but I’m not an asshole. At least not theologically speaking.

While it’s true that you may lose your religion during the course of a lifetime, you never lose your salvation. Once you let Jesus in your kitchen, he just keeps on making peanut butter and...

saved.” Alone. Watching Jimmy Swaggart on late-night TV. I also spent a painful vacation with my family one summer at Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Heritage USA Christian theme park in South Carolina. But that’s...

Did you have the wrong kind? Really? I’ve never had the wrong kind. Never, ever. My worst one was right on the money.” Grace works the same way. It is what it is and it’s...

My nun, which is how I think of her, was the most profound witness for God’s love I’ve ever encountered in this world. She was a magnet for lost souls, a petite fortress of strength...

So … what exactly is a Moby?” That’s like grace. Not that grace is a pretentious vegan techno-rocker, but you get the idea. Grace is everywhere, all around us, all of the time. We only...

monkey mind,” which is more often than not swinging wildly from branch to branch on intellectual and emotional trees. On the way back down the hiking trail after my encounter with the hawk in Big...

We’re so worried about the legal details of crossing doctrinal t’s and dotting sociopolitical i’s that we miss the big picture. The love picture. The one thing Jesus was really clear about: LOVE. If we...

It’s just startling. It isn’t supposed to work. This wasn’t supposed to work.

In

common.”To me, that’s like bickering about what color God’s eyes are. (They’re hazel, in case you were wondering.)

Grace has a way of sneaking up on you like that. When you least deserve it.

Together, on his back porch, his cigarette smoke rising like incense to the heavens, we spoke to the God of grace we both are so grateful to know up close and personal. It may be...

Without it, religion will surely suffocate you.” Because so many of us are gasping for air and grasping for God, but fleeing from a kind of religious experience that has little to do with anything...

Sometimes grace is having the strength to persevere through the storm.Sometimes it’s having the guts to rebuild, to take a chance, to follow your nose and your heart rather than your head.Sometimes grace is finding...

Good morning, God. Another beautiful day. I’m still here, and so is the sun. Thank you. Right, now let’s get down to business.

I wish it was accompanied by harp music so you could know that’s what was happening, but for me it’s that extra pause or that extra breath or that extra minute’s patience against all odds.”...

I’ve heard it said that grace is God reaching God’s hands into the world. And the Bible tells us that we are part of the body of Christ, that if we let the Spirit move...

Grace doesn’t obsess with ourselves. It obsesses with people and with brokenness. This is a hard place to live, but God is bigger than hard places to live.

Then round about the age of twenty-five, I was tired of being tired of being scared about doing something that, if I deconstruct it honestly, might somehow cost me my salvation and make God love...

In her inestimable audacity, Julia was the catalyst in my life for something beautiful. I hadn’t anticipated her—hadn’t even wanted her, truthfully—but there she was. A little something extra that made all the difference in...

Jesus must have had man hands. He was a carpenter, the Bible tells us. I know a few carpenters, and they have great hands, all muscled and worn, with nicks and callused pads from working...

Trying to explain or define grace is like catching the wind in a cardboard box or describing the color green.

Maybe that’s why Jesus was so fond of parables: Nothing describes the indescribable like a good yarn.

She loved you so much.” I know.