Jesus is not the ’founder of Christianity.
There is always risk in relationships, but bottom line? The world has no meaning apart from relationships. Some are just messier than others, some are seasonal, others are difficult, and a few are easy, but every one of them is important.
Part of my journey is to say that the soul of the human being must be a massively intricate, wonderful creation that God has a respect for in ways that we do not and that leaves a huge amount of space to go explore.
You cannot heal yourself. You cannot heal anybody else. We’re designed to do this in community because we were created inside community for community by community.
It wasn’t long ago I was cleaning toilets and now I have protestors. How cool is this?
And when you learn, over the course of your life, that it’s not about pleasing God, it’s about learning how to trust God. That’s a huge watershed, because trust is a whole different ballgame than appeasement or pleasing.
The arrival of the unforeseen reveals the depths of one’s heart.
The enemy of a writer is not controversy but obscurity.
Today’s minor irritations may become tomorrow’s treasured memories. We often don’t know what we are missing, until it’s missing.
It is my desire and intent to trust the multi-layered good purposes of God than in what humans fabricate out of their need and experience. I specifically ask not to know these purposes so that I might remain a child in their unfolding.
Image and appearance tell you little. The inside is bigger than the outside when you have the eyes to see.
The God of Evangelical Christianity is a Monster.
I believe that, that Christ became sin for us.
I think that most creative fiction involves the transformational process, whether it is Dickens or Dostoyevsky and the writer in some sense is expressing their own journey through such a wilderness.
I grew up fundamentalist, evangelical, Protestant. Those are my roots, and they are good roots. But it means the Pharisees are my people. I grew up with an image of God that was not helpful – largely the face of my father expanded.
Jesus was always challenging the dogma of religion. So, you know, it’s not like I’m out there by myself.
I don’t want my kids growing up with the image of God that I had – Plato’s white grandfatherly god – because that god is not a very good father. When it comes down to it, you can’t trust him with your kids.
You are the root, and only God knows that the flower will be.
My dad was a preacher. My relationship, for example, with my father – very difficult, and very painful, and it took me 50 years to wipe the face of my father off the face of God.
Look at us human beings: it’s so much easier to be right than to love.