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The times we worked harder to make the day stand out. Our story demanded that we change and so we did.
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I always thought the Bible was more of a salad thing, you know, but it isn't. It's a chocolate thing.
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I'm not a pastor; I've never been on staff at a church.
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We don't need as much as we have. Hardly any of us need as much money as we have. It's true what they say about the best things in life being free.
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My Sunday school teachers had turned Bible narrative into children's fables. They talked about Noah and the ark because the story had animals in it. They failed to mention that this was when God massacred all of humanity.
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Job found contentment and even joy, outside the context of comfort, health or stability. He understood the story was not about him, and he cared more about the story then he did about himself.
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There's a lot of letters, and a lot of people come say "hi" at book signings, but I'm amazed at how normal everybody is.
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When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are.
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There's no authoritarian structure at Reed College, but the education is conservative. So what you have is a lot of students who are very authentically looking for truth.
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Nobody will listen to you unless they sense that you like them.
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In an age in which we can project an image and score that image based on immediate Facebook and Twitter feedback, thus making a video game of life and a false-reality composed of lies, what gets lost is a joyful obsession with the work we create from the purest of motives, a sheer joy in the act of creation itself that causes us to lose ourselves in something else, and in a way die to ourselves over the absolute love of a thing we are breathing into life.
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It is worthy of note that the Chinese and Japanese characters for money and gold are the same.
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I took William Zinsser's advice that you write to yourself and you hope that there are people out there who are like you.
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Instead of asking what it feels like to follow God or be used by God, we should be asking who God is, and whether we really know Him. Everything else will take care of itself.
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The trouble with deep belief is that it costs something. And there is something inside me, some selfish beast of a subtle thing that doesn't like the truth at all because it carries responsibility, and if I actually believe these things I have to do something about them. It is so, so cumbersome to believe anything. And it isn't cool.
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There's a genius part of you that wants to create. That part of you wants to talk to God. Get out of the way.
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Some people skip through life. Others are dragged through it. I sometimes wonder if we are moving through time, or whether time is moving through us. Light, unlike anything else in the universe is not effected by time. Light exists outside of time.. It is still a mystery to physicists.
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I know, from the three visits I made to him, the blended composite of love and fear that exists only in a boy's notion of his father.
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I think writers would do better to consider that idea [to write to yourself], because you know yourself really well, and you never know your demographic fully. You only get into trouble if you try to please somebody you don't really understand.
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I asked God to help me understand the story of the forest and what it means to be a tree in that story.
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Christian spirituality was not a children's story. It wasn't cute or neat. It was mystical and odd and clean, and it was reaching into dirty. There was wonder in it and enchantment.
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For me, the beginning of sharing my faith with people began by throwing out Christianity and embracing Christian spirituality, a nonpolitical mysterious system that can be experienced but not explained.
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Being a Christian is more like falling in love than understanding a series of ideas.
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There is something beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what He is doing.