It’s not that the bee hovers in the seemingly effortless way that it does that amazes me. Rather, it’s more the amount of air that it has to move in order to do that.

I suppose that Christmas seems vexingly improbable in my mind because that’s not anything that I would do. But isn’t that the exact reason why we need Christmas?

All of us, minus the part of us we wish to keep for ourselves, adds up to none of us. And that’s typically what we give God.

When we say it is the whole story, the cross tells us that death is only half the story. And it is by far the least compelling half.

The cost of success is that I must be willing to fail far more times than I succeed, which is why so few of us are successful.

To be enriched in the giving, I must at the self-same time be completely depleted by it. For if I am not depleted, I have not given in the first place and therefore I will not be enriched in any place.

To refuse to sacrifice may in fact be the greatest sacrifice. For refusing to sacrifice means that I willfully throw away some of the greatest growth that life has to offer me.

At the point that I can look into my children’s faces and say that my life is about their lives, I have finally come to the point that I can now start becoming a parent. And if I’ve not reached this point, I might be a parent by birth but it all ends there.

Maybe I don’t have enough beginnings in my life because I fought against the endings that were about to birth those beginnings.