"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid."

"The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet."

"Go where your best prayers take you."

"Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day's chalking."

"The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you."

"Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving."

"Coincidences are God's way of getting our attention."

"The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt."

"It is as impossible for man to demonstrate the existence of God as it would be for even Sherlock Holmes to demonstrate the existence of Arthur Conan Doyle."

"A miracle is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A miracle is when one plus one equals a thousand."

"To be wise is to be eternally curious."

"Joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes...."

"It’s less the words they say than those they leave unsaid that split old friends apart."

"The place to which God calls you is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."

"Vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world's deep need."

"Lust is the craving for salt of a man who is dying of thirst."

"Thus, when you wake up in the morning, called by God to be a self again, if you want to know who you are, watch your feet. Because where your feet take you, that is who you are."

"Remember me not for the ill I've done but for the good I've dreamed."

"If you have never known the power of God's love, then maybe it is because you have never asked to know it - I mean really asked, expecting an answer."

"God himself does not give answers. He gives himself."

"Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me."

"If you don't have doubts you're either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants-in-the-pants of faith. They keep it alive and moving."

"You can survive on your own; you can grow strong on your own; you can prevail on your own; but you cannot become human on your own."

"Listen to your life. All moments are key moments."

"Whether you call on him or don't call on him, God will be present with you."

"Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp."

"... in the long run, there can be no joy for anybody until there is joy finally for us all"

"Lord, I believe; help my unbelief' is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough."

"The story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all"

"Listen. Your life is happening. You are happening. Think back on your journey. The music of your life..."

"You enter the extraordinary by way of the ordinary"

"The life thatI touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place my touch will be felt."

"Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens."

"He also said we should carve in the year and place where I was born, but I said no. As a man dies many times before he's dead, so does he wend from birth to birth until, by grace, he comes alive at last."

"It is within the bonds of marriage that I, for one, found a greater freedom to be and to become and to share myself thatn I can imaine ever having found in any other kind of relationship."

"Words spoken in deep love or deep hate set things in motion in the human heart that can never be reversed"

"The past is the place we view the present from as much as the other way around."

"There's no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth."

"The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment."

"What's lost is nothing to what's found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup."

"Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,' the good thief said from his cross. (Luke 23:42). There are perhaps no more human words in all of Scripture, no prayer we can pray so well."

"Jesus didn't come to merely speak words that were true, He is the Word that makes us true."

"God in his unending greatness and glory and man in his unending littleness, prepared for the worst but rarely for the best, prepared for the possible but rarely for the impossible."

"The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's hunger meet."

"There is always the poet, the lunatic, the lover; there is always the religious man who is a queer mixture of the three."

"It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God's presence."

"What keeps the wild hope of Christmas alive year after year in a world notorious for dashing all hopes is the haunting dream that the child who was born that day may yet be born again even in us."

"Theology, like fiction, is largely autobiographical."

"To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift."

"In other words to live Eternal Life in the full and final sense is to be with God as Christ is with him, and with each other as Christ is with us."