The gifts of the Master are these: freedom, life, hope, new direction, transformation, and intimacy with God. If the cross was the end of the story, we would have no hope. But the cross isn't the end. Jesus didn't escape from death; he conquered it and opened the way to heaven for all who will dare to believe. The truth of this moment, if we let it sweep over us, is stunning. It means Jesus really is who he claimed to be, we are really as lost as he said we are, and he really is the only way for us to intimately and spiritually connect with God again.

God dances with the outcast.

Change is not always a good thing. What I need is not change from one thing to another but transformation from who I am into who I was meant to become. Only when God's transforming power touches me can I begin to live the simpler, freer, fresher, more creative, more patient, more passionate, more sacrificial, riskier, rawer, more real, more love-driven life God intended for me all along. That transformation is what awaits all who dare to enter the story of God. As Paul wrote, 'Let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think' (Romans 12:2)

Follow the evidence to where it leads, even if the conclusion is uncomfortable.

What would it be like to think what a gerbil thinks, from a gerbil's point of view? Kind of like Thomas Nigel's 1974 paper, 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' There's a subjective character of experience that's never captured in reductive accounts. Know what I mean?''Um . . . Sure.

The true nature of man left to himself without restraint is not nobility but savagery.

When you get the coffee from the store, does it come in a great big metal can?'He beamed. 'Absolutely.'That was all I needed to hear. "Tea. A cup of tea.

So you think the best way to prepare kids for the real world is to bus them to a government institution where they're forced to spend all day isolated with children of their own age and adults who are paid to be with them, placed in classes that are too big to allow more than a few minutes of personal interaction with the teacher-then spend probably an hour or more everyday waiting in lunch lines, car lines, bathroom lines, recess lines, classroom lines, and are forced to progress at the speed of the slowest child in class?