The temptation that Jesus resisted in the wildreness [a crown without a cross; worldly glory], many of us, His followers, still long for.

Power, no matter how well-intentioned, tends to cause suffering. Love, being vulnerable, absorbs it. In a point of convergence on a hill called Calvary, God renounced the one for the sake of the other.

When I betray the love and grace God has shown me, I fall back on the promise that Jesus prays for me... not that I would never face testing, nor ever fail, but that in the end I will allow God to use the testing and failure to mold me into someone more useful to the kingdom, someone more like Jesus.

We do not pray to tell God what he does not know, nor to remind him of things he has forgotten. He already cares for the things we pray about... He has simply been waiting for us to care about them with him.

Indeed, how could we experience grace at all except through our defects?

No one who meets Jesus ever stays the same.

Often a work of God comes with two edges, great joy and great pain, and in that matter-of-fact response Mary embraced both. She was the first person to accept Jesus on His own terms, regardless of the personal cost.

It seems that God arranged the most humiliating circumstances possible for His entrance, as if to avoid any charge of favoritism.

Whatever you may believe about it, the birth of Jesus was so important that it split history into two parts. Everything that has ever happened on this planet falls into a category of before Christ or after Christ.