The novelist Pearl Buck argued that artists are people who tend to be extremely sensitive to any emotional input: "The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive. To them, a touch is a blow, a sound is...
A pastor of a small church would occasionally call on one gentleman to pray, and every time this one particular guy would pray, he would end with the strangest statement, “And, oh Lord, prop us up on our leaning side.” Finally, the pastor pulled him aside, and he...
As I was lying on a gurney in pre-op awaiting knee replacement surgery three days before Christmas, before the “happy drugs” were administered, I noticed a painting on the wall beside the gurney. It was rather nondescript, a field of blue flowers in a garden of rocks...
The problem with accepting truth as it comes to us rather than truth as we divine it for ourselves is that it's not worth dying for--and we don't. It becomes a patina of ideas inside of which we live our lives without passion, without care. This kind of faith happens...
Look at the animals roaming the forest: God’s spirit dwells within them. Look at the birds flying across the sky: God’s spirit dwells within them. Look at the tiny insects crawling in the grass: God’s spirit dwells within them. . . . Look too at the great trees of the...
I think it annoys God if you walk by the color purple in a field and don’t notice.
My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging.
I have been fed from fields I did not till.I have crossed bridges I did not build.I have sat in the shade of trees I did not plant.I have received knowledge I did not research.
I am maybe the ultimate Protestant, the man at the end of the Protestant road, for, as I have read in the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion, but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems...