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Most of the great books on prayer are written by 'experts' - monks, missionaries, mystics, saints. I've read scores of them, and mainly they make me feel guilty.

I think guilt is directional. You should get rid of it, but the way to get rid of it is not to get rid of the guilt feelings. It is to get rid of the wrong that you did that caused the guilt feelings.

The borderlanders are people who are kind of caught in the middle. They think there must be another world out there. There probably is a God, but they are either turned off by the church or wounded by the church or wary of the church for whatever reason.

The New Testament persistently presses us upward, toward higher motives for being good.

God already knows the naked truth about us, of course. Why not acknowledge it?

People instinctively know the difference between something done with a profit motive and something done with a love motive.

As a nonparent, I stand in awe of parents.

It's too bad prayer comes bundled in a package of 'spiritual disciplines.' Really, we should see prayer as a spiritual privilege. We don't do it as a callisthenic exercise to gain points with God; we do it, because it is good for us in every way.

I have come to know a God of compassion and mercy and love.

Christian faith is... basically about love and being loved and reconciliation. These things are so important, they're foundational and they can transform individuals, families.

One of the greatest things about writing as a profession is that the words of Tolstoy, Chesterton and Dostoyevsky have lived for a hundred years and are just as powerful today. Their words have changed me just as much as the people I actually met.

In some ways, evil is backhanded proof of Gods existence.

When I write, I try to represent the ordinary person in the pew, which means that, ironically, I'm qualified to write about prayer by being unqualified!

God endorses the confusion and even outrage that we feel when mysterious things happen.

The self-sacrificing, servant aspect of the Christian life has many parallels to parenthood.

Parents learn the uses of power and its limits. They can insist on certain outward behavior but cannot change inner attitudes. They can require obedience but not goodness - and certainly not love.

When suffering happens, it forces us to confront life in a different way than we normally do.

People who think they are free eventually end up slaves to their own desires, and those who give their freedom away to the only One you can trust with that freedom eventually get it back.

Muslims have great reverence in their prayers but not much intimacy.

What I see in the Bible, especially in the book of Psalms, which is a book of gratitude for the created world, is a recognition that all good things on Earth are God's, every good gift is from above. They are good if we recognize where they came from and if we treat them the way the Designer intended them to be treated.