Purposes are threads of continuity that we weave into the long-term view of our lives. Goals come and go, but purposes survive because they are long-term, they pertain to the why we exist part of our lives. They relate to how we perceive the theory of our lives.

None of us gets our dream in the way that we dreamt it, because none of us is writing our own story. God, in his love, writes a better story than we could ever write for ourselves. He has a better dream than the one we conceive. He knows much better than we do what is best for us. He will take us places that we never intended to go because, in doing so, we become more of what he re-created us in Christ to be.

You and I simply never know for sure what is coming next. Think about it: your life has not worked according to your plan. You could not have written yourself into your present situation twenty years ago. Last week didn't work according to your plan. Today won't work according to your plan. Your life is under the wise and sovereign plan of another (see Acts 17:26—27; Dan. 4:34b—35).

God owns our relationships—we do not—and that he has a higher purpose for them than we do.

Tear up your list and throw it away—what God has planned for you is better than anything you've dreamed of for yourself.

There is so much that we are incapable of understanding. So rest is found in trusting the Father.

There will be moments when you simply don't understand what is going on.

Since God is the Author of every detail of your story, since he writes into your story every situation, location, and relationship, then he knows exactly what you're facing and precisely what grace you need to face it in the way he has planned.

everything you do and say in your life, every choice that you make, and everything you decide to invest in is a reflection of a system of internalized values in your heart.

there's no such things as a purely horizontal complaint. If I am complaining about the insensitivity of my physician, the lack of attention I am getting from my pastor, and the fact that my friends lack sympathy and understanding, I'm not just complaining about those people but also about the God who ordained all of them to be in my life.

God's purpose in controlling the details of your life (the exact length of it and the locations where you live) is so that at any moment in the middle of your unfolding story, you can reach out and touch him, because his rule makes him very near to every one of us. What each of us really needs in our finite and faltering humanness is not so much the success of our plans, but God himself.

It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it.