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“If I have never had, or worse yet, I have lost the conviction that life (despite all of the blows it wields and the savagery that it spawns) is nonetheless an incalculable privilege, I will have in that single loss forfeited the whole of my life and effectively wiped out any hope that I can or will do anything other than exist.”

“The cross unerringly exposes this stunningly marvelous and abruptly exquisite declaration that God will not let this single life of mine, with all of its grotesque maladies and pathetic filth pass into oblivion without unflinchingly declaring that my life carries a value worth the expenditure of His. And if I dare look upon the cross, I am utterly perplexed but wholly enraptured by the immensity of such a love as this.”

“My sin murdered Him. And out of this self-loathing shame borne of the understanding that I could perpetrate such a heinous act, I am barely able to raise my head sufficiently to ask what crazed insanity would prompt Jesus to walk out of an empty tomb for the single purpose of pursuing a decaying soul that murdered Him? And I would be wise to consider that the question itself is asked only because I have yet to touch the barest periphery of God’s love despite the fact that because of an empty tomb it stands right in front of me.”

“The carnage of our lives can burn hot in the flames of our indiscretions, the greed that hung us on the very leash that we thought we had firmly secured around it, or the fool within us that thought ethics to be the hiding place of the visionless coward. And over time we have come to believe that the resultant carnage of these horribly errant ideologies carries a finality so irreversible that our lives have no hope of being anything other than the ash and smoke that we have recklessly turned them into. Yet, Easter is sufficiently formidable to raise ashes into lives of astounding beauty and turn smoke into the fragrance of hope eternally reborn.”

“The last time I saw it, its hull was crushed and it laid helpless against the incessant swells that rolled up upon the shallows within which it laid canted and broken. Yet, in the hands of a seasoned sailor who saw potential in the carnage, it was hauled out the swells, lovingly repaired, and the next year it pushed out past the swells that had held it helpless and it sailed again. And although our hulls are crushed beyond hope of repair and we find ourselves helplessly awash in the incessant swells of our sin, with God we too can sail again.”

“Our humanity possesses needs of such depth and intensity that the whole of our humanity itself is woefully inadequate in its ability to meet those needs. And while such an amazing paradox would readily invite us to embrace the notion that something greater than us exists, we adamantly ignore any such possibility. As such, we run ourselves to a host of graves where we bury the precious parts of ourselves that should never have been buried. And I would suggest that Christmas was the time that God came so that every grave would remain empty because every need would be met.”

“I simply cannot afford to be ignorant of the monumental challenges that constantly batter and beset the world around me. But neither can I afford to be ignorant of the cancer of pessimism that constantly rallies the entire weight of its defeatist character in an all-out effort to convince me that the abilities inherent in mankind are far, far too inadequate to challenge the challenges. And it might be that the greatest challenge of all is to challenge this sort of thinking.”

“I would not suggest that we love without reason or be reckless in our loving. But our definition of ‘reason’ and ‘reckless’ cannot be determined by the price that we might pay in loving those who would do us damage in the loving. Rather, any such definition must be based on the degree to which the person loved might be transformed by the sacrifice we incur in and by the loving.”

“At whatever point I find myself in the seasons of my life, I want to make irrefutably certain that I have invested myself in the passing season in a manner so complete and uncompromising that I am able to send it off richer than how it had arrived. And in having done so, I want to be confident in the fact that I have set a firm and glorious stage upon which to welcome a new season now unfolding. For you see, seasons turn on what we’ve left behind. And so whatever that is, might it be the best of myself so that the coming season might be the best of itself, and we therefore might have a chance to make the world better than itself.”

“The first frost laid down a thin wafer-like crust of crystalline wonder on a waiting world. Instantly melting to the slightest touch, it heralded the seasons turning in a celebration of ‘what was’ in an anticipation of what ‘was to come’. For you see, God sends the frost of fall ahead of the snows of winter so that nature might be readied for the flowers of spring. And it is the anticipation of each that makes them fresh every time they arrive.”