We ask, ‘Why the need for God?’ Maybe the better question is ‘Why the need not to need Him?’ And could it be that that question in fact evidences our need for Him?
You are not made in ‘your image’. You are, in fact, made in ‘God’s image’. Therefore, which one are you looking for when you look in the mirror?
If I’ve prayed, I never have to worry about being the first one to show up.
The world is shaken by major events, but it is ‘transformed’ by slight subtleties. And while we may be far too small to create even one major event, we are just the right size to craft a thousand subtleties.
In the end, if we don’t have God we don’t have anything other than an end.
The darkness that follows a sunset is never so dark that it can change the inevitability of a sunrise.
Faith is rare because fear is rampant. For faith will demand that I step into places that fear itself fears to go.
Forgiveness allows the burdens that we carry to become the histories that we forget.
When we choose to stay down, we are in reality confusing wisdom with cowardice. When we choose to stand back up, we are using wisdom to overcome cowardice.
I can arrogantly brag that the doors I choose in life open wide and grant me unobstructed passage. But the widest doors tend to lead to the worst places.
A compass calibrated by my greed is a rather shrewd way to legitimize my agenda. However, true north on a compass such as this is a straight line to the edge of a really big cliff.
It’s not that I’ve been invited to the hole I’m standing in. It’s that I accepted the invitation.
Things becomes invisible at the very moment I refuse to grant them importance. And while I am utterly ashamed to admit it, many of the most important things in my life are invisible.
If there’s one thing that’s irrefutably absurd, it’s believing that we can separate intelligence from wisdom and still have it be intelligence.
Too often, opinion is a lens polished by the grit of bias. And as I stare through my own lens, I might ask how much polish can the grit of bias actually create?
I must never equate the degree of pain as evidencing the incorrectness of a decision, for if I do I will default on some of the most critical decisions I should have ever made.
I’m in a hole because at some point I found a shovel and started digging. Maybe I should trade my shovels for ladders and start climbing.
So, there’s this hornet’s nest. And there’s this long stick. And then there’s me. How I walk away from all of this will depend on whether I realize that some things go together and some things don’t no matter how hard you try.
If you can get others to believe that your random guesses are actual answers, they’ll never guess that you never understood the question in the first place.
Impulsivity is something akin to spontaneously jumping out of an airplane and not realizing that you forgot something until about five seconds before impact.
Things that are truly great need nothing from me, and to somehow think that they do speaks to my utter lack of greatness.
If I simply look at the map that I’ve so tediously created, it will explain why I’m laying at the bottom of this cliff looking up.
Truth even in the most whispered tones will always roar.
Looking back, I now realize that I left home in search of all the things that were right in the very place I left.
Once faith dies, the death of hope follows hard on its heels.
Strength other than that received from God is just hype manufactured by men.
I ask, ‘Is the cup half-empty or half-full?’ And when I ask that question, I am amazed at how many people have no cup.
Hope is not some thin thing that is subject to the winds of fate, but it is crafted hard by the hands of God.
Hope is not some thin thing that is subject to the winds of fate. Rather, it is something crafted hard by the hands of God.
With God, the impossible is not an obstacle but an invitation.
Easter is a marvelous affirmation of the genius of our design, but it is likewise the blunt acknowledgement that left to its own devices, the genius of our design will result in the destruction of our lives.
My fear of endings too often blocks my hope of beginnings.
Any dream that I am absolutely confident I can achieve should immediately be discarded for the simple reason that it is simply too small.
The message of Christmas is a message of hope when all other such messages created by men can do nothing more than be hopeful.
Where there is no hope, there is Christmas. And where there is no Christmas, there is no hope.
In my desperation, I have finally discovered that the only way that I can begin to fill the gaping hole within me is to be thankful for what’s there, and not angry for what’s not.
The strewn and tangled wreckage that litters our lives is the precious raw material from which great beginnings are forged.
Darkness should never be an excuse to quit, for with God, darkness is the exact stuff that light was built for.
Ignorance is avoiding that which stands in front of me out of the misplaced hope that it will put what I’m ignoring behind me. Instead, it’s most certain to drop it on top of me.
Fairness is not something to which we are entitled. Rather, it is something for which we hope.
My goals exceed the reach of my energies, but my God exceeds the reach of my goals.
Underneath the chaos there stirs a great plan. And it will be birthed only if I give it permission to do so because I have exercised the faith that it’s there.
The greatest prayers that I could ever utter come from the heart. And when I pray that way, I rarely need to open my mouth. Therefore, maybe I should think about talking less.
It is when I am cold, alone, bitterly forlorn and shuttered from all hope that you will see who I truly am. And my goal is that at those most precarious of moments, what you will see is Jesus holding you through my tears.
True peace cannot be found in a ‘place’. Rather, it is found in a Person who can be with you in any ‘place’.
If I am not at ‘peace’, then I can be altogether confident that I’ve placed a larger ‘piece’ of myself in the hands of someone other than God.
In the absence of faith, our dreams will move from feasible aspirations to implausible fantasy.
It’s not a lack of opportunity around me. Rather, it’s a lack of faith within me.
With God, the fear of failure is slain cold by success that is already hot on the way.
I must not imagine what is ‘not’ as a means of escaping what ‘is’. Rather, I must understand what ‘is’ and imagine how I can make it what it is ‘not’.
Faith is the most unexercised muscle known to man.
Rather than being incensed by the nature of the bruise, maybe we should be inspired by the possibilities in the bruise.
Most often, what I don’t know will have a vastly greater bearing on my life that what I do know.
God’s genius is as wide as the cosmos, while by comparison our intelligence can find room on the head of a pin.
Intelligence and wisdom are certainly compatible, however they are rarely seen in each other’s company.
Common sense is one of the most unused commodities available to man.
To think that we grasp the fullness of life is to say that by holding a mere drop of water in our hands we are able to understand the immensity of the ocean.
Do I make up some ‘god’ in my mind, or do I make up my mind to know God?
The common theme of common sense is that it’s commonly rejected as uncommonly demanding.
I want to ‘think’ that I have all the answers. But if I ‘think’, I soon realize that what I thought to be answers were guesses. And if I ‘think’ yet again, I begin to realize that since God has all the answers He never hands me a guess.
The road to success is paved with the hot asphalt of failure.
I yearn not for the easy path, but for the right path. For ‘easy’ and ‘right’ are rarely compatible.
The father who has selflessly poured himself into the life of his children may leave no other monument than that of his children. But as for a life well lived, no other monument is necessary.
It’s not about inviting great things into our lives. Rather, it’s about accepting the invitation of great things to step out of our lives.
The world screams, ‘Stay down, it’s safer.’ My soul screams, ‘So is being dead.
Despite the voices of the culture that would scream otherwise, victory is irreparably tied to the surrender of self. And that explains why so few are truly victorious.
My definition of success is not based on achieving the impossible, but rather surviving the probable. And with a threshold that horribly low, simple survival cannot help but become my highest aspiration.
Authentic love is deciding to live on a one-way street where all the arrows point down the street and not a single one of them point back up to where I’m standing.
As I contemplate a relationship with God, I find that I’m afraid to ride on the coattails of the infinite. But what I fear more than that is spending my life in the coat closet.
It’s not about describing someone as that’s typically an attempt to make whatever they are comfortable for whoever we are. Instead, we may wish to skip the agenda of the description and embrace the wonder of the person.
Real relationships are the product of time spent, which is why so many of us have so few of them.
Vulnerability creates unimaginable space to build each other up, as much as it creates ample room to tear each other down.
Betrayal is advancing myself at the expense of the one who I committed myself to advance.
I cannot live without you. For to attempt to do so would be to rob both of us of each other, and that is thievery of the greatest sort.
What rubs off on me is hard to rub off. So, I’d better figure out what I rubbing up against.
A life that chooses not to grow is a life that died long before it ever lived.
To spin the tale with great flourish but never live the tale is the power of vision strangled to fiction by the fiction of fear.
Too often we make it more about what stands before us, and we miss all that stands within us.
Ignorance is my refusal to think outside the box of my fears.
We can be seized with panic of the fall, or inspired by the potential that lies within the fall.
Too often it’s about what stands before us, not what stands within us.
My life is too often driven by the fear of the next moment verses focusing on the privilege that I have the next moment.
What is fear but that ‘thing’ that we believed to be as powerful as it pretended to be.
I’m not the author of my fears, but I sure feed them really well.
Maybe my greater fear should not be fear itself, but what I will lose should I submit to fear.
The restless adventurer within me stands eye-to-eye with the fear that has stepped directly in my path. And the thing I absolutely must not do is to blink first.
Sadly, in too many cases surrender is having been ‘outrun’ by fear rather than having ‘run out’ of heart.
If we’re honest, what makes something impossible is not our fear. Rather, it is our indifference.
If your dream doesn’t scare you, it’s not big enough.
Sadly, it seems that I have the proclivity to create plenty of devils, but most of the time I don’t even go looking for angels.
Fear is my mind painstakingly creating the worse-case scenario and then putting it on steroids.
Running’ is driven by panic. ‘Destination’ is driven by thought. And while it’s terribly painful to admit, incessantly pretending that I do the latter doesn’t replace the fact that I’m constantly doing the former.
To ‘pretend’ is to say that I’m willing to waste the precious energy that it takes to pretend, and I’m unwilling to cultivate the bravery that it takes to be real. And I am at a complete loss to pretend that either of these aren’t true.
Too often fear is fiction madly running amuck, all the while madly tracking ‘muck’ across the floor of fact.
We will understand the depth of our vision when at some point we are finally faced with the price we must pay to achieve it. And when the price comes calling, most visions end up falling.
Have we ever thought that being lost is our destination?
I spend a tremendous amount of time carefully choosing the roles I wish to play so that I can run from the role I was born to play. And if I keep on doing that, I will eventually set foot in my grave never having set foot on the stage.
If there’s any redeeming quality that I can find in running away from something, it’s that I’m on my feet. Now all I’ve got to do is alter my direction.
Be absolutely assured that we will die long before our own deaths if we ever allow the fear of adulthood to kill the wonder of childhood.
