If the achieving of the goal was not enhanced by the effort to get there, you achieved something but it was not your goal.

Imagination envisions what could be. Reality states what is. And when my journey is shaped by one of these at the exclusion of the other, I will eventually wake up on some road facing the ‘reality’ that I’m far more lost than I could have ‘imagined’.

It is the length of the journey that ripens the joy of the outcome.

I am amazed that without any hesitation whatsoever I can completely believe myself to be on a grand journey of massive vistas and bold ascents, only to find that they are nothing more than a figment of a frightened imagination that needed a journey but could not admit to the fear of actually taking one.

At the end, a journey based on my imagination will leave me imagining that I should have engaged the very thing I used my imagination to avoid.

If I were to be brutally honest with myself, how often is my journey actually a path designed to circumvent my journey?

The apparent reality is that life never quite permits us the certainty that we impose upon it.

The fact that we can’t see the horizon in front of us is because we’ve focused on the carnage behind us. And if we face backwards long enough, we become convinced that the carnage behind us is the horizon in front of us.

Without unreservedly surrendering myself to God, whatever place I might raise myself to remains nothing more than a step or possibly two off the hard basement floor of life, for of myself I can be utterly assured that I will never step out of the basement.