If the Gospel of Jesus is relational, that is, if our brokenness will be fixed not by our understanding of theology but by God telling us who we are, then this would require a kind of intimacy of which only Heaven knows.

I felt a long way from the pre-me, the pawn-Christian who was a Republican because my family was Republican, not because I had prayed and asked God to enlighten me about issues concerning the entire world rather than just America.

The seasons remind me that I must keep changing.

I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently.

You put something on the page," he said. "Your life is a blank page. You write on it".

When a story demands transformation, you are much more likely to transform.

Transformation is natural. None of us look the same as we did when we were babies, and when we are old, we'll look very different than we did when we were middle aged. Things that are healthy and alive change. The converse is also true: things that are dead do not change. A rock does not change because a rock is not alive.

I was creating someone I could live through, the person I'd be if I redrew the world.

Every human being is on a transformational journey.

I only say this about the children because I used to believe charming people were charming because they were charming, or confident people were confident because they were confident. But all this is, of course, circular. The truth is, we are all living out the character of the roles we have played in our stories.

Once you know what it takes to live a better story, you don't have a choice.

His conclusion was that the human body displayed physical evidence that we are not the same person we were when we were kids, or even a season before. He said we think we are the same person, but we aren't. "People get stuck, thinking they are one kind of person, but they aren't.