Denial is fear gone delusional. Acceptance is fear given to God. Engaging is fear overruled by God. Victory is fear banished by God.

If left to my own simplistic devices and the sorely scant limits of my abilities, would I not die a death of the blandest sort imaginable? And should I not thank God that He graciously gifted me with an imagination that renders such a death entirely unimaginable?

If I wholly unleash my imagination and forcefully stretch it out beyond its own edges, even at such a point I can only imagine a thin shard of this most immense God. And even though it is but a thin shard, it will nonetheless be mesmerizingly colossal.

I think myself so terribly ‘clever’ that the need for God is blatantly irrelevant. And all the while, in the rapidly growing mess that I’m ‘cleverly’ creating, I rather quickly begin to realize that the only thing that is relevant is His relevance.

There’s something tightly woven throughout the fabric of our humanity that runs entirely opposite to the baser instinct of looking out for our own good.

Christmas is not something that sprang from the musings of some person who creatively devised caricatures of elves, spiraling candy canes, visions of a magical city whose foundation was nestled in the far reaches of the North Pole, or embellishments of a kindly bishop spun by myth into a bearded old man in a red...

Despite our battered exterior and in spite of the festering scars and rank filth that overlays it, there is underneath it all the pristine likeness of God Himself. And we would be wise to cast an eye not on the marred exterior, but to be fixed on the glorious interior.

Contrary to popular opinion, we are all a vast brotherhood of human beings whose very survival hinges not on what we keep, but on what we give. And it is in the giving that we not only survive to live another day, but we thrive to celebrate another day.

We may find great relief and inexplicable solace in purposefully looking beyond grief in order to determine the provision made within it.

Sometimes the grandest of all events are described in the poverty of a few simple words.

God would have us cherish even the smallest of blessings, for in taking a blessing for granted we are well on our way to taking it to its grave.

I too often allow people to become a sterile commodity to be bartered in the service of my greed, and in doing something so absurdly reckless I foolishly barter away everything that meets my need.

Denial is a seductive ruse of our own making, force-fitting our agendas by forcing out truth all because we bent to fear rather than bowed to God.

Purpose declares that the trajectory of my existence and the course of human history were intentionally set to collide at this precise moment in time because what I have to offer human history is desperately needed at this precise time.

To assist us in climbing the mountains is marvelous. To level the mountains and altogether eliminate the climb is miraculous. And at times I think that God prefers the latter because it emboldens us to face the former.

In too many instances we have settled for a world of our own shaping that is shaping up to be in terrible shape.

If I give with the motive to get, regardless of the degree to which that motive besets me, I will walk away impoverished and I will leave those to whom I have given just as impoverished as I have now found myself.

Christmas is everything that God would do, and nothing that we would imagine Him doing.

Sometimes things that appear completely irreconcilable and mutually exclusive serve a shared purpose that could not be achieved except through their contradiction.

Goliath’s” standing without Him.

If I am always standing at the bottom of the mountain longingly looking up, in all probability it is because I have heeded the pillaging dogma of mediocrity which persistently tells me that the dream is not worth the climb.

To strategize a rescue mission irrefutably capable of saving every human being is leagues beyond our ability to comprehend, and enormous beyond any resource we possess to execute. And to embark upon just such a mission fully knowing that without our death the mission will fall to failure is bravery of the greatest sort imaginable....

To be ‘one’ in one’s own hands is to be ‘one.’ To be ‘one’ in the hands of God is to be ‘one’ that is far too vast to be counted.

May we know fear, but may we always refuse to court cowardice.

It was the greatest, most intricate, most ingenious and most costly rescue mission in all of human history.

There is a deep dryness of the soul and all of the recalcitrant contrivances of man to quench his own thirst will bring not a single drop of moisture to those parched places, for God and God alone holds the water that satiates the soul.

Great difficult is the dogged bedfellow of great wealth, which always renders great wealth as less than great. Yet, great wealth as bequeathed by God is robustly free of such travails, which always renders it greater than great.

I often wonder if my imagination is one of God’s choicest gifts bestowed upon me to deliberately break me free from the frequent doldrums of my humanity.

To be blessed and yet permit gluttony to blind me to the blessings is to banish myself to a life of unrelenting poverty even though I might be utterly engulfed in the embrace of a million marvelous blessings.

We myopically stare at the gaping hole left in our lives and see nothing but the hole, not realizing a hole is defined by everything around it that is not a hole.

Maybe we need to reflect on the fact that the patience of God always outruns the impatience of our greed, and that His love always outweighs the greed that outweighs our love for Him.

It is inevitable that I will leave a legacy simply because I cannot walk through life without leaving footprints as I walk. Therefore, I would be wise to consider the path before I make the prints.

An end is only a beginning in disguise.

Starting over is an acceptance of a past we can’t change, an unrelenting conviction that the future can be different, and the stubborn wisdom to use the past to make the future what the past was not.

Forgiving others simply means that you refuse to be a prisoner of a past that you can’t change, and shackled to decisions that you didn’t make.

I am thankful that sacrifice is non-negotiable, and that counting the cost in giving to another is foolishly assuming that we can put a price on sacrifice.

There’s something inherently majestic about Christmas that seems to have been abandoned by us; something flippantly cast aside, something that was foolishly abandoned and was tragically forgotten in the abandonment.

Despite opinions to the contrary, restoring Godly values is the most progressive course of action that we could ever hope to take.

I would be dreadfully remiss not to think that God would painstakingly craft something an intimately ingenious and inexplicably intricate as my life, and that by virtue of such sheer brilliance I should not examine it with the greatest precision and unleash it with the fullest abandon.

Jesus came to give us life so unimaginably beyond anything that we could ever hope to conceptualize that wonder cannot help but be our constant companion.

Jesus was and is the greatest restoration specialist of all time.

The love hidden within is always greater than the hate displayed without.

To be bold is to be wise enough to realize that fear is the energy that fuels action.

Christmas is a response to bring mankind back, to restore some original intent that could never be even remotely restored by any effort of mankind regardless of how grand or majestic any such effort might be.

Will I someday pass into history having passed by God and therefore forfeited the opportunity to change my world and reap the blessing of being able to do so because I saw myself as inadequate to achieve either? And how long will it take me to realize that if I doggedly refuse to pass by...

If the amount of times we get up is just one less than the amount of times that we’ve been knocked down, then we’re spending our lives lying down.

The greatest imagination in all of existence is one that would be able to take ‘nothing’ and imagine ‘something’ from ‘nothing.’ And that is God.

Too many of us view liberty as something that ‘just is,’ and too few see it as something that ‘is’ only because someone, somewhere was faced with the formidable reality that to keep liberty meant paying a stiff price.

I think we need to consider a radical rewrite of any form of patriotism that serves the individual at the expense of the community, as that is nothing more than patriotism to one’s own small and solitary cause.

The ‘deep pause’ needed to cultivate wonder is far too often back-filled with an incessant busyness, as busyness errantly presumes a ‘deep pause’ to be deeply wasteful.