“When we do what God wants us to do, we are blessed, we are spiritually healthy.”

“By accepting God's love for us, we fall in love with Him, and only then do we have the fuel we need to obey.”

“A story is based on what people think is important, so when we live a story, we are telling people around us what we think is important.”

“It made me wonder if the reasons our lives seem so muddled is because we keep walking into scenes in which we, along with the people around us, have no clear idea what we want.”

“I think the things we want most in life, the things we think will set us free, are not the thing we need.”

“The problem with Christian culture is we think of love as a commodity. We use it like money. [...] If something is doing something for us, offering us something, be it gifts, time, popularity, or what have you, we feel they have value, we feel they are worth something to us. I could see it so clearly, and I could see it in the pages of my life. This was the thing that had smelled so rotten all these years. I used love like money. The church used love like money. With love, we withheld affirmation from the people who did not agree with us, but we lavishly financed the ones who did.”

“I've wondered, though, if one of the reasons we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of life is because we don't want the responsibility inherent in the acknowledgment. We don't want to be characters in a story because characters have to move and breathe and face conflict with courage. And if life isn't remarkable, then we don't have to do any of that; we can be unwilling victims instead of grateful participants.”