"Entering this world and bringing the good news of a life-giving, liberating, restoring God is risky."

The stranger at the door of your tent may be the living God, looking for an entrance into your life.

“Deep healing always comes in that gentle, merciful space where genuine encounter is made possible. Our deepest wounds just can’t be healed by force or from afar.”

Before there is healing, there is courage. Before there is a miracle, there is hope. After twelve years of rejection, she still reaches — and maybe that's the first miracle: the courage to believe that God has not abandoned her.

What if understanding the Trinity doesn’t mean anything more than understanding that we need each other, that we actually must be in relationship?

God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being. All of us. Each precious created thing that ever was. Every creature. Every stone. Every atom. These are real because they are given. And they are given, because that’s who God is. God gives. God gives life. Always.

You will not lose your way because I am the way. You do not have to go searching for truth because I am the truth. You do not have to fear that life will slip away from you. Because I am the life.

"Our duty as God's sheep is not to sit idly while God's protection and love wash over us, or to expect to be carried, but rather to continue walking even if we are in the valley of the shadow of death. It's to continue listening for the voice of God, even as we witness thieves breaking in and as the voices of strangers grow discordant and loud and drown everything else out."

How much smaller and how much sadder a gospel it would be to think God loves us because we are right, rather than because God's very nature is to love. How much paltrier would the good news be if it were that some of us are forgiven because we happen to be right, rather than because it is God's nature to forgive us all.

And into our demented lives, Jesus comes uninvited, saying something like, “I see you, and you can live in this shattered world in a different way. You can take the fragments and scars and make something whole again, even beautiful.” Peace be with you.