Too often we define love as something that we feel verses something that we give.

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.

May the many monuments that abound remind me of the desperate need for courage, the inestimable value of valor, the honor evoked of sacrifice, and the fact that a life spent in the service of self embodies none of these.

Love makes it all ‘not about me.’ And after having spent the whole of my existence making it ‘about me,’ that’s an ‘about-face’ that’s about as difficult as it can get.

Real victory is based on surrender to the right things, while failure is based on the unwillingness to surrender to anything.

I play the scenario of the hero out in my head, and in doing so I revel at the thought of boldly abating the darkness and saving the day. Yet, until I face the searing scourge of battle and am thickly bloodied by it, I will not understand that to imagine oneself as a hero without being laden with the scars of battle is fiction only. And if I am sufficiently brave, maybe someday I will turn that fiction to fact.

A true gift is giving away something that has created a hole within us that cannot be filled except by the reality that we’ve filled a hole in the life of someone else.

When it’s all said and done, everything that we’ve ‘said’ should have been ‘done’ in the life of another. And I would suggest that this is legacy. And I would further suggest that anything other than that is simply memory that we will soon forget.

God reached in because I had so thoroughly destroyed my life that I could not find a single gap in the carnage through which I could reach out.