I now deserve love. romance, and joy - and all the good that Life has to offer me.

God knows I didn't mean to fall in love with her

we will stand amazed to see the topside of the tapestry and how God beautifully embroidered each circumstance into a pattern for our good and His glory.

The success and the failure are not my concern, but His.

You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.

I had spent hundreds of hours gazing out at the calm, conquered suburban landscape surrounding my school, silently yearning for the outbreak of a zombie apocalypse, a freak accident that would give me super powers, or perhaps the sudden appearance of a band of time-traveling kleptomaniac dwarves.

A dream worth chasing. For the last five years, the Hunt had given me a goal and purpose. A quest to fulfill. A reason to get up in the morning. Something to look forward to.

I never worry about tomorrow. For instance I know I am going to have to leave here very soon, and I haven't the faintest idea where I'll end up or how I shall earn my living, but I know that something will turn up. If one burdens the future with one's worries, it cannot grow organically. I am filled with confidence, not that I shall succeed in worldly things, but that even when things go badly for me I shall still find life good and worth living.

There is an enormous gap between what we think we can do and what God calls us to do.

We fantasize an archaeological scoop. Meanwhile what we have right before us turns out to be far more useful—a theological probe. Instead of being told what Jeremiah's parents were doing, we are told what his God was doing: "Before I shaped you in the womb, I knew all about you. Before you saw the light of day, I had holy plans for you: A prophet to the nations—that's what I had in mind for you" (Jer 1:5).

Story is the most adequate way we have of accounting for our lives, noticing the obscure details that turn out to be pivotal, appreciating the subtle accents of color and form and scent that give texture to our actions and feelings, giving coherence to our meetings and relationships in work and family, finding our precise place in the neighborhood and in history.

I will not try to run my own life or the lives of others; that is God's business.