“By toeing the party line you earned social dollars; by being yourself you did not. If you wanted to be valued, you became a clone.”

“When I am talking to somebody there are always two conversations going on. The first is on the surface; it is about politics or music or whatever it is our mouths are saying. The other is beneath the surface, on the level of the heart, and my heart is either communicating that I like the person I am talking to or I don’t. God wants both conversations to be true. That is, we are supposed to speak truth in love.”

“I trust an academic institution much less when they have only one interpretation of scripture rather than multiple interpretations that contend with one another. If the search is for truth, we can’t reject debate. This is not to say there is no truth, it’s only to say all of heaven hardly fits inside a mans head. And any man who says it does has made something small of heaven and something rather large of his head.”

“By being true I am allowing people to get to know the real me. And it feels better to have people to love the real me than the me I invented. “

“I’ve noticed something. I’ve never walked out of a meaningless movie thinking all movies are meaningless. I only thought the movie I walked out on was meaningless. I wonder, then, if when people say life is meaningless, what they really mean is their lives are meaningless. I wonder if they’ve chosen to believe their whole existence is unremarkable, and are projecting their dreary life on the rest of us.”

“If you don’t love somebody it gets annoying when they tell you what to do or what to feel. When you love them you get pleasure from their pleasure and it makes it easy to serve.”

“It turns out the droplet of our knowledge is a bit lost in the ocean of our unknowing.”

“I never liked jazz music, because jazz music doesn’t resolve. But I was outside the Bagdad Theater in Portland one night when I saw a man playing the saxophone. I stood there for fifteen minutes, and he never opened his eyes.
After that I liked jazz music.
Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way.
I used to not like God because God didn’t resolve. But that was before any of this happened.”

“Jesus does not want us floating through space or sitting in front of our televisions. Jesus wants us interacting, eating together, laughing together, praying together. Loneliness is something that came with the fall. If loving other people is a bit of heaven, then certainly isolation is a bit of hell, and to that degree, here on earth, we decide in which state we would like to live.”

“Truth is rooted in story, not rational systems.”

“Truth is not My Truth, it’s Just Truth: My ideas were not really my invention. Even if I was the first person to consider an idea, it’s still something I stumbled upon. I shouldn’t take it personally when somebody doesn’t agree. They aren’t rejecting me, they are rejecting an idea.”

“Heaven and hell are about who you know, not about what you do. Who you know saves you from what you did and what you are inside.”

“What I believe is what I do. I used to say that it was important to tell people about Jesus – but I never did. Andrew very kindly explained that if I do not introduce people to Jesus then I don’t believe Jesus is an important person. It doesn’t matter what I say. Andrew said I should not live like a politician, but like a christian.”

“A person who thinks himself unlovable can not be in a relationship with God, because he can’t accept who God is – a being that is love.”

“The most difficult lie I have ever contended with is this: Life is a story about me!”

“Love is both, something that happens to you and something you decide upon. (…) I believe that belief is something that happens to us too.”

“My most recent faith struggle is not one of intellect. I don’t really do that anymore. Sooner or later you just figure out there are some guys who don’t believe in God and they can proof he doesn’t exist, and some other guys who do believe in God and they can proof he does exist. And the argument stopped being about God a long time ago. And now it’s about who is smarter. And honestly – I don’t care. I don’t believe I will ever walk away from God for intellectual reasons. Who knows anything anyway? If I walk away from him, and please pray that I never do, I will walk away for social reasons, identity reasons, deep emotional reasons, the same reasons that any of us do anything.”

“The bible is so good with chocolate! I always thought the bible was more of a salad thing, you know. But it isn’t. It is a chocolate thing!”

“But then it hit me … he was saying I would never talk to my neighbor the way I talk to myself and that somehow I come to believe it was wrong to kick other people around but it was okay to do it to myself.”

“Somehow we realize that great stories are told in conflict, but we are unwilling to embrace the pontential greatness of the story we are actually in. We think God is unjust, rather than a master storyteller.”

“A character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it is the basic structure of a good story.”