We look around us and we find ourselves confused as to why the world has fallen into such deep darkness. And standing in this descending darkness, what we need to realize is that the farther we move from God, the darker everything gets. And no light of man can illuminate that kind of darkness.

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.

Tragedy descends, and in the carnage our enraged cynicism screams ‘If there was a God, He would not have allowed this!’ And somehow we’ve conveniently forgotten that once upon a time He allowed us to tell Him to go away, and once upon that time we allowed ourselves to take Him up on that offer.

God’s absence in the carnage is due to one single rather unnerving fact; that at some time past He honored our request that He leave. And if we are not brutally honest with ourselves regarding that choice, it is we ourselves who have set the stage for the next tragedy.

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.

At the moment that everything goes dark, the sunset in front of us becomes the whole story. But if we find courage enough to wait until tomorrow morning, we will suddenly come to understand that in reality yesterday’s sunset was only half of the story.

In the end, if we don't have God we don't have anything other than an end.

Tomorrow’ is the thing that’s always coming but never arrives. ‘Today’ is the thing that’s already here and never leaves. And because that’s the case, I would much prefer to invest in today than sit around waiting for an arrival that’s not arriving.

The darkness that follows a sunset is never so dark that it can change the inevitability of a sunrise.

Ethics are the things that say, 'Don’t stick your finger in the socket.' The world says, 'It’s okay because we’ve shut off the electricity.' And at the point that we’ve chosen to listen to the world and ignore our ethics, we say, 'I’m having a really hard time getting back up.

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.

Imagination envisions what could be. Reality states what is. And when my journey is shaped by one of these at the exclusion of the other, I will eventually wake up on some road facing the ‘reality’ that I’m far more lost than I could have ‘imagined’.

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.

To be careless in making decisions is to naively believe that a single decision impacts nothing more than that single decision, for a single decision can spawn a thousand others that were entirely unnecessary or it can bring peace to a thousand places we never knew existed.

In case you’re short on definitions, here’s one. Insanity: ‘Destroying the very things that sustain us.’ And if we’re so short-sighted so as to make such preposterous choices, then it’s not all that preposterous to believe that shortly our end will be in sight.

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.

A lot of the situations that we put ourselves in are similar to a cat in a yard full of dogs. We rarely ask ourselves how we got here, (which doesn’t help with the question of how we get out of here), all of which rarely keeps us from finding ourselves in the next yard asking the same questions.

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.

If I can draw the slightest smile across a single face obliterated by pain, in that act I will have begun to understand the power of an ordinary human being to perform the seemingly impossible in the life of another human being. And how can that experience do anything less than drive me to try and make the world smile.

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.

Despite all of our incessant tinkering, we can’t manufacture the things we most desperately need. And if perchance we do, they will never be more than pathetically emaciated facsimiles that will leave us emaciated. And until we finally realize that we can only ‘find’ these things, we will never sense any compulsion to ‘find’ God.

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 hands of man can manufacture many things both penetratingly brilliant and utterly astounding. Yet, despite their amazing dexterity and profound skill they cannot manufacture hope. Such a masterpiece as that is left for the hands of God and a manger crafted by those hands.

The message of Christmas is a message of hope when all other such messages created by men can do nothing more than be hopeful.

There was a moment when any hope within me froze solid and I was finally emptied of all energy to fight the cold. And at the very point of that very surrender, when I became convinced that I must bow to a world that would be forever frigid, God cupped the hands of my soul and poured in the warmth of Christmas.

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.

If I have never had, or worse yet, I have lost the conviction that life (despite all of the blows it wields and the savagery that it spawns) is nonetheless an incalculable privilege, I will have in that single loss forfeited the whole of my life and effectively wiped out any hope that I can or will do anything other than exist.

The strewn and tangled wreckage that litters our lives is the precious raw material from which great beginnings are forged.

The worst of it is that while we continue to sink deeper into the muck and mire that we’ve created, in the very descent itself we ignorantly declare that in reality we are rising. And until desperation has crippled us sufficiently to confess the lie that we are lifting ourselves out of this mess, and until the panic of utter hopelessness has driven us to completely surrender all of the pathetic contrivances that we’ve fashioned that have put us there, we will never realize that God has readied solid ground that stands but a single step away

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.

