Jesus died, but as far as the underworld of darkness and death was concerned he was buried alive.

We are not human beings having a temporary spiritual experience we are spirit beings having a temporary human experience.

You take a lot of pressure off your leaders when you go to church to be led rather than entertained! – Christine Caine

If I die and they have to have an estate sale then I think I read something wrong. -Mark Crouse

Home is the living laboratory to work out your relationship skills with authority (parents) and people who are different than you (siblings). If you fail to pass the test in your father’s house (Dad) you will retake the test in your Father’s world (God).

We perceive the greatness of God not just by counting our blessings he has given, but by counting the burdens he has enabled us to carry because his strength is made perfect in our weakness. There are benefits to carrying burdens.

The greatest difficulty in living the Christian life is learning to live your life desperate for God when your circumstances are not.

This three year journey of faith has been extraordinary, strange, painful, full of amazement, bewilderment, blind, lonely, adventurous, puzzling, breath taking, limited, unpredictable…Very few get the opportunity to live this way.

How can you go from presence driven to performance driven worship unless the presence you were worshipping was from those for whom you performed.

How do I keep professional integrity in the midst of a people long practiced in comparative shopping, who don’t get overly exercised on the fine points of pastoral integrity?

What is saving you now?  The moments that you encounter Jesus even when you don’t initially see him.  May the moments become shorter in time and closer in space when you experience the saving moments.

It’s not Aslan’s disappearance that is mysterious, but the times that he appears that become magical.

Over 30 years of pastoral counseling (which is actually discipleship) where I have repeatedly seen people dealing with deep heart issues begin to have a “breakthrough” and they suddenly “feel better” and then discontinue the process, believing that they have achieved what they were working through.

What in fact happens most often is that the partial breakthrough does offer some relief and they mistakenly accept the partial work as the completion.

But what I continue to observe is that people discover things about themselves that they are unable and unwilling to face. So they cut it short, live with the quick fix hoping that it lasts, live in denial of the deeper reality, do not want to apply the WORK of the cross, lack the spiritual maturity to go beyond the surface, but most often fear that God could not, will not and does not love them as they are and see themselves.

Even as I have pleaded with them and offered to walk with them through these painful places they are content to walk wounded rather than healed and whole.