God is going to reveal me as a flawed human being as fast as he can and he's going to enjoy it because it will force me to grapple with real intimacy.

They never tell you when you get born a control freak it will cost you a healthy love life. But it's true. You can't control somebody and have intimacy with them at the same time. They may stay because they fear you, but true love casts out fear.

It's interesting that in the Bible, in the book of Ecclesiastes, the only practical advice given about living a meaningful life is to find a job you like, enjoy your marriage, and obey God. It's as though God is saying, Write a good story, take somebody with you, and let me help.

Life is a dance toward God, I began to think. And the dance is not so graceful as we might want. While we glide and swing out practiced sway, God crowds our feet, bumps our toes, and scuffs our shoes. So we learn to dance with the One who made us. And it is a difficult dance to learn, because its steps are foreign.

I realized that for years I'd thought of love as something that would complete me, make all my troubles go away. I worshipped at the altar of romantic completion. And it had cost me, plenty of times. And it had cost me most of the girls I'd dated, too, because I wanted them to be something they weren't. It's too much pressure to put on a person.

To know there is a better story for your life and to choose something other is like choosing to die.

It's true the manipulator is the loneliest person in the world. And the second loneliest is the person being manipulated. Unless we're honest with each other, we can't connect. We can't be intimate. Only God can penetrate a manipulative person's heart, and even then, he sits quietly, waiting for them to stop running their con.

After all, to love somebody is to give them the power to hurt you, and nobody can hurt you if you're the only one writing the script.

But in so many ways I'm still that kid, not sure exactly how to be emotionally intimate with a girl without feeling weak, not sure my work is good enough, not sure if the people who are clapping would really like me if they got to know me.

If I learned anything from thinking about my father, it's that there is a force in the world that doesn't want us to live good stories. It doesn't want us to face our issues, to face our fear and bring something beautiful into the world. I guess what I am saying is, I believe God wants us to create beautiful stories, and whatever it is that isn't God wants us to create meaningless stories, teaching the people around us that life just isn't worth living.

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