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;...

Every creative person, and I think probably every other person, faces resistance when they are trying to create something good…The harder the resistance, the more important the task must be.

About the time I told God that He didn’t exist, I was desperate for an identity.

We live in a world where bad stories are told, stories that teach us life doesn’t mean anything and that humanity has no great purpose. It’s a good calling, then, to speak a better story....

What good does it do to tell somebody to live morally so they can die 50 years later and apparently go to Hell?

Sometimes the things we want most in life are the things that will kill us.

Well, let’s consider the value of the dollar. Ultimately, logically, the dollar has no value at all. It’s a piece of paper. It only has value because we say it has value, and because we...

The actual language of life is not the charts and graphs and stuff we map out to feel smart. The hidden language we are speaking is really about negotiating the feeling God used to give...

A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.

Writers don’t make any money at all. We make about a dollar. It is terrible. But then again we don’t work either. We sit around in our underwear until noon then go downstairs and make...

The trouble with deep belief is that it costs something And there is something inside me, some selfish beast of a subtle thing that doesn’t like the truth at all because it carries responsibility, and...

The repentance we are called to is about choosing one audience over another.

When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.

He thought about the story his daughter was living and the role she was playing inside that story. He realized he hadn’t provided a better role for his daughter. He hadn’t mapped out a story...

I began to wonder if what we were doing it evangelical circles had more to do with redeeming ourselves to culture than it did with showing Jesus to a hurting world, a world literally filled...

…burying themselves in his arm was more about feeling his love in the confusion, in the difficulty, than it was about having moved past it.

You don’t realize your story is changing you until you look back.

All our time spent making lists would be better spent painting, or writing, Or singing, or learning to speak stories. Sometimes I feel as though the Church has a kind of pity for Scripture, Always...

I think this is when most people give up on their stories. They come out of college wanting to change the world, wanting to get married, wanting to have kids and change the way people...

It occurs to me it is not so much the aim of the devil to lure me with evil as it is to preoccupy me with the meaningless.

It wasn’t necessary to win for the story to be great, it was only necessary to sacrifice everything.

All this beauty exists so you and I can see His glory, His artwork. It’s like an invitation to worship Him, to know Him.

I never thought to ascribe my mother’s emotional and physical exhaustion to the lack of a husband and father; rather, I ascribed it to my existence. In other words, I grew up learning the exact...

Author Toni Morrison swats aside other possible sources of her success and says that the ONLY reason she is a great writer is because when she walked into a room as a child her father’s...

But in so many ways I’m still that kid, not sure exactly how to be emotionally intimate with a girl without feeling weak, not sure my work is good enough, not sure if the people...

Life isn’t memorable enough to remember everything. It’s not like there are explosions all the time, or dog smoking cigarettes.

If you think about it, we get robbed of the mystery of being alive. I think we get robbed of the glory of it because we don’t remember how we got here. When you get...

And if these mountains had eyes, they would wake to find two strangers in their fences, standing in admiration as a breathing red pours its tinge upon earth’s shore. These mountains, which have seen untold...

This message God was communicating to mankind, this Gospel of Jesus, was a message to the heart as much as to the head, that the methodology was as important as the message itself, that the...

I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding your love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will simply...

Paul was terribly personal. The books I like are the ones that make you feel like you are with a person who is being quite vulnerable, telling you all sorts of stuff that is personal,...

Dwight Eisenhower said that from the beginning, his mother and father operated on an assumption that set the course of his life – that the world could be fixed of its problems if every child...

When you live countless stories in which you play a sedentary role, it’s an odd feeling to switch stories.

I bring this up because in writing some thoughts about a father, or not having a father, I feel as though I’m writing a book about a troll under a bridge or a dragon. For...

Sometimes when I watch my dog, I think about how good life can be, if we only lose ourselves in our stories. Lucy doesn’t read self-help books about how to be a dog; she just...

People assume when you’re swimming in a river you are supposed to know which way you are going, and I guess some of the time that is true, but there are certain currents that are...

I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes,...

A person could read the Bible, not to become smart, but rather to feel that they are not alone, that somebody understands them and love them enough to speak to them, on purpose, in a...

I think if you like somebody you have to tell them. It might be embarrassing to say it, but you will never regret stepping up. I know from personal experience, however, that you should not...

Fear is a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life.

He captures memories because if he forgets them, it’s as though they didn’t happen.