If I scan the expanse of my heart and find it empty of everything except emptiness, it is because I ‘poured’ the whole of my passion into something other than God. And anything other than God will always be too ‘poor’ to be able to ‘pour’ back anything that can fill that kind of emptiness.

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.

Maybe the truth of it all is that we’re just too fearful to give our faith enough running room to realize that this precariously thin path that led us to the end of this life is dwarfed to obscurity by the infinitely vast byway that begins immediately on the other side.

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 hold in my hand a million ideas and more. But if I am puzzled as to why they have never leapt out of my hand and been birthed into the realities they were crafted to be, it is likely because the other hand has withheld the sacrifice that is necessary to birth an idea.

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.

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.

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.

Far too often the ‘things’ that men define as success do little more than successfully destroy the lives of the very men who achieve those ‘things.’ And while I must admit that there is an authentic element of success in all of that, it’s the kind of success that I would much prefer to successfully avoid.

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.

Ignorance might be bliss, but it also has teeth.

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?

We can certainly run from a lot of things. But when we eventually pull up exhausted and entirely out of breath, we are rather shocked to discover that we haven’t been able to create any distance between ourselves and what we’ve been running from regardless of how fast we might have been running and how far we think we might have gotten.

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.

What would behoove me to instantly declare God not to be God unless He followed my script in some tediously exacting manner? I must confess that I am less likely to believe that it’s a matter of some narcissistic demand that I freely pen my own script. Rather, I think it’s fear that I’m too inadequate to follow God’s.

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.

Self-preservation is to hunker down in the suffocating confines of this infinitesimally tiny existence that I define as ‘me,’ instead of letting ‘me’ run through the infinitely massive expanse of everything that is not me. And if the beast of self-preservation does not permit such freedoms, I will preserve myself to my own death.

I am amazed that without any hesitation whatsoever I can completely believe myself to be on a grand journey of massive vistas and bold ascents, only to find that they are nothing more than a figment of a frightened imagination that needed a journey but could not admit to the fear of actually taking one.

I might define a ‘journey’ as something that life itself calls me to. And I might then define a ‘trip’ as something I create to avoid a journey by mimicking a journey. And while fear is most certainly part and parcel of both, the latter is emboldened by fear while the former surrenders to it.

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.

The hand of God is wonderfully evident at those times when He pens stories whose lines we ourselves are far too fearful to pen or whose imaginations are far too limited to envision. And I would unashamedly suggest that the Christmas story is that very story.

Far too often, it is at the moment where we finally stand on the very precipice of some great thing that we turn and abandon it, for it is at these seminal moments that fear wins and greatness dies. The beauty of Christmas is that God steps over precipices.

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.

Fear is a lethal killer of dreams, the greatest cancer that has beset passion, and a ruthless thief of lives stolen and buried in the decay of lives squandered. Yet the greatest tragedy of all is that the fear that destroys us is rarely the monster it pretends to be, nor does it possess anything close to the power that we grant it. Therefore, it is only a killer, a cancer and a thief because we empower it to be so.

What in the world would ever lead to me believe that life is a series of opportunities that are readily available to everyone else but me? What really leads me to believe such an atrocious lie is that I don’t believe in myself sufficiently to engage those opportunities in the first place.

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 assumption is that if I expend myself for myself in the end all I’ll be left with is myself, and that alone is frightening. But what I’ve failed to consider is that I have to expend so much of myself living for myself that in the end I’m really left with very little of myself, and that is unimaginably frightening.

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’.

In a relationship with God, our most secret places once thickly cloaked and meticulously hidden away now stand before us utterly and entirely exposed. And it may be that this dreaded fear is the single thing that keeps us an arm’s length from God, and forever a single step away from His blessings.

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.

Fear tells me that while there might be a host of people who wish to stand beside me in times of crisis, the tangled wreckage is sometimes so enormous that the best of their efforts leave them stranded at a great distance. And standing desperately alone surveying the carnage that holds all others a bay, God suddenly taps me on the shoulder, leans over and whispers, 'how about a little demolition?

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.

The line that we chart into our future is often more a circle that brings us back to our past. And it might be that there is some hidden intent in charting circles in that we can feel like we’re moving when we actually have no intent of doing so.

To fall is not to fail. To fail is to never fall because I never got up in the first place.

Apathy is unconditional surrender where we are driven into hiding by unrealistic fear, and firmly held there by the misinformed belief that we are helpless to do anything other than hide. Therefore, apathy survives solely on lies and can be completely abated by truth.