Fear left unrestrained always leaves us running ‘from’ something. Fear harnessed compels us to run ‘to’ something. And fear denied leaves us running in circles.
Comfort is not a goal that I seek, rather it is a place that I hide.
The more we construct lives that prioritize safety, the bigger the prison we construct around ourselves.
If I am sufficiently brave to extract the cancer of fear, I have effectively gutted my conviction that what stands before me is impossible.
Safety is not a destination that we reach for, rather it is a retreat that we escape to. And if our lives are marked by the incessant search for safety, we will live the whole of it going in reverse.
We think that boxes take everything that’s bad and they lock all that nasty stuff out, when in reality they take everything that we are and they lock all of those great things in.
It’s not about the elimination of fear. Rather it’s about the elimination of the feeling that the elimination of fear is necessary before we take the next step.
What excites us the most or likewise scares us the most is when something is exactly what it says it is. And when it comes to Christmas, we’re going to end up finding ourselves on one side of that line or the other.
How often have I painted a splendid picture of a journey marked by courageous ascents and daring desert crossings when all along all I’ve really been doing is running?
Fear is often bred of an imagination that couldn’t let something be what it actually was.
By choosing comfort we are in the very same decision choosing to miss every great thing in life, and that thought should be anything but comforting.
The choice to avoid risk is the choice to avoid living, and to avoid living is one of the greatest risk of all.
Fate’ and ‘coincidence’ are the mythological derivatives authored by those who refuse to see a ‘greater purpose’, because such a conclusion would naturally suggest a ‘Greater Being’.
To look beyond our horizons is to acknowledge that we’ve hemmed ourselves in by creating them in the first place.
I much prefer not to fall, unless of course I am falling into the hands of God.
Choosing a life of safety is safely choosing something other than life.
Either we are running ‘from’ what we fear or running ‘to’ what we fear. The former is a choice controlled by fear, the latter is an action inspired by it.
The anticipation of loss is much more frightening than the actual loss as anticipation leaves room for the imagination to create that which, in all likelihood, will never transpire.
Either we are running ‘from’ what we fear, or running ‘to’ what we fear. The former is a choice driven by fear, the latter is an action inspired by it.
Mediocrity is a path cleared by fear, leveled by apathy and paved by comfort.
One of the most terrifying things I fear is not my potential, but how much regret I’ll die with should I never use it.
The paralyzing fear of being lost is fed solely by the irrational fear that we will never be found.
God’s eyes readily see beyond our actions, for our actions are simply fear and selfishness pretending to be us.
Most of our fears are borrowed. Since that’s the case, we should get busy returning them.
The power of a thing is not based on the power it actually possesses. Rather, it is much more about the power that we permit it to possess.
To intentionally pass on opportunity is to intentionally pass on living.
If I am brave enough to stand against those who have been groomed by fear, I will recognize that where I get knocked down is all about where life begins, and has nothing to do with where it ends.
Loss is an invitation to a journey of unparalleled growth, yet we seldom RSVP the invitation.
We tend to deny our humanity because in accepting the fullness of it, we would need to confess how little we’ve done with it.
Comfort is a stance of avoidance rather than the pursuit of excellence.
I must look at the ‘nature’ of God, not the ‘nature’ of the challenge. For the former means everything and the latter means nothing.
I cannot be afraid of being afraid. Rather, I need to realize that it is my fear that gives me the energy to wrestle that which I fear into the dirt that is soon to become the road underneath my feet.
The only reason I can’t jump in and engage life is that I’ve told myself I can’t. Yet I can’t helping wondering would happen if I told myself I could?
To seek the praise of men as our motivation is to abandon truly great things, for more often than not truly great things elicit the ire of men far more than they garner their praises.
I think that it is infinitely wiser to accept the fact that we’re afraid, for in accepting our fear we are in no way granting it the power to crush us. Rather we are finally empowering ourselves sufficiently so that we can crush it.
Why is it that none of the things I construct ever make me feel safe? The answer lies in the fact that safety can’t be created. It can only be found. And the only thing I’ve found that’s never been created is God.
Bravery is not found in getting knocked down. Rather, bravery is found is getting back up knowing that you’re going to get knocked down again.
I often ask to what place I am running, for if I am unable to identify that place it is likely that I am running in a circle of the most circular sort.
To fall is not to fail. To fail is to never fall because I never got up in the first place.
Is the goal I’ve set been determined by a desire to avoid the goal I should have set?
Because I have ‘chosen’ to see something as impossible, there’s a good chance that it’s not.
I do not walk into the storm unless I have been called into the storm. For the former is arrogance and the latter is obedience.
If I’m perplexed by the fact that I’m constantly lost, maybe somewhere in my head I’ve determined that being lost serves a greater purpose than being found.
However far I’ve come, it’s probably somewhere less than halfway of where I could be if I simply believed in myself.
If truth be told, the easy road is nothing more than an armchair in clever disguise. And if you look around, it seems that there are a whole lot of people in the furniture business.
Once I realize that the tune I’m whistling in my head is the theme that’s driving my heart, I suddenly realize that the most important question I can ask is, “What are the lyrics?
An idea without sacrifice, regardless of grand it might be, will never be anything more than an idea.
Love never lives on a one-way street, for it will always come back up the road bigger than how we had sent it down the road.
I pretend to give gifts that people pretend to be gifts so that I can pretend that I gave something that actually cost me something. And what pretending or this sort gives me is the gift of a pretend life.
To judge someone is to say that I have the right to define who they are, verses understanding that God has handed me the priceless privilege of discovering who they are.
A label locks me into a definition that people use to control me. A vision graces me with an idea that serves to release me.
With God, anything that stands against you will always be inferior to what resides within you.
Sadly, I put my dreams to bed long before they ever had the chance to get tired.
When my vision is numbed by apathy and narrowed by mediocrity, I can stand in the presence of great things and fail to see even the smallest of things.
Dreams are ideas where the collar has been removed and the leash has been thrown away.
Risk is the clue that our dreams are both real and great.
An exceptional future can only be built on the transformation of the mess I’ve made out of my past, not the elimination of that mess.
Dreams must be chased, for if we wait for them to chase us we will live a life of waiting.
In many instances, the failures of my greatest schemes ultimately lead to the fulfillment of my greatest successes. Therefore, God will allow our most cherished dreams to perish so that we might turn and seek out His most cherished plans.
You are greater than you can possibly imagine, if you would only free yourself up to imagine.
To even begin to embrace the magnitude of God’s vision, we must first embrace our vision as being nothing more than vision by definition.
Consequences are not the spoiler that kills my dreams. Rather, they are the lessons that enhance my dreaming.
Decisions are the privilege we’ve been granted to have a hand in penning the script of our lives. And in the writing, the question is not the availability of the paper or the pen. The question is the wisdom to use them rightly.
Every tomorrow is an outcome of what I do today, and the beauty of it all is that today is happening all the time.
I can be absolutely assured that any endeavor of which God is not a part is most certainly a step backward. And any step backward is at least two steps behind where I’d be if I’d have gone forward in the first place.
Shame is embarrassment multiplied against itself until it dies under it’s own weight and we with it. Forgiveness is freedom multiplied against the Cross until it flies under it’s own liberation and we with it.
The birthplace of anarchy is the cemetery of freedom.
Rights’ are ‘privileges,’ and if I am arrogant enough to demand the former without respecting the latter I will lose both.
It is not the chains of some tyrant that robs us of freedom. Rather, it is the staleness of our attitude.
The assumption of ‘rights’ is the cancer of privilege.
We work hard to believe that our actions really don’t affect others all that much because we want the license to act without thinking all that much.
I don’t know that love is freedom. Rather, I think it’s more a force to preserve freedom.
To embrace an attitude of humility is to free myself from myself. And that is likely the great liberation of all.
One of the greatest lies is to believe that we don’t have value. One of the greatest mistakes is to act on that belief. And the greatest liberation is found in looking at the cross of Christ and realizing the enormity of the lie.
That which I cannot hold is that which I can treasure the most because it affords me no burden other than to enjoy it.
Independence that has declared its ‘independence’ from the sure and certain compass of sound morals is nothing more than rogue greed having scantily dressed itself in the garb of independence while running off the cliff of anarchy.
We know enough to know that all of this is not quite right. And we know enough to know that settling for what’s not quite right is quite wrong.
Discerning the difference between a dictator and a leader is quite easy. The former cannot help but see ‘leading’ and ‘serving’ as stark contradictions that by their very nature are utterly incompatible. The latter can’t tell the difference
I am thankful that there are those among us who have sacrificed dearly on behalf of us. And I ardently pray to God that I might be less like myself and more like them.
An exceptional future can only be built on the transformation of the mess I’ve made, not the elimination of it.
The only thing I have to wait for to change my life is my attitude.
To pretend is to do nothing more than imagine life as something wonderful so that we don’t have to incur the pain that it takes to actually make life wonderful.
How often is my tidy and well-appointed world nothing but the thin veneer of an imagination that I’ve chosen to use in the service of denial, rather than a gift I’ve chosen to exercise out of a passion for change?
If I had any hand in it at all there’s a chance that it might be beautiful, but it simply cannot not be majestic.
My heart says, ‘This way.’ The world says, ‘That way.’ God says, ‘I am the Way.’ And if perchance I choose to listen to the first two, I’m going to find myself so far off the ‘way’ that being lost becomes the ‘way’.
If the light we have is continually engulfed by the darkness in a way that makes the darkness even darker, maybe we should think about getting our light from Someone else before it gets a whole lot darker.
The best I can do is to ‘pretend’ that I’m my own god. But in the pretending I have to pretend that I’m not pretending, and somehow that doesn’t sound very god-like to me.
To deny the battle is unwise. To believe that I can fight it without God is insane. To actually do so is suicidal. No wonder so many of us walk around looking like death warmed over.
If I choose to take the pen from God and write the story of my life without Him, I better have plenty of erasers and a whole lot of white-out. Better yet, I should invest in a good shredder.
Sooner or later I will be faced with the fact that the world is helpless to meet my needs. And at that point, I will be left with two conclusions; that life is cruel or God is real.
