I once listened to an Indian on television say that God was in the wind and the water, and I wondered at how beautiful that was because it meant you could swim in Him or...

I liked this God very much because you hardly had to talk to it and it never talked back. Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

All relationships are teleological, are going somewhere.

I know, from the three visits I made to him, the blended composite of love and fear that exists only in a boy’s notion of his father.

Because it is so scatterbrained and has absolutely no charts and graphs, I’m actually quite surprised the Bible sells.

We were made to be distracted by life, by story.

When I walked into the Christian section of a bookstore, the message was clear: Faith is something you do alone. Rick does not have much tolerance for people living alone. He’s like Bill Clinton in...

The inciting incident is how you get (characters) to do something. It’s the doorway through which they can’t return, you know. The story takes care of the rest.

..[My friend Marco said]. essentially, humans are alive for the purpose of journey, a kind of three-act structure. They are born and spend several years discovering themselves and the world, then plod through a long...

I can no more understand the totality of God than the pancake I made for breakfast understands the complexity of me

When you build a city near no mountains and no ocean, you get materialism and traditional religion. People have too much time and lack inspiration.

All this gave way to my first encounter with guilt, which is still something entirely inscrutable to me, as if aliens were sending transmissions from another planet, telling me there is a right and a...

Jesus had no regard for the lifeboat politics you and I live within every day.

(The monks) approach was far less narcissistic and our tends to be. Their goal when reading Scripture was to see Christ in every verse, and not a mirror image of themselves.

It is always the simple things that change our lives. And these things never happen when you are looking for them to happen. Life will reveal answers at the pace life wishes to do so....

But playing your music as loud as you want and coming home drunk aren’t real life. Real life, it turns out, is diapers and lawnmowers, decks that need painting, a wife that needs to be...

I was starting to believe I was a character in a greater story, which is why the elements of story made sense in the first place.

The only appropriate war rhetoric is more rhetoric that calls our enemies spirits and people with flesh the victims of this war. Satan wants us to fight with one another, and I understand that some...

It comforts me to think that if we are created beings the thing that created us would have to be greater than us, so much greater, in fact, that we would not be able to...

At the time, I didn’t know what forgiveness meant. I wouldn’t really know what forgiveness meant for another year, until my pastor, Rick McKinley, happened to spell it out in a sermon. He said that...

Everybody wants to be somebody fancy. Even if they’re shy.

You can’t memorize poetry and stay a fake. Sooner or later, you start to understand what these poets are saying, and it makes you feel life has something quite special, with certain layers of meaning...

You’d think God would come right out and tell us what to do in the Bible, but He doesn’t. He mostly tells stories, and He rarely stops the story to say what the point is....

For a long time, I thought I was good at relationships because I was charming.

It was a haunting feeling, the sort of sensation you get when you wonder whether you are two people, the other of which does things you can’t explain, bad and terrible things.

We don’t know how much we are capable of loving until the people we love are being taken away, until a beautiful story is ending.

Today I wonder why it is God refers to Himself as ‘Father’ at all. This, to me, in light of the earthly representation of the role, seems a marketing mistake.

The human body essentially recreates itself every six months. Nearly every cell of hair and skin and bone dies and another is directed to its former place. You are not who you were last November.

I feel guilty because for a long time I didn’t allow myself a television, and I used to drop that fact in conversation to impress people. I thought it made me sound dignified. A couple...

It will not appeal to children.

Perhaps one of the reasons I’ve avoided standing on the point toward the horizon is the second you stand up and point toward a horizon, you realize how much there is to lose.

If the Gospel of Jesus is relational, that is, if our brokenness will be fixed not by our understanding of theology but by God telling us who we are, then this would require a kind...

…I love this about Christian spirituality. It cannot be explained, and yet it is beautiful and true. It is something you feel, and it comes from the soul.

…I wondered about the story we were writing and wanted even more to write a better story for myself, something that leaves a beautiful feeling even as the credits roll.

If you dont love somebody, it gets annoying if they tell you what to do or what to feel. When you love them, you get pleasure from their pleasure nad it makes it easy to...

God allows us to face the tension whether we like it or not.

The same principles that make up a good story also make up a good life.

The person who believes the sum of his morality involves gay marriage and abortion alone, and neglects health care and world trade and the environment and loving his neighbor and feeding the poor is, by...

I don’t wonder anymore what I’ll tell God when I go to heaven when we sit in the chairs under the tree, outside the city……..I’ll tell these things to God, and he’ll laugh, I think...

You get a feeling when you look back on life that all God really wants from us is to live inside a body He made, and enjoy the story, and to bond with Him through...

I will give you this, my love, and I will not bargain or barter any longer. I will love you, as sure as He has loved me. I will discover what I can discover and...

To know there is a better story for your life and to choose something other is like choosing to die.

A big part of me needed something outside myself to tell me who I was. The thing that had been designed to tell me who I was was gone.

I think that’s why so many couples fight, because they want their partners to validate them and affirm them, and if they don’t get that, they feel as though they’re going to die. And so...

In church, the rules of the lifeboat don’t apply. Church is the refuge where the Kingdom of God is emulated, not mocked.

The reason stories have dramatic tension is because LIFE has dramatic tension.

The separation of truth from reason is a dangerous game. I think ideas have to sink very deeply into a person’s soul, into their being, before they can effect change.

I listened so hard because it felt like, while she was telling me stories, she was massaging my soul, letting me know that I was not alone, that I will never have to be alone,...

Life has a peculiar feel when you look back on it that it doesn’t have when you’re actually living it. It’s as though the whole thing were designed to be understood in hindsight, as though...

…to be in a relationship with God is to be loved purely and furiously. And a person who thinks himself unlovable cannot be in a relationship with God because he can’t accept who God is;...