Quotes from Greg Paul

We remember stories more easily and more completely than we do facts. We assimilate stories differently, bringing to them the shades of understanding made possible by our own experiences, finding something new each time we approach even one that has long been familiar. A story is like a multifaceted jewel, giving off a different light each time it is turned.

Every story has a structure. Most simply, a beginning, a middle, and an end—although, as Bilbo recognizes in The Lord of the Rings, the story never really ends, and there is always something that came before the beginning of any tale we might tell.

Sometimes they speak words that cut or bruise my soul, telling me I am unlovely and unlovable—a message I am unaccountably ready to believe. They may be the voices of people close to me, the culture around me, the advertising I can't escape, religion, education, or of my own innate pride or insecurities.

My child. My beloved. My pleasure. It seems as if it should be easy to hear these words and believe them, but it's not. An entire life of discipleship cannot fully mine these three simple expressions. It's the work of a lifetime just to begin to truly believe them.

My children and I inhabited those stories together. A good story allows you to admit your fears, and hope that you might be a hero in the face of them. I'm not sure why adults so often lose the art of "entering" a story in written form.

When I seek him, root my values and desires in him, when I found my relationships and sense of self on him, my capacity for joy increases. The more I "have" Jesus, the deeper my enjoyment of him. He increases my desire for those things that are good, adds value to that which is benign, and diminishes the strength of the negative (the evil) that threatens to throttle me. My dependence on material values and experiences as the means by which I define or please myself decreases.