There’s not much that I can find in places where there is nothing to find. However, to avoid facing God I find myself spending a lot of time in those very places.
Maybe what I need to be rescued from is the feeling that I don’t need to be rescued, for without a doubt this is the most difficult rescue of all.
Raw power without Godly obedience is a long walk off a short conscience.
Our prayers are something akin to delivering a list, verses surrendering a life. The former will always leave me creating the next list, while the latter will leave me creating a new life.
With God, the word ‘impossible’ is itself impossible.
To ascend the mountain, we must descend to our knees.
In one way or another, every mission that I have ever set out on to rescue myself is yet another mission that I end up needing to be rescued from. Hence, there is God.
If I were to sit down and count them, how many of my prayers were tainted by the seduction of greed? None, simply because nothing of that sort is a prayer.
To attempt to know myself ‘apart’ from God is to choose to know nothing more than ‘a part’ of myself.
God invites. We decline. And because of that single foolhardy decision we spend the rest of our lives ‘declining’.
Easter is a time when God turned the inevitability of death into the invincibility of life.
Greatness untethered from God results in calamity unrestrained by men.
Easter is God throwing everything at death so that I can give everything to life.
Maybe I don’t have enough beginnings in my life because I fought against the endings that were about to birth those beginnings.
Of course God does outrageous things. But in reality, what insanity would prompt me to follow a God who did anything less?
Easter says that every ending ever experienced by man is exquisitely crafted to find its own ending at the feet of a fresh beginning.
There are an incalculable number of things within me that I frantically wish to be emptied of, and despite my most earnest efforts to remove them, they remain. And it is Easter that reminds me that God empties out tombs.
Although I rail against it, death is the dark demarcation beyond which I am at the mercy of my own end. To the contrary, an empty tomb says that my end is at the mercy of God’s beginning.
God emptied out that first tomb so that He could turn around and empty out me.
Easter is the final solution to the finality of death.
My limitations abruptly define the frighteningly negligible extent of my existence, yet my soul utterly perishes if bound by those very same limits. And does this not somehow evidence both the reality of and need for God?
Easter is the invulnerable tale of utter selflessness where at an inestimable cost God did for us what He did not need done for Himself. And that kind of ‘doing’ happens every day.
If God has the answer to every question, maybe my appreciation for God should be shaped more by the number of questions and less by the wisdom of the answers.
We need to know that our limits do not define our limitations. And an empty tomb does exactly that.
Reasonably speaking, we can see the cross as entirely possible. But in considering Easter, we see an empty tomb as entirely impossible. And is it possible that God had to do the impossible to finally get our attention?
Of course I fall. Yet, I incessantly blame my falls on circumstance so that I can deny my own inadequacy and therefore remain my own god. And so, I am left to ask which will come first, the fall that kills me or the surrender that saves me?
The voice incessantly quelled in the chorus of human voices will always be the voice of God. And given a reality of this magnitude, I would be well advised to cease my babbling and encourage those around me to do the same.
I have yet to learn that I am not designed to carry the burden of men. Rather, I am designed to carry the love of God so that I might soothe the burden of men.
Despite my incessant desperation, I simply cannot paint the perfect picture within which I would wish to live out my life. And because I cannot, God picked up the brush of love, positioned the canvas of history and painted a manger.
I find that I spend a tremendous amount of time chasing the praises of men rather than sitting with the praises of God. The former is something I attempt to catch, the latter catches me.
The most formidable way to lead is to serve. And while the perplexing oxymoron of such a grinding statement absolutely cripples us, it birthed a Savior.
The worst defeat of all is to surrender without having been defeated. And it is Christmas that obliterates both.
To grasp love, I must grasp the fact that it is a creation of God and therefore it is forever beyond me. But the very fact that it is forever beyond me is the very thing that prompts me to forever pursue it.
I often think myself to be so ingenious that I don’t even realize that my own plans may actually be my own undoing. Therefore, I might be wise to realize that God’s plans undo what I’ve done that’s undoing me.
The promises of God hold up long after the promises of the world have blown up.
God has given me both the right and privilege to outrun Him if I so choose. Yet, if I do so, I will have lost the race.
To understand the mysteries of God we must move past the logic of men.
Despite my best effort to make myself as large as absolutely possible, life will always be larger than me. That simple fact makes God not only a likelihood, but a necessity.
The greatest men stand on their values and pray on their knees.
The length of the fall is dictated by how far we had climbed. The outcome of the fall is dictated by whether we’re holding on to that which we’re climbing, or we’re letting God hold onto us.
When standing face to face with myself, I far too often refuse to look in the mirror. When standing face to face with God, there is no place where a mirror is not.
The yardstick that we frequently use to determine if something can be restored is based on the handful of inches that we bring to the process, when God shows up with an infinite amount of miles.
The drum to which we march reveals the conductor to whom we’re listening.
I am always trying to figure God out so that I can figure Him in. But after a while I figure that I should just let God be God, and figure that He’ll figure it all out anyway.
The worst of me is the raw material from which God molds the best of me.
We are quick to surrender that which we deem as long dead, when God is quick to restore that which He deems as never really having lived.
Without a doubt, the most ingenious plan I could ever hope to devise would be to trade my plans for God’s.
The worst thing that I can do is humanize God. The second worst thing that I can do is deify myself. And the best thing that I can do is to avoid both.
Rarely do I truly understand the disease which ails me. Therefore, rarely do I truly understand the fix that would cure me. And so maybe I should truly contemplate how rarely I recognize that God understands both.
The extent of God’s grace always eclipses the extent of my grotesqueness. Therefore, I can never be bad enough for God to tell me that He’s had enough.
I cannot create greatness as I can only create weak facsimiles. And in sorting through the innumerable facsimiles around me, I will only happen upon true greatness when I happen upon the true God.
If I must know something in order to believe in it, what I am able to believe in will be severely limited. If I choose to believe in something in order to know it, then what I believe in can be boundless.
Without a beginning I am pouring the whole of my existence into the building of endings, while the cross and the resurrection declare that God is incessantly building beginnings from the collapse of endings.
A nation aimlessly drifting away from God is a nation for which prayer is a rudder and praise is a sail. And it is the man or woman on their knees that builds the former and gives wind to the latter.
The romantic within us is a harbinger of our deepest desires.
We must clean the lens of our hearts to see the state of our souls. However, too often the former is too dirty to even know that the latter exists.
Given the lethal enormity of sin and the inestimable value of a single soul, a baby in a manger and a man on a cross makes more sense that anything else I will ever be able to possibly imagine.
Tragedy cleans the windows of the soul by washing away the bias of our lives in the detergent of pain.
What I allow into my head finds its way to my heart, which is a porthole to my soul. Therefore, I might be wise to consider the state of my soul, and then walk this process backwards.
Directing praise to oneself is to cash in on the ego in order to bankrupt the soul.
I am thankful that I can be thankful, for if thankfulness did not exist my heart would be irretrievably imprisoned by the crazed twins of acquisition and possession, and my soul would exist as a forever slave to greed.
Let me be strong, for to be anything else is to languish in the abyss of compromise and to descend to places of impoverishment so destitute that they will squelch my soul and crush my heart.
Hope is oxygen to the soul, and God is the oxygen of hope.
To lead solely on the behalf of those being led is the utter pinnacle of fatherhood, and it is sad that so few ever stand on the summit.
Our best-laid plans are often our worst-made decisions.
Intelligence without wisdom is nothing more than stupidity that looks smart.
I am likely to fail if I have determined the cost as too high or my intelligence as too low. Yet, if I think about it, the real failure rests in believing either of these to be true.
Starting over is opportunity informed by failure, which is opportunity made intelligent.
To forget is to render the pages of history as entirely blank, and the lessons of history as never taught.
Memory is a few lines snipped from a larger story that we are privileged to tuck away between the pages of our minds.
The legacy I leave will be unimaginably enhanced by the legacies I received. Therefore, I must be wise enough to embrace the history of those who have gone before me so that I can shape the future of those who will go ahead of me.
It’s not that I can’t remember. It’s that I prefer not to remember, which means that I prefer not to remember what not remembering did to me the last time I did it.
More often than not, the foolishness of our humanity drives us to destroy the very things that we need to keep ourselves from destroying ourselves. And because that’s the case, God will never allow us to destroy Christmas.
To fall down is to face the weakness of my humanity, test the mettle of my character, and push the limits of my strength. Therefore, falling down will tell me who I am far more clearly than most things I might learn when I’m standing up.
Instinct is all of our humanity being deliberately honest with all of life.
We are not built for mediocrity, but we build it into our lives nonetheless.
My worth is not based on the ‘work of my hands’ despite how feverishly I might work and how audaciously successful I might be. Rather, my worth is based exclusively on the astonishing fact that I am the ‘work of God’s hands.
I am selfish by habit, but sacrificial by nature. Therefore, I’d be wise to develop the habit of following my nature.
Peace is achieved when our conscience rests in the fact that we’ve engaged in ‘right’ living, verses believing that living is a ‘right.
Undoubtedly, failure is growth in pain’s disguise.
Failure is information encased in a shell of pain.
I have finally come to realize that it’s being forced to be honest with myself that’s made my pain painful all along.
Thankfully, the nature of pain reminds us of what the ease of pleasure foolishly allows us to forget.
For love to eliminate pain is to waste it, for it is love alone that possesses sufficient force to bend pain against everything that would break us.
Although I’ve been thoroughly conditioned by pain to see it otherwise, an ending is nothing more than the backside of a beginning.
Pain is nothing but growth waiting for us to give it permission to grow us up.
Pain dutifully reminds me that the world is terribly imperfect, but it faithfully helps me appreciate the world on those days when it’s a little closer to being perfect.
There is no doubt that the most effective way to heal my pain is to purposefully put it to work healing the pain in the life of another. But that means I must endure the pain of not focusing on ‘my’ pain.
An ending is only happening because at some point it was a beginning. And if an ending is dependent upon a beginning, I would be well advised to focus on the miracle of beginnings verses the pain of endings.
It is in opposing the world’s lies that we impose truth in our hearts.
