Parable of the Sower

We’ll have to be very careful how we allow our needs to shape us.

But there’s hope in understanding the nature of God—not punishing or jealous, but infinitely malleable. There’s comfort in realizing that everyone and everything yields to God. There’s power in knowing that God can be focused, diverted, shaped by anyone at all. But there’s no power in having strength and brains, and yet waiting for God to fix thing

Worship is no good without action. With action, it’s only useful if it steadies you, focuses your efforts, eases your mind.”

“Then show me a more pervasive power than change,” I said. “It isn’t just entropy. God is more complex than that. Human behavior alone should teach you that much. And there’s still more complexity when you’re dealing with several things at once—as you always are. There are all kinds of changes in the universe.”

way. I don’t claim that everything changes in every way, but everything changes in some way.”

“I was looking for God,” I said. “I wasn’t looking for mythology or mysticism or magic. I didn’t know whether there was a god to find, but I wanted to know. God would have to be a power that could not be defied by anyone or anything.” “Change.”

I showed him four verses in all—gentle, brief verses that might take hold of him without his realizing it and live in his memory without his intending that they should. Bits of the Bible had done that to me, staying with me even after I stopped believing.

Did our community die so that addicts could make a help the poor political statement?

Now that it was gone, there were moments when I couldn’t imagine how I was going to survive without it.