…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;...

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...