Excerpt from The Gospel According to Job
Once I met a man who, like Abraham, had moved his entire household halfway around the world on the strength of a vision from God. When I asked him to tell me the story, he answered that there were three versions of that story, and which one did I want to hear? First, there was the version of the story that he told to Christians. Then there was the version he told to non-Christians. Finally, there was the truth.
Excerpt from Practicing the Presence of People
Why does it seem so hard to love? Why does the real thing so often elude us? Why don’t we just claim this treasure and enjoy it?
Excerpt from The Mystery of Children
One day in our church all the parents were encouraged to stand before their children and take their hands. As we looked into our children’s eyes, the pastor read Jesus’ words in Matthew 18:3: “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Excerpt from The Furniture of Heaven
With Christopher Rainbow and me, right from the start it was one of those stormy romances: on again, off again, on again, off again. So when the news first came out about this new technique for merging two people into one, we simply made up our minds one night, he and I, to throw caution to the winds and give it a try. I guess it just seemed high time for us to take some kind of permanent, irreversible step, and so we thought–well, why not? Why not go all the way?
Excerpt of a story from The Mystery of the Word (no longer in print, but still available from online bookstores)
It was a sunny day with a light breeze and the world could not have been more beautiful. I was picking wild flowers in the woods beside the airstrip in Chizela, a mission station in Zambia, when just as I reached for one last flower, a flame lily, all at once I felt something slam into the back of my leg. It was a real hit, like a gunshot, a powerful stinging blow that actually made me jump into the air. I spun around, caught just a glimpse of the familiar coffin-shaped head and those eyes like the tiniest black diamonds, and knew immediately I was as good as dead. There had been no warning whatsoever, yet instantly my astonishment gave way to an eerie sense of fatalism, as though everything leading up to this event had been meticulously and uncannily prepared. Is that, I wonder, what passes through everyone’s mind at the moment of death?