said that all people believe in a god—whether it's the god of hopelessness or the god of circumstances or the god of ourselves or the god of some other person. It took me a long time to figure out what my god was.

It would be all right if I could pray in this way, or in that other way, if I were just able to give You the only thing You want: not my thoughts and feelings and resolutions, but myself. But that is just what I am unable to do, because in the superficiality of the ordinary routine into which my life is cast, I am a stranger to myself. And how can I seek You, being so distant, how can I give myself up to You, when I haven't been able as yet to find myself?

Because if He were a King in name only, I would rather go back to the chocolate factory. I would remain a Christian, but I would know that my religion was only a set of principles, excellent and to be followed, but hardly demanding devotion. Suppose on the other hand that I were to discover God to be a Person, in the sense that He communicated and cared and loved and led. That was something quite different. That was the kind of King I would follow into any battle.

Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

Religious life is an encounter with the living God. Sometimes that encounter is preceded by a kind of soul-searching agony that tries desperately not to hear, runs in the opposite direction, and frantically tries to reason itself out of answering the invitation.

The more we get to know God, the more we want to know him better.

My only prayer for my time with you is, "God I just want these men and women to long for you."

God is the only true Giver, and He needs nothing from us. But still He wants us. He gave us life so that we might seek and know Him.

If my own struggles have taught me anything, it is that my greatest need is to know God better, and I am not alone.

People have lost faith in God and the Kingdom of God because they have put God in the wrong place. If they put God in the right place, in their own heart, the spiritual crisis will come to an end. This is a spiritual and a cultural matter. In the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions there are people who have discovered that God does not belong to the future or to another place.

Ask me not where I live or what I like to eat . . . Ask me what I am living for and what I think is keeping me from living fully that.

There is only one problem on which all my existence, my peace, my happiness depend: to discover myself in discovering God. If I find Him I will find myself and if I find my true self I will find Him.