“There are actual monsters in the world, but when my kids ask I pretend like there aren’t.”

“God: Check out this human I designed.Angel: Wow, that looks pretty incredible. How does it work?God: It's pretty complicated. Point to something and I'll tell you what it does.Angel: Okay. What are these?God: Teeth. They're for chewing up food.Angel: How come there are so many of them?God: I threw in, like, three or four extra. If they don't like them, they can pll them out somehow, I guess.Angel: What about this weird bag thing?God: That's the appendix.Angel: What does it do?God: It explodes.Angel: Really? That's all?God: Pretty much.Angel: What causes that to happen?God: It just happens randomly. Like you'll just be walking down the street or driving a car and boom.Angel: Geez...that's terrifying. Does it kill the person?God: (shrugs) Sometimes.”

“I still remember the day I got my first calculator Teacher: All right, children, welcome to fourth grade math. Everyone take a calculator out of the bin. Me: What are these? Teacher: From now on we'll be using calculators. Me: What do these things do? Teacher: Simple operations, like multiplication and division. Me: You mean this device just...does them? By itself? Teacher: Yes. You enter in the problem and press equal. Me: You...you knew about this machine all along, didn't you? This whole time, while we were going through this...this charade with the pencils and the line paper and the stupid multiplication tables!...I'm sorry for shouting...It's just...I'm a little blown away. Teacher: Okay, everyone, today we're going to go over some word problems. Me: What the hell else do you have back there? A magical pen that writes book reports by itself? Some kind of automatic social studies worksheet that...that fills itself out? What the hell is going on? Teacher: If a farmer farms five acres of land a day-- Me: So that's it, then. The past three years have been a total farce. All this time I've been thinking, "Well, this is pretty hard and frustrating but I guess these are useful skills to have." Meanwhile, there was a whole bin of these things in your desk. We could have jumped straight to graphing. Unless, of course, there's some kind of graphing calculator! Teacher: There is. You get one in ninth grade. Me: Is this...Am I on TV? Is this a prank show? Teacher: No.”

“Is my son turning into some kind of monster?”

“Is that "great cloud of witnesses" watching my way so as to judge or is it informing my way so that I may walk it? Do they hide the light so that I cannot see it or do they filter it so that its blaze will not blind me? Can a man see God face to face and live? Can I not see an eclipse better through a pinhole in a paper than without it?We can't so much see light as we can see things because of it. So I do not meet God in a vacuum -- I meet Him in the world He has provided for me to meet Him in -- in a world of events and of places, of history (time and space), in a world of lives of people and their records of their encounters. I meet God in this world -- in the world of these things......and this is the world as best as I can remember it.”

“My heart is moved by all I cannot save:so much has been destroyedI have to cast my lot with thosewho age after age, perversely,with no extraordinary power,reconstitute the world.”

“The longer I live, the more I have the feeling like God looks down, like when you've just bitten into a vanilla ice cream cone, you just get the feeling God's going, 'Yes! He enjoys it, and I made his taste buds and I made vanilla and he's putting it together and he's experiencing what I created him to experience.”