While we tediously check our weaponry before entering into battle, do we check our hearts? For without exception, that is the greatest weapon of all.
Despite how utterly massive they might be, it is never the size of the arsenal nor the strength of the warrior. Rather, it is a heart bent on sacrifice that is the most potent weapon of all.
Oh God, please find it within your heart to grant me a heart that looks after itself only because it has first looked after others. And help me to realize that anything less is not a heart.
If my heart is set on pursuing real treasures, my mind must be fixed solely on the privilege of enjoying them and freed of the obsession of owning them.
I want to have the eyes of an adult to see the world as it is, but I more desperately want to have the heart of a child to make certain that I never forget what it could be.
Through the eyes of men an utterly irrational birth followed by a terribly improbable execution are miscues of the most pathetic sort. And all I can say is that I’m immeasurably thankful that I’ve been given access to the eyes of God.
I am far too often the author of terribly poor decisions. Yet I must rest in the unalterable fact that God says I am far better than what the sum total of those decisions would ever suggest.
The difference between a ‘man’ and a ‘father’ is that the former shares his genes, but latter gives his life.
If a father does not altogether embrace a life of uncompromised sacrifice as the core of all principles by which he nurtures his children, he is a father by birth only and no power on earth can ever or will ever make that sufficient.
Have we ever thought to consider that the need to be loved grows because of its absence, but that love also grows because of its presence? And does this not speak to the power of love?
What insanity would lead me to believe that I possess the power, much less the aptitude to manipulate all of the consequences out of all of my decisions?
If I have not been both soothed by love and on the opposite extreme left devastated by it, I will never understand its power nor respect its majesty.
No, I am not powerful nor do I wish to be, for it is God using my weakness that makes me potent and I would never wish to surrender that.
I feign fullness, but in reality I am achingly empty. And it is because I too often sit at the table of the world instead of the feet of God.
If I see only my bias, I have surrendered to a single myopic lens through which to view the world. If I dare to surrender my bias, I will spend the rest of my life seeing the world and throwing away lenses.
Will I live yearning for a world that I need not yearn for because the message of Christmas is entirely undaunted in its ability to handily penetrate and completely subjugate the very world that I doubt its ability to survive in?
Maybe I need to immerse the fabric of my soul in torrential nature of Christmas, and in doing so to finally understand that it is the very thing that can make the world what I so wish it were.
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.
With God, a mountain before me is soon to be a memory behind me.
To grow is not to timidly sit on some safe shore at water’s edge and clumsily grab whatever happens to float by me. Rather, it is to deliberately step into waters both calm and turbulent in order to wrestle great things to shore.
A commitment to never getting knocked down is in reality a decision to never stand up.
Denial is fear gone delusional. Acceptance is fear given to God. Engaging is fear overruled by God. Victory is fear banished by God.
I can bow to fear and flee the pursuit of great things. I can bow to God and engage in the pursuit of making things great.
I want to stand on the truth that God has designed us to stand, and that the opportunity to stand is the opportunity to live exuberantly and gloriously.
Mediocrity is the companion of passivity and will not heed the call of great things. Courage is the companion of sacrifice and cannot help but heed the call of great things. And we are left of our own accord to choose one or the other.
To live safely within the realm of possibility is to know nothing other than that which is possible. To live boldly within the realm of God is to experience everything that’s impossible.
Sacrifice is a passion that unleashes everything away from us so that it can be drawn into everyone around us.
We focus on the reasons why we ‘can’t’ at the expense of the far greater reasons why we ‘can’.
Once I have impounded love and towed it into the confine of words, I have lost it altogether.
The eyes of love have 20/20 vision when focused on another, and become entirely blind when focused on ourselves.
In our frenzied attempts to catch up with life, we run right past it. Once we have run past it, what we are in reality attempting to catch is ourselves.
I have diligently disciplined my life to search out life’s gifts in the places where life stores its scraps.
Mediocrity is ‘purpose’ left to rot in minds ensnared in the deluded rationalization that vision is nothing more than a collection of fanciful dreams constructed by an imaginary God.
To lust for something is desire turned selfish and gone mad. To embrace God’s passion is desire turned selfless and gone mindful.
If truth is relative, then it’s cousin is anarchy.
We live with this tortured feeling that we must create that which in reality we have the privilege of finding.
I can only begin the process of saving myself when I surrender to the reality that I can’t. And what greater place to surrender that reality than to an infant who surrendered Himself to me so that I might surrender myself to Him.
Have we ever thought to consider that God allows things in our lives to die so that in that death we might come to the precious realization of how little we’ve actually lived in the first place?
Disappointment focuses on ‘what is not,’ and completely misses the far greater reality of ‘what now is.
I can attempt to stay on the fence. However, the problem is that the fence is a figment of my fear not a reality of my journey.
It is the length of the journey that ripens the joy of the outcome.
Abundant living is realizing that life is a privilege whether it’s adhering to our scripts or not.
We have a choice. We can be jaded by what we’ve lost, or joyous over what that thing had accomplished while we had it.
Is it reasonable to assume that the jarring nature of a particular consequence might be the very thing that strong-arms us away from making the poor choice that we didn’t see as a poor choice?
However, in many instances we might be very wise to ask what the consequence of removing the consequence might actually be.
If we fail to instill a fixed sense of confidence in our children, we will raise handicapped children who have no handicap other than the conviction that they believe they do.
A ‘good’ father will tenderly cultivate his children. But a ‘good’ father who is also a ‘brave’ father will let the children without cultivate the child within.
It is not that you give birth to a child that matters most. Rather, it is what you birth into them.
If as an adult I have scolded and then silenced the child within me, I contend that I am neither an adult nor a child. Rather, I am just plain ignorant.
The clash is born of the fact that the child within me sees with undiluted clarity what the adult within me is incessantly working to deny. And in these most vexing moments, to be the adult is to defer to the child.
The ‘fact’ of my actions frequently collide with the ‘fiction’ of my words. And at what point will I live what I say, so I will avoid what I do?
The problem with the ‘herd’ is that our voice is never ‘heard’.
I don’t necessarily sit around inviting life to knock me down, but when it does I don’t wait around for an invitation to stand back up either.
It wasn’t until I slowed the car and rolled down the windows that I realized I spend most of my days driving ‘through’ life without driving ‘in’ life. So, I’ve decided to walk because the pace is slower and the windows are always down.
It’s really a rather simple thing to bring balance to my anger. All I need to do is remember that the ‘hand of cards’ that have been dealt to me pale in comparison to the ‘deck of cards’ that I’ve thrown at others.
The miracle is that the brilliance of the miraculous can live in the blandness of the mundane. The greater miracle is that we have enough brilliance in our own blandness to see it.
We are living out the drama of a pathetic story whose pages are smeared with our own handwriting.
If we’re missing life it’s probably because we’re expecting it to reveal itself to us, rather than realizing that life is revealed by us looking for it.
The greatest dividends in life are those that we give away.
The worst denial of all is being in denial that we’re in denial in the first place. And I would wonder if that’s not exactly where most of us live out most of our lives.
Maybe we ought to consider that sometimes the most destructive outcomes in our lives are the ones that we’ve created.
We can fill our lives with ‘stuff,’ but as we do we’re concurrently filling our lives with the obligation to maintain that ‘stuff.
We can live out our lives, and in the end realize that we never really ‘lived’ a day in our lives.
It may be that we’re not seeing the wonder in life because all we’re doing is wondering how we’re going to survive life.
To live a lie may allow us to avoid the truth, but the real lie lays in believing that we can avoid the truth in the first place.
To let something go is to participate in a much greater dance that we call life.
Life is not about getting everything right, as much as it’s about working to live right.
Our actions in the present build the staircase to the future. The question is whether that staircase is going up or down.
We desperately want to believe in something. To simply live out our lives believing in nothing is to live as if this thing we call life is filled with nothing but nothing.
It would be wise to define ‘living’ as walking in the fullest expression of who I am, verses wallowing in the confines of who I’m not.
The art of living is to rise above lesser things so that we can truly enjoy great things. And the message of Christmas is the greatest of all things.
To ‘live’ is to realize that without the journey the destination is nothing more than a task rigorously completed rather than an experience riotously lived.
It’s not that I’ve ‘faked my own death’ as the saying goes. Maybe it’s that I’ve ‘faked my own life,’ and in doing so I’ve yet to realize how dead I really am.
To take this one shot at life and live it with God is to take this one shot and have it reverberate across and around my world as if it were a million shots and more.
In too many instances we have settled for a world of our own shaping that is shaping up to be in terrible shape.
Jesus came to give us life to the very edges of life.
To maximize our lives we think that we should get up and join in the race. Yet, we rarely consider that maybe it’s less about joining a race and more about actually creating one.
When the world does its level best to devalue me in ways that are nothing short of brutal, all it does is evidence my value. For why would it expend such massive amounts of energy attempting to destroy something that’s not there?
Could it be that we lost something because had we not lost it, we would have lost ourselves?
If life is nothing more than a journey to death, autumn makes sense but spring does not.
With God, a mountain is only a road waiting to happen.
In reality, is being sedentary a choice to run from our calling by not running after it?
The road ahead is not some predetermined path that I am forced to trod, but it is a rich byway that I can help create.
If we’ve somehow become convinced that the script we followed ‘yesterday’ can’t be edited, it will be incredibly difficult to tell the difference between ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’.
The road from ‘here’ to ‘there’ is a map yet to be written with the pen I hold in my hand.
Our experiences are the building blocks of the future hewn out of the granite of the present.
If I were to be brutally honest with myself, how often is my journey actually a path designed to circumvent my journey?
Whatever I ‘align’’ myself with are the very things that will create a ‘line’ into my future.
The present is too often squandered grieving the past or fearing the future, which makes the present nothing more than a cheap facsimile of what was or what will be instead of what it could be.
Eons ago, the creative genius of God foresaw that it would take the shattered pieces of my ‘yesterday’ to construct the sturdy portal to my ‘tomorrow.
To dress up today in the threadbare garments of yesterday is to create an impoverished tomorrow.
