I didn't really like doing commercials.

Protestants so often confuse being Republican with being Christian.

I prize my seamstress, I value my copyist; but my cook, who knows well how to prepare the food to sustain life, and nourish brain, bone, and muscle, fills the most important place among the helpers in my family.

I'm such an avid magazine reader - music, art, beauty magazines - and I found that food and restaurants were pouring into everything I cared about. Whether it was the pop-up concept, or some mysterious mini-mall restaurant, I got swept up in the sexy romance of the food movement.

People would more readily believe that the gospel is from heaven if they saw more such effects of it upon the hearts and lives of those who profess it. The world is perhaps better able to read the nature of religion in a man's life than in the Bible.

If people in your community are not responding to the gospel as they did in New Testament times, one possible reason is that they do not see God in what you are doing as a church.

But once we become practiced at a contemplative worldview, a "thisness" way of seeing, there is nothing trivial anymore and all is grace.

Let me sum it up this way: We do not think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into new ways of thinking. Without action and lifestyle decisions, without concrete practices, words are dangerous and largely illusory.

Practice is standing in the flow, whereas theory and analysis observe the flow from a position of separation.

God comes to you disguised as your life," as my friend Paula D'Arcy so wisely says.

Remember, we do not think ourselves into new ways of living, but we live ourselves into new ways of thinking. Jesus moves toward lifestyle solutions and not academic ones.

Christianity is much more about living and doing than thinking.