Believing in the sovereignty of God injects courage in the act of desire.

Desire, if it is to be trusted, is to be inspired by a holy vocabulary.

The phrases of the Lord's Prayer, "are words we pray, not always because we believe them, but because we WANT to believe them.

Sometimes God seems to be killing us when He is actually saving us.

We prefer the not wanting and not having to the losing.

Grace has as much to say about endings as it does about beginnings.

Only he who cries out for the persecuted Jews can sing Gregorian chants. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer

How do you fill the space between, "God says it, " and, "I believe it, "?

The Christian story, centered as it is on the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, is the only story for making sense of desire and loss.

The Bible provocatively evokes desire.

Blessing and obedience do comfortably and mysteriously coexist.

I like when a poem ends on its "receipts," meaning it gives me something tactile or tangible to dwell on as I exit the reading experience. So I strive to end my own poems that way as well.

Offspring, friends and relatives flee from a devotee of the Lord: yet those who follow him bring merit to their families through their devotion.

The logic for me, in writing it is that the different areas or different years are almost like different rooms.

When I paint a person, his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness.

Try to find a teacher of meditation and meditate at least once a week in a group with people who meditate a little better than you do. It will inspire you to keep meditating.

You know, there must be happiness somewhere, when a lawyer dies.

One way to stop a runaway horse is to bet on him.

I do believe in an afterlife. I try to be at one with people and try to love life as much as I can.

For me, my 20s were all about reaching for the brass ring of work in theater, television, and film, surviving in between by waiting tables, painting houses, serving coffee, and temping.

I don't know about you, but I can tell when someone's lying. They can't look you in the eye - they look you in the bridge of your nose.