I can ruthlessly press my imagination out beyond its very edges, and even in such a remote place I have not begun to touch the barest periphery of God’s imagination.
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.
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.
We incessantly vacillate between what’s behind us and what’s before us depending on the current barometer of our courage and the ambivalent nature of our vision.
And so, it is always the case that the past is irreparably land-locked, and the future has yet to land. And here we are, living out our lives on the precariously thin line which separates the two.
Five of the most dangerous words I know: ‘What’s in it for me?
Faith means I chose not to know, which is different than ignorance which refuses to know.
There is that gnawing feeling that we are far more than what we believe ourselves to be. Maybe it’s time to believe the gnawing.
Most of the things we deem as impossible are only impossible because we’ve given them permission to be impossible.
Maybe the real miracle in any miracle is our ability to believe that despite our own depravity, in the eyes of God we are worthy of a miracle.
My fear of standing alone often pressures me to stand with a rather unsavory group that embraces a rather unsettling belief system which leaves me wondering why I left the promises of God for the company of people.
Faith is the resplendent key that liberates me from the impregnable confines meticulously constructed from the raw material of my disbelief.
In the deepest darkness God tenderly grasps my hand and whispers that darkness is nothing more than a place that He is preparing for the arrival of light.
If I am indeed my own god, I’d better start praying to myself to get myself out of myself.
Prayer is one action where I lay aside my abilities to immerse myself wholly in God’s capabilities. And the liberation found in such an action is less about being engaged with God and more about being freed from myself.
Prayer is knowing that what I ask for is always far bigger than what I could ever articulate, but it is never too big for God to understand nor is it ever too vast for Him to deliver.
My prayer is that God would continue to love me enough to refuse to answer the prayers I’m praying that I shouldn’t be praying.
Starting over is an acceptance of a past we can’t change, an unrelenting conviction that the future can be different, and a stubborn wisdom to use the past to make the future was the past was not.
The issue is becoming so absorbed in positioning ourselves ahead of everyone else that life becomes nothing more than an endless strategy.
We are about the hurried business of living life while missing it in the very process of living it.
A consequence may be the very thing that saves us because it was the only thing loud enough to get our attention.
Instead of the weight that sinks us, consequences are often the life preserver that saves us.
Sometimes consequences are building blocks fashioned of granite when successes are shaped of clay.
Too often the spotlight that highlights our successes burns out quickly, while the spotlight that scrutinizes our failures is a long-life bulb.
I tend to walk around convinced that any amount of forgiveness that I could extend could never possibly compensate for the offenses that I’ve had to endure. Yet, maybe the greater offense is that I’ve got that backwards.
Forgiveness means that you will not allow a temporary event to have “forever” repercussions.
To forgive is to refuse to contaminate the future with the errors of the past.
We can hide a lot of stuff until God shows up, for when God shows up nothing is hidden, which includes both our embarrassment and His forgiveness.
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.
If I have attached anything to sacrifice other than loss, I have at some level assumed a pay-off. And if I’ve assumed a pay-off, I’m only assuming a sacrifice.
To abandon the child ‘within’ means that the adult ‘without’ will be an adult in name only. And frankly, I can only name a handful of things that are that tragic.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, an absolutely certain way to lose something as quickly as possible is to forget the privilege you have to possess it in the first place.
Loss is the uninvited door that extends us an unexpected invitation to unimaginable possibilities.
Maybe the thing that we’re losing is the very thing that has caused us to lose everything else in the first place.
We would prefer all gain and no loss in life, yet that would gain us nothing more than great loss.
Loss eventually arrives when something departs. Grief is working through both.
The greatest loss lies in our inability to accept loss.
A hole is a space where everything has been moved out so that opportunity has space to move in.
Too often my solution is to let something die because I can’t keep it alive, when God’s solution is to let something live because His Son already died for it.
We can’t even remotely fathom that whatever is ending for us is always more than an ending.
Whatever might be taken from me need not leave me with a deficit in its wake.
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.
In the oddity or maybe the miracle of life, the roots of something new frequently lie in the decaying husks of something old.
We lose the understanding that death always begets life of some sort, and that life is always an opportunist, persistently standing ready to build something out of the smoldering ashes and raise something up out of the tangled carnage.
We may find great relief and inexplicable solace in purposefully looking beyond grief in order to determine the provision made within it.
At the end, a journey based on my imagination will leave me imagining that I should have engaged the very thing I used my imagination to avoid.
Christmas is God deciding to become what He never had been, so that we can become what we never could be. And so, God does the most improbable thing imaginable. He orchestrates His own birth.
Our imagination is God’s ingenious gift that hands us the privilege of romping and playing in realities that we can’t see only because we’ve yet to create them.
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.
Dream extravagantly, for God has imbued us with ample imagination to dream out to and across the very periphery of the impossible.
Without an imagination we would be irreparably shackled to what is, and never be released to what could be.
I would suggest that our imagination is a tiny shard of God’s infinite genius that we have within us simply because we were created in God’s image.
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.
Maybe consequences are dear friends in stealthy disguise.
Why is it when I pursue the praises of men I find myself with everything that I’ve looked for but nothing that I need? That’s because I have an extraordinary habit of looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place.
I incessantly look for water in wells dug by men, and I have drunk enough sand to prove it.
Is safety the ‘dream’ that will kill all of my other ‘dreams?’ For the truth is, no ‘real’ dream is safe.
To dream only of what is ‘possible’ is to be fooled into believing that one is dreaming in the first place.
The Christmas story is penmanship of the most brilliant sort, where God crafted a beginning that would never be subject to an ending.
Christmas embodies everything that I need. However, everything that I need is often made up of a lot of stuff I don’t want.
I would like to say that I’m sacrificial. But am I sacrificial enough to acknowledge the fact that I’m not?
More often than not, rejecting rescue is in reality rejecting our need to be rescued. And it may very well be that is why so many reject Christmas.
What we’re searching for will determine where we arrive, or if we arrive. And right in the middle of such risky choices, Christmas is God perfectly solving the problem by showing us what to search for and then bringing it to us.
It’s not so much about writing the story of Christmas itself, as ingenious as it is. In reality, it’s much more about writing the story of Christmas into the story of life so that it will become the story of life.
This is the wonder of Christmas, that in the solitary form of an impoverished infant God has handed me everything that I could never create so that I can be everything that I could never be.
If I worship the fact that I don’t worship anything, amongst other things what I’m worshipping is denial.
For once in my life maybe I ought to actually think about taking God at His word, and in doing so to suddenly find myself riotously welcoming the rather shocking reality that Christmas is truly everything that He says it is.
We must leave Christmas to be what it is, for to reduce it to the stuff of myth and whimsy is take the single and sole hope of a dying humanity and obliterate it. And I would contend that such an action is insanity of the greatest sort.
What insanity propels me to incessantly invest in a world that never ceases to fail me? And what ignorance bewitches me so thoroughly that it keeps me from investing in a God who never ceases to be unfailing?
At this moment God might not necessarily be a necessity, but know that His absence will of necessity eventually result in His necessity.
To keep my life free of evil I must of necessity keep my life full of God, for keeping my life full of anything else will give evil everything else.
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.
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.
It would be infinitely more prudent to be a single “David” standing with God, than a million “Goliath’s” standing without Him.
A true work of art is shaped by the hands of another, and if in shaping us that ‘other’ is anything other than God, the piece will never touch the remotest periphery of its potential.
Worlds of my own creation are erected with walls that are within but a few scant paces of each other. The world that God creates for me has no idea what walls are.
Jesus was and is the greatest restoration specialist of all time.
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 came to give us life without leaving out any of life in the giving.
The key to understanding if something is truly precious is to ask if we can hold it, for things truly precious cannot be held.
I can amass countless fortunes and yet stand with empty hands. I can seek God and have fortunes that fill countless hands.
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.
Real patriotism embraces the wholly immovable belief that without freedom, the essence of the human soul and the life-breath of the human spirit is doomed to perish for lack of space and absence of light.
It is in building the best of our abilities that we ultimately destroy the worst of our liabilities.
To realize your potential you must look beyond the end of yourself, realizing that where you end is most likely where you actually begin.
The adult within me would be much wiser to learn from the child within me rather than focus on the demand that the child within me grow up.
Am I a storm-waster? For it is within the fury of the very storms within which I cower that I find resources for my growth that are entirely absent on calmer days.
To fully understand how utterly amazing we really are we must first understand all of the things about us that are not, and then we must make our habitation where they are not.
I fear that should I seek out the treasures around me, they might by comparison reveal that I have not cultivated the treasures within me.
Undoubtedly, our weariness is not based on the fact that we’re running. Rather, our weariness is all too frequently based on the fact that many of the things that we’re running from are the very things we should be running to.
The goal of comfort is at the self-same time the abandonment of great accomplishments.
Due north’ on my compass is largely ‘due’ to the fact that in ‘due’ time I have been ‘unduly’ lax in recalibrating my compass. And I’m apparently ignorant enough to wonder why I’m lost.
If I’m chasing the wrong thing, what I’m chasing will end up chasing me. And in the end, I’m less likely to be the one doing the catching.
It is the fool who declares ‘I am ascending the summit,’ while he’s toddling around in the ditch.
Although I regularly convince myself otherwise, because I aim at something doesn’t necessarily mean I have a target.
Most journeys are armchair calculations strategically charted in some reclined state that are designed to allow us to embark upon a grand journey without ever leaving the armchair. However, real journeys are absent of furniture.
The barrier to our future is often the very plans that we’ve created to get there.
There are often two sets of goals in life: those that we establish, and those that really matter.
The most critical time in any battle is not when I’m fatigued, it’s when I no longer care.
The presence of a path doesn’t necessarily mean the existence of a destination.
I am most thankful for what I don’t have, for had my life’s wish list been filled in the manner I had chosen I would be steeped in meaningless trinkets verses bathed in God’s treasures.
My vision of what God can do is nothing more than a fleeting glance of the backside of the ‘possible,’ while God is inviting me to the forefront of the ‘impossible.
The hallmark of great dreams is not their possibility but their impossibility, and the fact that it is the very notion of the ‘impossible’ that inspires us to go and accomplish them anyway.
