We're here on earth, in these bodies, feeling the pull of gravity, knowing that we're only here for a while. But then there are these moments— like brushes or glimpses— of love and connection and hope, and suddenly we're here, and we're everywhere. Our feet are on the ground, but we're flying. Our hearts are still beating, but our souls are soaring.

The world is free to be a world. It's free to be beautiful and safe, and it's free to break your heart in a thousand ways. That free.

Heaven comforts, but it also confronts.

You go to a funeral and you sit there grieving the death of this person you loved but when you leave you realize that mixed in with your sadness is a strange sort of energy that comes from a renewed awareness that you're here and this is your life and it's good and it's a sacred gift.

A voice said, Look me in the stars And tell me truly, men of earth, If all the soul-and-body scars Were not too much to pay for birth.

If you think beauty insipid, you haven't experienced it. Nor is it always devoid of suffering. That's something religious artists have always understood, Michelangelo, Chagall, and Van Gogh, Beethoven, C.S. Lewis, and all the writer's for whom beauty is a gift and a calling.

Christianity is the only religion whose God bears the scars of evil.

Unless there is a Good Friday in your life, there can be no Easter Sunday.

They could not understand the advantage of living contrary to their inclinations in this world in order to enjoy a hypothetical well-being in another.

Don't let the mistakes and disappointments of the past control and direct your future

With my past forgiven, my present secure, and my future irrevocably guaranteed, why shouldn't I be enthusiastically optimistic?

My faith survived because I realized God didn't want this for us, He never had. I'm passionately looking forward to a new Heaven and Earth where only good exists once more.