I know that the Bible is a special kind of book, but I find it as seductive as any other. If I am not careful, I can begin to mistake the words on th….

Day by day we are given not what we want but what we need. Sometimes it is a feast and sometimes...swept crumbs, but by faith we believe it is enough..

I wanted to be as close as I could to the Really Real, and I'll capitalize both of those R's, because God is a word that means different things to di….

The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self - to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fi….

I'll do my best to always put God and neighbor ahead of ego, but I want to find myself, and if finding myself means losing my ego self, I'll go there..

No one longs for what he or she already has, and yet the accumulated insight of those wise about the spiritual life suggests that the reason so many ….

The value for me being in a mainline tradition is history and memory, which is not just Christian tradition but denominational tradition, and charact….

I think a toxic message in a lot of Christianity has been that the self has to be annihilated in order for God to be found. I think that has been a t….

I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is ….

I discovered a version of the sinner's prayer that increased my faith far more than the one that I had said years earlier...In this version, there we….

With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in t….

God does some of God's best work with people who are seriously lost..

To be in the mainline is to have a history and not simply to be an amalgam, a community church of who knows what that came from who knows where..

Our waiting is not nothing. It is something -- a very big something -- because people tend to be shaped by whatever it is they are waiting for..

As hard as I have tried to remember the exact moment when I fell in love with God, I cannot do it. My earliest memories are bathed in a kind of golde….

You probably can't get much closer to God than serving a congregation 24/7. At the same time, there's a different kind of closeness in this present l….

That's enough, and I have a ministry as a neighbor as well. A ministry as a friend and a ministry as an aunt and a godmother, and family is very much….

The great thing about civility is that it does not require you to agree with or approve of anything. You don't even have to love your neighbor to be….

I read more widely. I made friends more widely. I wore more red. I stayed home on Sundays. I did things that were never in the realm of possible thin….

I think my idea of God was much more directive than my idea of God now, that is, a God who had one plan in mind for me, perhaps, and my job was to fi….

When I talk about losing myself, which I did, it's losing my idea of who I was and my idea of what I was supposed to be doing and the idea of what my….