Calm for too long begs the question of whether we’re in an all-out pursuit of life, or we’re all-out of the pursuit of life.
How often do I stand in abject terror and raw trepidation before the impossible peaks that soar to impossible heights in front me, when God turns to me and calmly says “what mountains?
Every advancing step I take toward my goal of comfort is yet another retreating step I take away from God’s goal of the impossible.
A conviction borne of God amply possesses the potency and power to brazenly reach beyond the possible in order to topple the impossible.
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.
I am what no one else is, and in the hands of God I can do what no one else does. And if I dare set such a truth in motion I will change my world.
I would surmise that we must cherish the resources that God has given us to achieve a goal more than we cherish the goal itself. For if we fall victim to the pursuit of the goal alone, then the goal has suddenly become our god.
Who you are is too vast to be captured by the reflection of a mirror, classified by the state of your attitude, or categorized by the opinions of others. Therefore, if any of these are defining you, you have yet to be defined.
The thing that I’m most likely to collapse under is not the weight of the stresses that stand around me, but the ego that sits within me.
I can confidently state that the greatest rescues in my life have occurred when I’ve been saved from myself.
If it’s about me, I can be assured that there will be a bunch of empty chairs in the auditorium of my life; save the one I’m sitting in.
If I can’t quite figure out what an ego is, all I have to do is look for the thing that’s killing itself in the very act of feeding itself.
If it has anything to do with me, it has nothing to do with sacrifice.
If I’m my biggest fan, the only person in the stadium is probably me.
Ego is borne of the need to ‘prove’ oneself instead of making the choice to ‘be’ oneself. And so maybe we need to begin curbing the birthrate.
Whatever the item is that I have chosen to give you, it is nothing more than the receptacle within which I have placed the whole of myself. If it is empty, it is not a gift.
The death of our self-worth begins at its appraisal, for such an action erroneously implies that our worth can be quantified.
Self-serving biases and self-centered agendas are cotton jammed in the ears of our conscience. Even if truth shouts, we can’t hear it.
The shortest short-term investment is to serve ourselves.
If I don’t know who I am apart from everyone else, I probably need to spend some time apart from everyone else.
We are always immeasurably bigger than the little person we’ve too often doomed ourselves to be.
To save myself I must face myself, which may be the hardest of all things to face.
If I so much as dare to intimately probe the reflection I see in the mirror, I am filled with the tormenting fear that I might be repulsed. God invites us to boldly probe the reflection in the mirror so that we might be released.
At some point I hope to have grown sufficiently in both stature and wisdom to understand that I cannot deliver myself from myself, and that God alone can save me from me.
To be an end in myself is to bring an end to myself.
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.
If sacrifice is not the theme of my life, there’s no sense telling the story.
If the baser instinct of rampant self-preservation adamantly refuses to surrender itself to the infinitely greater call of self-sacrifice, in attempting to save our lives we will have in reality completely destroyed our lives.
To assume that I can even begin to chart a ‘straight’ path is probably the best way I can take myself ‘straight’ to the very place I don’t want to go.
The reason my life has wandered to nowhere is likely due to the fact that the focus of the moment has dictated the destination of my life, when the destination of my life should have been dictating the focus of the moment.
The war on Christmas is waged of weakness and fed by vision blinded. It is a war of intellect blunted to stupidity and calling begging at the feet of cowardice.
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.
Timeless principles never age, and truth is as young as the day it was spoken into existence.
If the pursuit of perfection is a way to prove our worth, in the end the pursuit will only prove our imperfections.
In evaluating ourselves, we tend to be long on our weaknesses and short on our strengths.
I while away my time wishing I were someone else when simply being me is the most magnificent thing I could ever wish to do.
It has nothing to do with who I am as compared to everyone else. It has everything to do with who I am in companionship with God.
I say that my value is based on my accomplishments. Christmas is God saying that I am His accomplishment and that will forever be enough.
With God, being lost is nothing more than an idea that never has and never will be anything more than an idea.
The challenge is never based on the size of the obstacle that stands before me. Rather, it is dictated by the degree of faith that rests within me.
Failure is not the deterrent for the next try. Rather, it is information that empowers the next step.
Failure is a friend if we can see past the face of the foe that we project on it.
Failure is blessing wrapped in the clothing of curse.
The fear of getting knocked down is less about the pain of the fall and more about the embarrassment in having fallen. And so, to rid myself of the latter is to reduce my concern about the former, which means I just unleashed my life.
If I’m conceited enough to believe I’m invincible, then maybe it will take me doing the very thing I swore I would never do to understand that I’m not as wonderful as I thought I was.
The real promise in too many promises is a promise that I’m going to be disappointed.
The reason placing blame repeatedly fails to work is that I repeatedly place it on everyone else instead of where it actually belongs.
Most of my failures can be ascribed to the fact that I chose that which was ‘easy’ over that which was ‘right’. And while it’s ‘right’ to admit this to myself, it isn’t ‘easy.’ So, which choice am I going to make this time?
Of course I don’t want to get knocked down. But the single and sole solution to that fear is to not go anywhere where I can be knocked down. And is that not already being knocked down?
Sometimes we are so caught up in the disappointment of plans gone astray that we fail to recognize the potentially new options that might now exist.
In my impatience I become convinced that this desire of mine should have been fulfilled yesterday, when it belongs to a tomorrow that yesterday would have killed had I had my way.
If those who cause destruction have come to be ‘newsworthy’, and those who heal the devastation of that destruction have come to be less than ‘noteworthy’, has our thirst to be entertained become the truly destructive thing?
I am so often the architect of my own pain and the engineer of my own failures.
Why is it that we don’t worry about a compass until we’re lost in a wilderness of our own making?
Contradictions are the impossible chasms that create forever separations. God is the forever bridge that creates impossible reunions.
The dark might be dark, but at least we don’t have to look at ourselves when we’re standing in it.
If I had a single wish, I would wish sixty seconds of total depravity upon myself. For one of the greatest gifts of all is to have ‘nothing’ so that I can finally learn how to appreciate ‘everything’.
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.
True evil is unlikely to receive an invitation from us, so it clothes itself in just enough truth to make itself look appealing and then it looks to unpeel us.
If we limit love to being nothing more than a feeling, we have no real feeling for what love is.
Only God understands how incredibly far we’ve fallen, and only God understands how incredibly far we can rise. And only we can determine if we’re going to wallow in the mediocrity that is born of the refusal to understand either.
The greatest gains that we will ever experience arise from the greatest sacrifices that we have ever known.
We might do well to take a look at what we’ve crammed into our pockets as it will say much about what we’ve crammed into our hearts.
Once I finally understand the immensity of my own impoverishment, I am finally in a position to see the enormity of God’s majesty.
Has it not ‘dawned’ on us that many of the things that we incessantly blame others for are actually things that our actions originally set in motion? Or, are we too weak to experience a ‘dawning’ of that sort?
Real, lasting closure is never secured through retribution or retaliation.
Love that is fueled solely by feelings will suddenly find itself out of gas on a long road with no gas stations.
Easter is a time where we are reminded that conclusions in man’s mind are beginnings in God’s plan.
It’s thinking that I had the solution that probably created the problem in the first place.
Ignorance is not bliss. Rather, ignorance is blistering.
To love those who hate us is to refuse to borrow their hatred.
Hate feeds on itself, while love will always find itself fed.
The love hidden within is always greater than the hate displayed without.
It might not be about perfection. Rather, it may be that that which is imperfect is that which has the most character.
Yet, there is a sense of some deep sort that runs entirely contrary to human nature; that in putting ourselves first, we must by necessity put others first.
Greatness demands that I understand that I am not nearly as big as I thought myself to be, but that I am capable of becoming far bigger than I ever imagined myself to be.
We want greatness, but we prefer it tamed and on a leash short enough for us to control it, yet long enough to allow it to retain some remote yet diminished flavor of greatness.
If God created great things with a point of vulnerability, it would lie in the reality that great things die in the hands of great ignorance.
I want to stand on the belief that great things are the product of ordinary people who are made great when they stand.
Truth speaks for itself if we’d just let it speak.
Such is the power of truth that even the slightest whisper of it can handily drown out the most boisterous of lies, which may explain why in many instances God only needs to whisper.
When I’m at the bottom looking up, the main question may not be ‘how do I get out of this hole?’ In reality, the main question might be ‘how do I get rid of the shovel that I used to dig it?
There appears to be value in getting past a mentality that good things can only rest in good things.
To recklessly excuse a failure is to believe that I’ve effectively erased it from the story of my life, when I’ve actually imprinted it in indelible ink.
We somehow have led ourselves to believe that our questions are big enough to encircle life, and that life is small enough to be contained by the answers. The real question might be, are we ignorant or just plain stupid?
In a very tragic kind of way, sometimes things have to be gone before I fully realize that they were ever there.
Maybe it’s a whole lot less about focusing on the fact that we’re all victims and a whole lot more about the changing the fact that we’re all careless, as that is what victimized all of us in the first place.
To label myself is similar to thinking that I can come up with a single phrase to explain the universe.
At the very point that I’ve taken something for granted, I have at that same moment taken it to its grave. And if I look around, I realize I’ve cultivated quite a cemetery.
To assume that I and I alone have all the answers is to eventually find myself entirely alone without any answers.
Vigilance of the wisest kind is to incessantly remain open to the reality that what I ‘see’ is but a single thread and solitary shard of what ‘is’, for to assume otherwise is to surrender the wisdom of vigilance to the decay of ignorance.
When wisdom gives way to whimsy and ethics fall to excitement, it is highly likely that the ground beneath me will ‘give way’ and it is I who will ‘fall.
Truth is its own defense, therefore if something can’t speak for itself, it’s not truth.
A lie is my attempt to tamper with the truth so that I need not face the truth. Yet as shrewd as I think myself to be, I would be wise to understand that God designed truth as ultimately tamper-proof.
If you think you can stand to know what you’re made of, try kneeling before God.
Everything I touch makes me a little bit more like the thing I’m touching, so I’d better start paying attention to what I’m touching.
