“I've discovered that sometimes God wants us to live inside of the questions. Sometimes he wants us to linger in the waiting, hoping, praying. In fact, sometimes it's right in the middle of our darkness in the middle of our crisis, in the middle of our Plan B struggles that God speaks most clearly.”

“You may be at odds with God right now. You're not happy with the way your life is turning out. You may be praying and pleading with God. But is it possible you don't really want God? Is it possible you just want what you think God can give you? One of the things I believe God is teaching me in my life these days is that at times we want our dreams more than we want God. We want what God does for us instead of just God.”

“We sometimes have a tendency to bring God to our level, rather than allowing God to enlighten us by bringing us to God's level.”

“My greatest fear for my life and yours is that we'll just get busy and distracted and settle for a mediocre, unexamined life. It's that we'll just settle into life as usual and never become the person God intended for us to be.”

“When people ask me how they can know God's will for their lives, I tell them the best first step is to know God. Beyond that I really don't have any steps.”

“But the best reason to pray is that God is really there. In praying, our unbelief gradually starts to melt. God moves smack into the middle of even an ordinary day. He is no longer someone we theorize about. He is someone we want to be near.”

“God gave us minds to think with and hearts to thank with. Instead we use our hearts to think about the world as we would like it to have been, and we use our minds to come up with rationalizations for our ingratitude. We are a murmuring, discontented, unhappy, ungrateful people. And because we think we want salvation from our discontents...”