“I have been a skeptic all my life, and it took me a long time to affir...” — Amos Smith Quote

“I have been a skeptic all my life, and it took me a long time to affirm the Seed of Christ through actual experience. Like scientists, I ultimately trust experience….”

“Daring greatly’ requires nothing less than a cleansing of the heart—or what the Desert Elders called ‘purity of heart.’ My best stab at what they meant by this is what I call wholeheartedness. This means we are ‘all in.’ We no longer hold anything back. We can contrast ‘all in’ with ‘half-hearted.’ Purity of heart is unwavering commitment and resolve, void of duplicity.”

“The same Bible verse may say something entirely different to you from what it does to me, based on our individual contexts. In other words, scripture is not monolithic. When we approach it prayerfully, it is personal.”

“I intuitively knew what Quakers have always known: that silence is God’s primary love language.”

“Patient endurance and self-discipline mean we submit to the present moment as it is, not as we would like it to be.”

“I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings.”

“Some things have to be believed to be seen.”

“The current is harsh, but gracious... It disciplines as with rod and staff and protects us all the same. Its flow is unpredictable, yet so methodically planned that even the angels in heaven cannot know its end but when they see it they cry out, 'hallelujah, praise be, for such was the plan from the beginning.' What joy that we should be held in its mercy and in the love of its reproach, keeping us adrift on the way everlasting. The Good Lord's eye is on the sparrow, so I know He's watching over us.”

“I am very sensible what a weakness and presumption it is, to reason against the general humor and disposition of the world.”

“In all my travels, I've never seen a country's population more determined to forgive, and to build and succeed than in Rwanda.”

“The initial intellect that created everything became a man and died, nailed t a wooden post, some two thousand years ago, before briefly returning to human life and then transferring back to His ethereal state somewhere outside of the physical world. This anthropoid interlude for this creator deity (many billions of years after the start of the Universe) is believed to compensate for the bad behavior of those people who accept this story as real, thereby ensuring a pleasant continuation of consciousness after their physical body has ceased to be alive.”