If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side!

Prayer helps correct myopia, calling to mind a perspective I daily forget. I keep reversing roles, thinking of ways in which God should serve me, rather than vice versa. As God fiercely reminded Job, the Lord of the universe has many things to manage, and in the midst of my self-pity I would do well to contemplate for a moment God's own point of view.

Self-sufficiency which first reared its head in the Garden of Eden, is the most fatal sin because it pulls us as if by a magnet that their lack of self-sufficiency is obvious to them every day. They must turn somewhere for strength, and sometimes they go through life relying on their natural gifts. But there's a chance, just a chance, that people who lack such natural advantages may cry out to God in their time of need.

AS ANDREW GREELEY SAID, If one wishes to eliminate uncertainty, tension, confusion and disorder from one's life, there is no point  in getting mixed up either with Yahweh or with Jesus of Nazareth.7-9 I grew up expecting that a relationship with God would bring order, certainty, and a calm rationality to life. Instead, I have discovered that living in faith involves much dynamic tension.

Prayer is the act of seeing reality from God's point of view.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you," he said.

It is not the same as optimism or wishful thinking, for these imply a denial of reality.

There's a cardinal rule in book publishing that applies equally to brain surgery and auto mechanics: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Since people are still buying the original Where Is God When It Hurts?

Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart. Audacious longing, burning songs, daring thoughts, an impulse overwhelming the heart, usurping the mind—these are all a drive toward [loving the One] who rings our heart like a bell. —ABRAHAM HESCHEL

Self-sufficiency, which first reared its head in the Garden of Eden, is the most fatal sin because it pulls us as if by a magnet away from God.

At the heart of sin lies a lack of trust that God intends the best for us.

Civilisation once looked to art as the means of passing wisdom from one generation to the next. Writing itself was invented in part to convey the sacred: permanent things deserved a permanent place, hence the hieroglyphs on Egyptian tombs. But a modern civilisation that no longer believes in permanent things, one that accepts no certain narrative of meaning, resorts to deconstruction, not construction.