We all die eventually; we have no choice in the matter. But there are degrees of death before the final physical one. If we are honest, we acknowledge that we are dying throughout our life, and this is what we learn if we are attentive: grace is found at the depths...
[Written in 1948] How are we to live in an atomic age?’ I am tempted to reply: ‘Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land...
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
People who know they will die live very carefully. Not careful as in fearful; careful as in full of care. Every word, every act, every relationship holds the possibility of giving birth to something filled with great care. And that thing need not be showy or dramatic,...
We write our own eulogy not by how we die, but how we live.
Here is a peeving, depressed preacher who is mad. God sent a little gourd to grow up and make shade over the preacher's head. He is so thrilled at that nice little, leafy plant. Then God sends a little cut worm like the one that cut off your tomato plant last spring....
To love is to know God precisely because God is love. The emerging community, at its best, can teach us again that love must be the first word on our lips and also the last, and that we must seek to incarnate that sacred word in the world. I recently heard a...
And so it comes down to this: the only way to truly overcome our fear of death is to live life in such a way that its meaning cannot be taken away by death. This sounds grandiose, but it is really very simple. It means fighting the impulse to live for ourselves,...
Unless we are exchanging deeply committed levels of love with a few people, we will die slowly on the inside. This is precisely why so many people feel almost nothing at all. If we don’t learn to exchange love with family and friends, we will eventually grow numb and...
It amazes me how casually I can sing songs of deep, almost heroic commitment. It’s as if I think, “As long as I’m singing, the words I say don’t really matter. God knows it’s just a song.” While my mind wanders I promise to bow before the Lord, to proclaim His name to...