Books

If Sandy’s mother respected her freedom to make choices, she would say something like this: “I’m so disappointed that you’re not coming home for Christmas, but I hope you all have a great time.” She would be owning her disappointment and respecting Sandy’s choice to spend her time with friends. We cause pain by making

The family is the social unit God invented to fill up the world with representatives of his loving character. It’s a place for nurturing and developing babies until they’re mature enough to go out of the family as adults and to multiply his image in other surroundings.

“You know,” I said, “I’m asking you about friendships, and you’re answering about ministries. They’re not the same thing.” She had never considered the difference. Her concept of friendship was to find people with needs and throw herself into a relationship with them. She didn’t know how to ask for things for herself.

Reading, he told me, creates a “unique form of consciousness…. While we’re reading, we’re directing attention outward toward the words on the page and, at the same time, enormous amounts of attention is going inward as we imagine and mentally simulate.” It’s different from if you just close your eyes and try to imagine something off the top of your

One well-worn traditional Christian position is to say that the Jewish background is a mass of legalism and formalism, and that Jesus came to teach a different sort of religion, namely, an interior spiritual sort. This is clearly no good.32 If it were true, Jesus would have been simply incomprehensible, a teacher of abstract and interior truths to

For still there are so many things that I have never seen: in every wood in every spring there is a different green.