to preach about hope, let them preach out of what they themselves hope for.
Despair has been called the unforgivable sin-not presumably because God refuses to forgive it, but because it despairs of the possibility of being forgiven.
You can’t be too careful what you tell a child because you never know what he’ll take hold of and spend the rest of his life remembering you by.
Even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength.
My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours.
Pay mind to your own life, your own health, and wholeness. A bleeding heart is of no help to anyone if it bleeds to death.
Theology, like fiction, is largely autobiographical.
Faith in God is less apt to proceed from miracles than miracles from faith in God.
When someone we love suffers, we suffer with that person, and we would not have it otherwise, because the suffering and the love are one, just as it is with God’s love for us.
If you want to talk about grace, if you want to talk about revelation, talk about your life with some depth, which doesn’t mean lurid revelations as much as simply looking at your own deep experiences and describing them as they are.
Vocation is the place where the world’s greatest need and a person’s greatest joy meet.
The sacred moments, the moments of miracle, are often the everyday moments.
Like a house in the rain, books were havens of permanence and protection from whatever it was that as a child I needed protection from.
Through the power that memory gives us of thinking, feeling, imagining our way back through time we can at long last finally finish with the past in the sense of removing its power to hurt us and other people and to stunt our growth as human beings.