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.

Surrendering is intentionally laying down the power I possess. And have I considered that the power I lay down is often more powerful than that which I’m laying it down in front of? Therefore, I would be wise to recognize that surrender is less the absence of power and more the presence of fear.

I would suggest that the prisons I incessantly create are not designed to lock me in, rather they are designed to lock the world out. And the oddity is that either way, I am a prisoner who has sentenced himself to a prison within which I do not belong.

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.

You are silent now who once stood on battlefields ravaged by destruction unimaginable, holding in those desperate places the line of freedom for others you would never know, and who would never know you. And being one of those you never knew, I would give all I have to clasp your hand one single time, look into eyes that witnessed the bloodied carnage that results when freedom refuses to bow to chains of any kind, and simply say 'thank you.

Because a door slammed shut, we assume that our dreams were slammed shut with it. Yet before we surrender to a closed door, it might be wise to take a moment and consider the fact that any dream is far too big not to have a couple of back doors.

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.

I am the greatest obstacle to my greatest dreams.

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.

Men can dig wells, but they can’t create water.

What is an adventure, I might ask? And in the asking, I might begin to understand that my adventures are sorely limited to the confines of my lackluster imagination. Therefore, an adventure of the most robust and wild sort must be constructed by an unlimited imagination. And unless I am mistaken, only God has an imagination like that.

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.

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.

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.

Sometimes the very things that we’re expending our lives to sustain are the very things that are killing our ability to live. And against our blind and frequently raging protests, these are the very things that God let’s die so that we can live.

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.

To embrace the message of Christmas is to throw off my hedonistic rebellion and bow before the chafing reality that I can't save myself, and in that very act to be suddenly taken aback in that I've stumbled upon the very freedom I've longed for in the very place I'd least expected it.

Rare are the handful of principles that incessantly drive us to stand even when we face the stark realization that we will likely perish in the standing. And rarer still is the person who will surrender all to protect such principles. Yet, the rudimentary principles of freedom and liberty pristinely untarnished by greed and selfishness took captive the hearts of simple people and raised this nation up from untamed wilderness and unchecked tyranny. And let us all be warned that without renewed adherence to these principles, we will rapidly return this nation to untamed wilderness and unchecked tyranny.

It is at the precise moment that I take something for granted that I have placed myself in the precarious position of losing that very thing. And if that thing I risk losing is liberty, taking it for granted is foolishness of the most foolish sort.

If I have become so pathetically dulled that I hold freedom as my right and the privileges of liberty as my due, I can stand beside the stilled graves of a thousand soldiers fallen in defense of freedom and not feel a thing. And my most solemn prayer is that I will never be this.

The world brazenly touts freedom as both the inalienable right and morally liberating justification to mindlessly play in the filth that lies all around me. And the slight bit of sanity that yet remains within me asks, ‘what raging madness would prompt me to incessantly wallow in the very things that will eventually swallow me?

Is it possible that my walls are specifically erected and intentionally reinforced out of the fear that God calls me to an existence without walls? And if this is so, do I realize that I am the warden of prison that I created in which I myself am the prisoner?

Sometimes what is said to be a gift may appear more of a curse only because the greatest gifts of all are the gifts that have enough disruptive force to break us out of everything that’s breaking us. And God loves us far too much not to give us exactly those kinds of gifts.

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.

The sacrifice ‘of’ self for the greater good is the greatest calling imaginable, and it is the bedrock of the greatest nations. The sacrifice ‘for’ self is the most pathetic calling imaginable, and it is the quicksand within which nations perish.

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.

Suddenly finding myself imprisoned in the ruins of the fortresses I created, I realize that that which I built to protect me has now become a labyrinth that is set to destroy me. And laying spent in the rubble, I finally realize that there is only one fortress and I cannot create it because there is only one God.

If you want to completely destroy a child, all you have to do is mold them into your vision of what you want them to be. If you want to completely liberate a child, all you have to do is grow them into the person they were created to be. The former cannot see God in the child. The latter can see nothing less.

A father teaches his children that the battle is not determined by the enemy that stands around them, but by the God Who stands within them. And that lesson can only be driven home as they watch their father stand around them, while God stands within their father.

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.

