The integrity of our relationships matters more than the boldness of our words.

Mercy ministry always comes down to this: you can help, but only Jesus can heal.

Living according to God's standards is an acquired taste.

Healing comes through God's work, and God deals differently with us when we deal differently with him.

There is only one thing to do when you meet the Living God; you must fall on your face and repent of your sins. Repentance is bittersweet business; Repentance is not just a conversion exercise -- it is the posture of the Christian, much like 'tree' or 'full lotus' is the posture of the Yogi. Repentance is our daily fruit, our hourly washing, our minute by minute wake-up call; our reminder of God's creation, Jesus' blood, and the Holy Spirit's comfort. Repentance is the only no shame solution to a renewed Christian conscience, because it only proves the obvious: God was right all along.

Before we come to Christ, we must come to ourselves.

Slowly, but steadily, my feelings did start to change- feelings about myself as a woman and feelings about what sexuality really is and what it really isn't. I -like most everyone who identified as gay or lesbian -felt very comfortable, very at home in mu body in my lesbianism. One doesn't repent for a sin of identity in one session. Sins of identity have multiple dimensions, and throughout this journey, I have come to my pastor and his wife, friends in the Lord, and always to the Lord himself with different facets of my sin. I don't mean different incidents or examples of the same sin, but different facets of sin -how pride, for example, informed my decision-making, or how my unwillingness to forgive others had landlocked my heart in bitterness. I have walked this journey with help. There is no other way to do it I still walk this journey with help.

One very difficult aspect of sin is that my sin never feels like sin to me. My sin feels like life to me, plain and simple. My heart is an idol factory, and my mind is an excuse-making factory.

Her heart was revealed in a slip, as our hearts always are.

There is no such thing as an independent Christian.

Worship is the launching pad for life.

[W]hen you make your mistakes in public you will learn that they are mistakes and in being corrected you will grow. It also reminded me that being wrong and responding to correction with resilience was a higher virtue than covering up your mistakes so your students and the watching world assumed that success meant never being wrong. Working from your strengths and cultivating resilience in all matters of life have always been guiding principles for me.

Is God giving you victory this day, if not this whole day, how about this very minute?

A family that never embraces life's risks never really lives.

The more God-centered our worship practices, the more mercy-centered our life.

There is a core difference between sharing the gospel with the lost and imposing a specific moral standard on the unconverted.

We have, by God's grace, been given another day to serve and love, laugh and learn, pray and ponder. Spring is ready to burst into the open air, and we are ready to embrace it.

What good Christians don't realize is that sexual sin is not recreational sex gone overboard. Sexual sin is predatory. It won't be 'healed' by redeeming the context or the genders. Sexual sin must simply be killed. What is left of your sexuality after this annihilation is up to God. But healing, to the sexual sinner, is death: nothing more and nothing less.

Lord, please protect me from Your people.

Do we use the Word of God only as a cue card to commandeer our external behavior?