I decided to start from scratch, with a simple prayer: Hi! I said. Someone or something hears. I don’t know much about its nature, only that when I cry out, it hears me and moves closer to me, and I d...
I also tell them that sometimes when my writer friends are working, they feel better and more alive than they do at any other time. And sometimes when they are writing well, they feel that they are li...
Haters want us to hate them, because hate is incapacitating. When we hate, we can’t operate from our real selves, which is our strength.
Haters want us to hate them, because hate is incapacitating. When we hate, we can’t operate from our real selves, which is our strength. Now that I think of it, this is such a great reason to give up...
God makes a way out of no way.
God loves you crazily, like I love you, Rae said, like a slightly overweight auntie, who sees only your marvelousness and need.
Forgiving people doesn’t necessarily mean you want to meet them for lunch. It means you try to undo the Velcro hook. Lewis Smedes said it best: To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that t...
For twenty years I have ached to go back home, when there was nobody there to whom I could return.
For some of us books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small flat rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world worlds that sing...
Easter says that love is more powerful than death, bigger than the dark, bigger than cancer, bigger even than airport security lines.
Easter is so profound. Christmas was an afterthought in the early Church, the birth not observed for a couple hundred years. But no one could help noticing the resurrection: Rumi said that spring was...
During congregational silences, in meditation rooms or halls, in prison cells and meeting rooms, in silent confession at church, all these screwed-up people like us, with tangled lives and minds, find...
Does sunset sometimes look like the sun is coming up? Do you know what a faithful love is like? You’re crying; you say you’ve burned yourself. But can you think of anyone who’s not hazy with smoke? —R...
Can you imagine the hopelessness of trying to live a spiritual life when you’re secretly looking up at the skies not for illumination or direction, but to gauge, miserably, the odds of rain?
But where do we even start on the daily walk of restoration and awakening? We start where we are.
But where do we even start on the daily walk of restoration and awakening? We start where we are. We find God in our human lives, and that includes the suffering. I get thirsty people glasses of water...
But easy's like, who cares? Easy's like, how much is easy going to get you?
Bonnie persuaded me to focus on the good, just for today: tomorrow I can call back and we will wallow in the total awfulness of Amy’s behavior, which will surely lead to permanent estrangement and dea...
Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious.
As far as I can recall, none of the adults in my life ever once remembered to say, Some people have a thick skin and you don’t. Your heart is really open and that is going to cause pain, but that is a...