Love is a perpetual journey that is extraordinary because it will never find itself terminated by a destination.
All along, I was less concerned about walking a path of integrity and more caught up in a compass calibrated by greed. And with a compass such as this, how is it that I’m having a hard time understanding why I am where I am?
The step that we are on is only a step to the next place, and no step regardless of how massive is ever a destination.
We can only climb the mountains because there’s a valley that makes the mountain a mountain.
We can only get to God through God. Every other possible avenue is a dead-end before it even starts.
If I get up just one less time than the number of times I’ve been knocked down, I have done one of the most devastating things possible; I have halted my life at that very spot.
I would be an utter fool to let my journey be defined by the denial of the journey.
Are the returns on my journey equal to the length of the road behind me? And if not, have I realized the pressing need to surrender to God the road in front of me?
If my goal is simply to survive the journey, then I’m not on the journey in the first place.
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.
If the road behind me is not growing ever longer, then it is likely that the feet underneath me are not moving any longer. And if my feet are not moving, I have somehow, somewhere traded this most glorious journey for lesser endeavors.
Nearly everyday life leans over and says, ‘Come on down!’ But standing at the bottom looking up, it’s finally dawned on me that it’s not these invitations that have dug this hole. Rather, it’s the fact that I accepted them.
If I have refused to risk, I have in the self-same decision refused to love. And if indeed I have refused to love, tragically I have refused to live. And when will I realize that that in and of itself is an unacceptable risk.
My life is a series of invitations accepted and invitations rejected, and the place I now find myself is often a result of accepting the wrong invitations and rejecting the right ones.
More times than I can remember I look around and I ask why the hole I’m in looks so strangely familiar. Probably because it looks a whole lot like all the other ones I dug before I got around to digging this one.
More times than I’m willing to admit I am my own worst enemy, which suggests that more times than I’m willing to admit I should allow God to be my own best friend.
We got where we are because our choices mapped the route and paved the road.
We want to ‘write in’ our plan and ‘write out’ the consequence. When we do that, we’re headed ‘right back’ to what we foolishly thought we could ‘write out.
Although it pains me to admit it, I am quite familiar with the holes in life. And this familiarity is due to the fact that I spend far more time in these holes than I spend on the paths that brought me to them.
Oh that I had the opportunity to rethink so many of my decisions, for the pitfalls into which I have so frequently fallen were often dug with the shovel of those very decisions.
It would be advisable to realize that we will eventually become whatever it is that we’ve created. And too often what we’ve created is a massive mess.
Many of our efforts to intentionally craft and subsequently force our limited vision on life has more often than not resulted in some degree of cataclysm or schism or division or any number of other things that aren’t all that savory.
Everything that I hold will eventually be gone. Subsequently, the quality of my life will depend on whether I choose to appreciate those things ‘now’ or wait until ‘then.
Judging others is too often escapism dressed in the garb of righteous indignation, whereby I dutifully point out in others that which I probably should be pointing out in myself.
If we are merely a chance product of ‘random happenstance’ and nothing more, doesn’t it strike you as a bit odd that we have the ability to contemplate the question of ‘random happenstance’ with such methodical complexity?
Making oneself large involves intentionally making oneself small.
The point that I think myself to be so terribly clever is the precise point at which I am beginning to think myself to be god-like, which causes me to become God-less.
If I continually focus on what I don’t have, my life will always be completely empty despite the fact that it’s completely full.
Thankfulness is an attitude of possibilities, not an attitude of liabilities.
Because thankfulness is the tonic that always cures the cancers of greed, envy and jealously, it should be taken in liberal doses daily.
Thanksgiving is an attitude that must be rooted in the ‘gift of life’ if we ever hope to be thankful for the ‘gifts’ of life.
I can only see life as this most miserable accident that I have been forced to endure simply because I refuse to see it as the most astounding plan that I have been privileged to engage.
We tend to perseverate on the fact that as far as we might have fallen, there’s always another bottom underneath the one we’re laying on. Yet, for every bottom underneath us, there’s always endless opportunity above us.
Romanticizing comes with colored glasses of the most colored sort.
We really can’t afford to live our lives walking in some sort of introspective darkness as if the darkness is the only thing that we can walk in.
Although I’m seldom aware enough to see it, the greater cost regarding that which I possess was not what I paid for it, but what someone along the way sacrificed so that I might have the opportunity to pay for it.
Until I realize that it’s all I gift, I can hold all of it and yet receive none of it.
Heaven shows up all the time. But we plan our time so that we show up in other places.
Blindness is a choice born of fear, nursed by complacency and groomed by comfort. And what I often don’t see in my blindness is that ‘choice’ evidences the existence of other options.
Sometimes the grandest of all events are described in the poverty of a few simple words.
When I read the ghastly lines of tragedy darkly penned into my life, I turn and notice that the pen in my hand is wet.
Each day hands me a clean sheet of paper upon which to write. Therefore, I would be wise to write without ever having the need to erase.
We have the power of the pen to write the next chapter, and the privilege to author the page in whatever fashion we choose. Yet, seldom do we understand the power of the pen and the privilege of the page.
Arrogance is a map of a road that leads to bridges that are out.
At the point that it dawns on me that I am not God I have finally made room for God.
To declare myself as a genius immediately evidences that I am not.
Authorship of anything apart from God is nothing more than a tragedy in the making.
Simply giving something ‘a shot’ is not giving something our ‘best,’ for our best is made up of as many ‘shots’ as it takes in order to be our best.
The true sign of a robust and mature life rests in how many times that life has been knocked down, for to be incessantly knocked down and yet find oneself still standing means that someone had the resolve to get up that many times plus one.
It’s not about some principled debate as to whether I should focus on what I have, or on what I don’t have. Rather, it’s about being thankful that I have the privilege to enjoy the former, and the opportunity to contemplate the latter.
We want a fresh start only because we didn’t sufficiently care for the last fresh start.
Death reminds us that life is a temporary privilege, not an endless right.
To focus solely on endings is to trade conclusions for the very beginnings that created them. And if this cycle should persist, we will likewise miss the beginning that will follow this ending.
We’re constantly presented with opportunity, or the opportunity to create opportunity.
Opportunity is present is wreckage as much as it is in that which is wonderful. It’s not so much how it comes to us, but what we do with it.
While real sacrifice is committed to the result, it relishes the effort
We have errantly romanticized love as something we freely get verses something we sacrifice for in the giving.
I would much prefer to enlarge your life by giving you the gift of my life, rather than gifting your life to material obesity with frivolous trinkets.
Christmas is a bold act of emboldening sacrifice and the most selfless gift ever granted the rebellious lot that we are.
If I am so terribly limited as to view my handicaps as nothing more than lamentable limitations, then I have taken some of my greatest God-given assets and completely handicapped them.
To simply survive appears to be the choice of the plodding hoards that wander all around me. Therefore, I’ve adamantly committed to never hoard hoards.
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.
I would entertain the apparently fading idea that patriotism that serves the self is greed dressed in the garments of liberty and adorned with the fashion accessories of other associated patriotic notions.
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.
The greatest abuse that we perpetrate on liberty is our assumed right to it.
And who would dare write their own death into the script so that the rest of the characters in the tale might live? God of course.
It is the restraint of patience that yields the magnificent in life.
Oftentimes I think it is far better to listen for an answer, rather than talk out of an effort to create one.
To wait is to wisely resign myself to the fact that my ‘timetable’ is too often a ‘table’ with two legs that won’t stand up no matter how much ‘time’ I give it.
Where am I?” you ask. Where you are is where the things you’ve denied worshipping have taken you.
The ‘gods’ that do us the greatest harm are the gods we deny having.
A goal lacking a sense of ethics is a goal that lacks any sense.
How many times has our conscience firmly prompted us to ‘draw the line,’ and we showed up with an eraser?
If we dare examine our decisions, we will see our values woven in and through every single one of them. Therefore, it would do us well to take an occasional peek to insure that our values remain at their peak.
It is, I think, a far lesser offense to blatantly ignore God’s directions for our lives rather than arrogantly think ourselves shrewd enough to be able to bend them to our liking without breaking them and therefore breaking ourselves.
Despite opinions to the contrary, restoring Godly values is the most progressive course of action that we could ever hope to take.
I spend my life constantly calling in ‘imaginary’ debts that aren’t owed to me in order to avoid the ‘real’ debts that I owe to others, and so everybody ends up bankrupt.
Sacrifice” and “self” both begin with the same letter, but the spelling is way different after that.
I pretend to give gifts that people pretend to be gifts so that I can pretend that I gave something that actually cost me something. And what pretending of this sort gives me is the gift of a pretend life.
An obese ego is just about the heaviest thing you’ll ever carry. So maybe you should stop feeding it.
You can dress up greed, but you can’t stop the stench.
The burdens I carry on my back are in direct correlation to the weight of my ego.
The image of God infused in us never sees the light of day in the service of self, but it becomes the light of day in the service of others.
Often we don’t see the majesty of God’s design because we’re caught up in the mediocrity of our own designs.
The problem that I think I have with God is often not a problem at all. Rather, it is most frequently a tired misperception where I have made God what I need Him to be in order to justify my rejection of Him.
Faith revels in the liberating fact that only a terribly miniscule part of life lies within the constricted confines of my reach, and that I am graciously invited out to live in a place beyond my grasp.
I have forged many things that I believe to be things of great beauty. Yet if God is not a part of them, they are entirely counterfeit and I have been robbed blind by the work of my own hands.
The only things I truly keep are those things that I give away.
If I’m asking what kind of ‘return’ I should be expecting on the sacrifices I’m making, I have in that question revealed the need to ‘return’ that question to wherever I found it and have the word ‘return’ edited out of it.
If I am not touching a life, I am not touching life.
To calculate sacrifice is to attempt to sacrifice safely, and safe sacrifice is one of the most outrageous oxymoron’s I can think of.
Rhetoric can be easily recognized for it is delightfully sweet sounding but it is utterly void of sacrifice, which means it is utterly void of substance. Christmas is irrefutable evidence that God never engages in rhetoric.
Sacrifice is a noun in my vocabulary that should be a verb in my life.
To fill the fathomless caverns of my thirsty soul I must work entirely contrary to impulses of my own humanity, for it is in emptying myself at the very point where I am most empty that I fill myself.
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.
I am thankful that in the giving we receive, and what we receive is the satisfaction of knowing that whatever we give is always bigger once we’ve given it away.
Love knows nothing of short hauls because it has committed itself for the long haul.
Real accomplishments do virtually nothing to serve me and they do everything to serve others. Anything less is nothing more than a meaningless task dressed in the deceptive finery of accomplishments.
I am thankful that to be attuned to the needs of another attunes us to the world, and that if I stay attuned only to my needs I will always be a stranger to the world.
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.
To put others in front of ourselves is to put God in front of everything.
Good tells us that our agenda is the agenda of the person next to us.
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.
Being our best involves walking away from every situation with less than what we had when we encountered it because we left something behind in the exchange.
Yet, there is a sense of some deep sort that runs entirely contrary to human nature, that in putting ourselves first, we must by necessity put others first.
To incessantly blame others for my shortcomings is cowardice borne of fear, fed by fear, and haunted by fear. To be steadfastly accountable for my shortcomings is bravery borne of God, fed by God, and blessed by God.
The very places that we presume God not to be are the very places that are filled with His footprints and littered with His fingerprints.
In God’s vocabulary, ‘lost’ is an unnecessary adjective that is easily erased by the adjective ‘found’ if we would simply be brave enough to hand Him the eraser.
We opt to be seen as ‘right’ in the eyes of everyone else, rather than doing what’s ‘right’ in light of the situation.
I paved the path to the very place I don’t want to be. But passing the blame off to someone else doesn’t put me any place else.
If the truth gets in the way, I will remove it. But truth be told, removing the truth never removes the truth.
I pray that I am never so foolishly naive or roguishly pompous to think that I can be the captain of my own ship, for if God is not at the helm my ship will soon be at the bottom.
It is the state of the heart within us that determines the nature of the triggers we will pull outside of us.
To be found is to be exposed. No wonder so many of us are still lost.
If in fact it’s not too late to realize that something’s ‘too late’, then there’s a good chance that it’s not.
Being lost without grasping the rather obvious fact that we are lost is by far the best guarantee we have that we’re going to stay lost.
Can anything be called an achievement if it does not simultaneously enhance the life of someone other than the one who has done the achieving?
I suppose that one of my greatest problem lays in the fact that I have assumed a blessing to be something that is mine for the taking, verses being something that by sheer exposure to it takes me.
I would be quite wise to realize that I will never craft a solution that will be the ‘end-all,’ and that God’s ability to craft perfect solutions never ends ‘at-all.
Uncommon solutions can always overcome problems of the most common or uncommon kind if I am sufficiently committed to overcoming them.
When we actually refer to God’s blueprint, we gladly work in fascinated conjunction with it, suddenly realizing that any other action outside of that blueprint is foolhardiness and lunacy of the worst sort.
I have both the violent turbulence of the storm and the quiet promises of God in the storm. And what I must work to remember is that something is not necessarily stronger simply because it’s louder.
Consequences need not be the obstacles that I dread, but the direction that I need.
Although we may face untold numbers that by their sheer mass appear to render us as little more than a speck in the face of them, a single person standing with God amidst any mass will always be an indomitable majority.
Being our best is asking how can we take ourselves to the precipice of our own limits in any and every situation?
It’s about recognizing that the great movements and moments in history laid on the backs of ordinary people who simply chose to do extraordinary things.
My wisdom absent of God’s wisdom is nothing more than a best-guess.
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.
Maybe the greatest hope of Christmas is that what it purports to be is exactly what it is.
Christmas is everything that God would do, and nothing that we would imagine Him doing.
Christmas is a clandestinely ingenious script that outlines a plan to reclaim mankind through a strategy unimagined and unimaginable. This strategy involved God writing His own death into the script.
We cannot humanize the fact that the story was penned to have the eternal God, Who Himself knows no beginning nor is in need of one, choose to experience a beginning. That is genius in and of itself.
Christmas was an ingenious plan designed by God to lay siege to the hearts of all men by submitting Himself to the greed of all men.
Christmas was about understanding that servanthood would win the hearts of men for eternity, where raw power might win them only for a moment, if at all.
Christmas is not a story birthed of a humanized god for it simply doesn’t fit into the rubric of such an emaciated plot.
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.
Christmas is God saving mankind from the folly of mankind’s grandiose sense of greatness.
Christmas is God being relentless to the point that He would die in that relentlessness.
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.
It was the greatest, most intricate, most ingenious and most costly rescue mission in all of human history.
Christmas seems to say that paradise lost and longed for does not have to be paradise given up on.
In the midst of our worried searching we recklessly abandon the treasures that life has bestowed upon us in the mad hunt for that which we wish to bestow upon ourselves.
Loving those who hate us means wantonly setting the stage and orchestrating the situation in a way that’s sure to result in a production of great personal calamity. But to not love them is an even greater calamity.
Every life is a canvas and every interaction is a brush, therefore we’d be wise to consider how we handle the paint.
It’s not so much about the cards you’re dealt; it’s a whole lot more about whether you play them well, or play them at all.
Betrayal dressed in love and trimmed with the facade of good intentions is the most barbaric of all betrayals.
There are consequences to ignoring consequences that are a consequence of my blatant unwillingness to learn from my consequences.
Commitment is a promise to a cause. Being non-committal is a promise to catastrophe.
I craft most of my own tragedies without ever having even the remotest understanding that it is I myself who have done the crafting.
I constantly pack my pockets full of worthless trinkets, and in such misguided gorging I leave my heart empty and my soul emaciated because I have forgotten everything but trinkets.
A cause that only serves me is much like a door on the edge of a cliff, it doesn’t open to anywhere good.
In choosing to exchange precious principles for worthless impulses, I have far too often bankrupted my soul in order to bankroll my ego.
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.
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.
To destroy that which seeks to destroy me, God invites me to stand against it until it stands down and then falls down.
To ‘stop and smell the roses’ we must first believe that there’s a rose garden out there somewhere. And in this jaded world of ours, the refusal to believe in gardens leaves most of us ref of roses.
Although it would lead me to believe otherwise, fear has little interest in intimidating me. Rather, it much prefers to enslave me.
Expectations are the shackles that will not permit something to be what it actually is.
Maybe we should remember that logic constructs a box that is far too small for wonder to take up residence in. Therefore, the crucial question is, ‘Will we choose to live there if wonder cannot?
I am only one, but that is infinitely better than being none.
Human beings manifesting the fullness of who they were created to be would be inviting and correspondingly transformational in a manner almost mysterious.
Integrity is the antithesis of compromise and the sworn enemy of comfort. It bases its decisions not on how much discomfort we might be able to avoid, but on how much we need to avoid the compromise of comfort.
The priceless lesson in the New Year is that endings birth beginnings and beginnings birth endings. And in this elegantly choreographed dance of life, neither ever find an end in the other.
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.
Why is it that crisis pushes me to my own devices when those devices are frequently the very things that produced my crisis in the first place?
Sometimes things that appear completely irreconcilable and mutually exclusive serve a shared purpose that could not be achieved except through their contradiction.
If I’m surprised at where I’m at, it’s probably because I’m not listening to the reality that listening to the voices that I’ve listened to have put me here. So, maybe I should be less surprised and more disappointed.
Be confidently assured that any ‘gods’ that we build will always have veracious appetites, and sooner or later they will gorge themselves on that which built them.
Humanized gods are too small to captivate my imagination, or be worthy of my fullest allegiance.
May we know fear, but may we always refuse to court cowardice.
To be bold is to be wise enough to realize that fear is the energy that fuels action.
We can only be our best by giving, and so we always need to be in the process of giving or preparing to give.
Risk is uncertainty injected into our most vulnerable places. And because that’s the case, we may choose not to risk.
Risk is the stuff that sucks the predictability right out of the very things that we desperately wish were predictable.
Have we ever thought to consider that we create values that ‘feel’ right because they serve our current agendas, which is an infinitely different thing from values that ‘are’ right because they serve an eternal agenda?
If we ignorantly act to solely serve our agenda, we’re simply slogging around in the egocentric and brackish backwaters of selfishness. Any response that comes out of that kind of cesspool will be vulgarly irresponsible.
If it’s the benefit to myself that drives my decisions, I can know that I’m driving down a long road with a short bridge.
Too often we want to take stands to elevate us rather than elevate a cause.
Sometimes chaos is the very thing that deliberately shakes up our neatly ordered world’s in order to get us out of the neatly ordered ruts that have kept us stuck.
Somewhere, somehow, something arises out of the ashes of our losses to remind us that nothing ever ceases. Nothing ever vanishes. Nothing ever comes to nothing.
Judging others shackles them to the cold iron of our limited notions.
What I would be quite wise to remember is that ‘pieces’ are not the end of what was, but the beginning of what is to be.
Sure, things die. Yet hard on the heels of every death there comes a birth. And if the life around me is being perpetually refreshed in such a relentless manner, why would I think that the life within me can’t have the same experience.
To blithely discard the spent kernels of something that has ended is to discard the very resources that have painstakingly been harvested from that ending from which a spirited new beginning will be cultivated.
The problem with wearing a facade is that sooner or later life shows up with a big pair of scissors.
If I look closely, my failures are less about my inadequacies and more about the fact that I channel my abilities into the wrong places.
One sure way I can avoid facing myself is by refusing to look into the face of God.
Avoidance is paying forward that which I would be much wiser to pay off.
Kicking the can down the road implies that we’re accepted the galling reality that whatever it is that we’ve avoiding, it’s something that’s not going to go away; at least on its own.
The problem is not that we don’t recognize the truth when we hear it. The problem is that we don’t want to recognize what the truth might mean for us if we hear it.
I decry the injustice of my wounds, only to look down and see that I am holding a smoking gun in one hand and a fistful of ammunition in the other.
Although I am far too frequently convinced otherwise, with God a dead-end is only the death of an end.