Yet faith happens in the in-betweens, the interruptions, the thresholds. It happens when I’ve left this room where I was in control, where I had my self-explanation, where I had my ego boundaries, where I had my moral sense of my own rightness and superiority.
…the promise of the Gospel [is] not that we can be in control, or even that God is in control, but rather that God in Jesus joins us in our out-of-controlness, holds onto us, and brings us to the other side.
If I were going to begin practicing the presence of God for the first time today, it would help to begin by admitting the three most terrible truths of our existence: that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little.
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, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you...
Friendship is the reasonable passion for truly human fellowship; it is a mutual affection cemented by loyalty. The more people begin to live with one another as friends, the more privileges and claims to domination become superfluous. The more people trust one...
Christianity is about water: “Everyone that thirsteth, come ye to the waters.” It’s about baptism, for God’s sake. It’s about full immersion, about falling into something elemental and wet. Most of what we do in worldly life is geared toward our staying dry, looking...