It‘s utterly astounding that every time I get knocked down God’s mercy compassionately raises me to my feet; His grace thoroughly brushes off every trace of assorted filth I accumulated in the fall, His word precisely recalibrates my direction to insure the success of a journey resumed, and once all of that is completed He gently leans over and whispers, “How about another run?

God’s decision to reach out in such dramatic fashion as to lay all rightful privilege aside and be born into abject destitution tells us that His passion for us exceeds our desire for Him. And maybe we should commit to evening that up a bit.

I don’t know that anything really new can be said about love, for something so imposing has long captured the attention and teased the words of untold millions, including myself. But in similar fashion, nothing new can be said of the struggle that I have to live it out in the way that I have so often written it out.

Love exceeds all other emotions because it dares to take the passion to give oneself to another and turn it into a decision. Therefore, should the feeling of love ever find itself fleeting, the decision to love won’t.

It might be an awfully long road sometimes, but love is awfully long on patience all of the time.

My love will be complete at the point I realize that my love will never be complete.

The most sacred invitation that a person can extend to us is to invite us into their pain. But that means that we have to choose to knock on a door that we often prefer to pretend is not there.

I tend to walk around convinced that any amount of forgiveness that I could extend could never possibly compensate for the offenses that I’ve had to endure. Yet, maybe the greater offense is that I’ve got that backwards.

When I reach out to you in the midst of our differences, I want there to be nothing in my hand except the compassion of the human attached to that hand.