Words can be honed to crafted perfection by the finest wordsmiths. Yet, if we trust solely in the expanse of them to explain this God of ours or articulate our experience of Him, we will have brutally destroyed the very things we are attempting to explain. And if I should do that, no words can describe how badly I wish I had no words.

I pray for sufficient wisdom to understand that wisdom apart from God is the stuff of opinion tainted by the rot of bias. And if I am somehow apt to confuse such rubbish with wisdom, I will think myself wise but find myself living in a landfill.

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.

Sooner or later I will realize that the very things I most desperately need are the very things I am unable to give myself. Therefore, I will either be left despising the fact that I am doomed to live out a life that is perpetually empty, or I will realize that an empty tomb is the single thing that will eternally fill me.

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.

I am pressed to admit that I don’t have the capacity to understand the bloodied horrors of a cross and the wild exhilaration of an empty tomb. But at the point that I think I completely understand God, I have at that very point humanized Him and in that very action I have lost Him. Therefore, I much prefer to simply marvel.

God emptied out that first tomb so that He could turn around and empty out me.

A god of the ‘possible’ is no God.

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?

Do I dare believe such an absurdly outrageous story that a man would die, lay lifeless in some tomb for three days and then somehow live again? Yet, if I dare to consider it, is that not exactly what I so desperately desire for this lifeless life of mine? And is Easter God’s tenderly outrageous way of telling me that that is exactly what I can have?

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?

If my decisions constantly heed the voice of the world, I can be completely assured that I’m going to end up in a ‘world of hurt.’ If my decisions heed the word of God, I can be completely assured that this ‘world of hurt’ won't be anywhere near my solar system.

If I can somehow focus on the pain of not focusing on my pain, I will soon find that pain healed simply because I forced myself to do the exact opposite of what my core humanity demanded I do…I sought to heal the pain of someone else instead.

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.

The sure path to tomorrow was plotted in a manger and paved on a cross. And although this sturdy byway is mine for the taking, I have incessantly chosen lesser paths. And maybe it is time to realize that Christmas is a promise that I can walk through the world and never get lost in the woods.

Although it pains me, I must admit that I have never found what I ‘need.’ And I am in this place because long ago I took it upon myself to decide what I ‘want’ to need, verses surrendering to what I ‘need’ to need. And thankfully I have realized that God made Christmas everything that I ‘want,’ but more so He made it everything that I ‘need.

In the thoughtlessness of my incessant hurry, I have made God an ‘addendum in’ my life verses the ‘agenda of’ my life. And what I need to hurry up and realize is that with these priorities positioned as such, what I am hurrying to is my own demise.

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.

If my decisions constantly heed the voice of the world, I can be completely assured that I’m going to end up in a ‘world of hurt.’ If my decisions heed the word of God, I can be completely assured that this ‘world of hurt’ isn’t anywhere near my solar system.

I huddle in the dark with a mass of burnt matches strewn at my feet. And yet, for all of those matches I’ve not been able to light a single candle. And huddled in such deep darkness, I’ve somehow yet to realize that Christmas made both matches and candles forever obsolete.

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.

Why in the world have we never found what we’re really looking for? Because what we need is often the very thing we won’t accept. And sadly, in turning away the God we need, we need to understand that we have chosen to live without everything we need.

Is my faith so terribly pathetic that I have diminished God to the point that I doubt His ability to survive in the very world that He came to save? Indeed, I have done exactly that. And all I need to do to beat that mentality is to remember that a baby born in a manger with every disadvantage imaginable stills lives today.

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.

Possibly the most debilitating deception of all is to create a god of my own making, fool myself into believing that this limp god of mine is the true God, and then construct the entirety of my life on this flamboyantly fictional character. Possibly the most devastating realization of all is when the real God shows up, and in the showing up all of this come crashing down.

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.

To only see ‘death’ in death is to somehow assume that death itself is a barrier so abrupt that God Himself is halted by it. To see ‘life’ in death is to understand that death is a sprawling horizon to a new beginning that God created long before death ever thought to show up.

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.

If I see God as nothing more than a caricature of history or imagination I cannot do anything less than make myself my own ‘god’. And once I realize that in doing so my rendition of being a ‘god’ is embarrassingly inferior to the very caricature I am mimicking, I quickly come to realize that maybe the only thing that can be ‘god’ is a God. And if that is the case, I suddenly find myself hounded by the stunning reality that God is not a caricature.

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.