Mike Mason quotes:

To keep a vow, means not to keep from breaking it, but rather to devote the rest of one's life to discovering what the vow means, and to be willing to change and to grow accordingly.

There is no trick of a magician or spell of a witch doctor, no drug or mesmerism or bribery or torture or coercion that can compare in power with the force for change unleashed in the human breast through the touch of love.

Pure suffering has a consciousness, a tongue, a heart all its own and even the memory of it is but a pale unreality when compared with the actual experience.

Love coaxes and even hood-winks us into the making of a decision so radical that if left to our own devices we would never have entertained it for a moment.

And as Dad said to me, 'You can't always stop people from being mean. But you can stop them from making you mean.

How tragic that the very thing that could set us free-playing the fool-is the thing we will not do. When we're afraid to be fools, we end up being afraid to be anything.

It is easier to diminish God than it is to enlarge one's heart.

It is something that is just there, and it is huge, and everything has been built around it, and wherever one happens to be going to the fridge, to bed, to the bathroom, or out the front door - the tree has to be taken into account. It cannot be gone through; it must respectfully be gone around... it is beautiful, unique, exotic: but also. Let's face it, it is at times an enormous inconvenience.

Love is an earthquake that relocates the center of the universe.

Real love is always fated. It has been arranged before time. It is the most meticulously prepared of coincidences. And fate, of course, is simply a secular term for the will of God, and coincidence for His grace.

So the best marriages and the deepest relationships with God grow out of the startling discovery that there is nothing one can do to earn love, and even more startling, that there is also nothing one can do to unlearn it, or to keep oneself from being loved. This is a religious awakening that is utterly different from any other religious experience, no matter how profoundly spiritual it may seem.

Take away material prosperity; take away emotional highs; take away miracles and healing; take away fellowship with other believers; take away church; take away all opportunity for service; take away assurance of salvation; take away the peace and joy of the Holy Spirit... Yes! Take it all, all, far, far away. And what is left? Tragically, for many believers there would be nothing left. For does our faith really go that deep? Or do we, in the final analysis, have a cross-less Christianity?

The very fact that faith looks to a power beyond itself means that it is continually subject to loss of control. So if you're looking to get control of all your problems, forget Christianity. If you're looking for success, happiness, or freedom from pain, forget Christ. The way of Christ is the cross, and the cross spells weakness, poverty, failure, death.

True worship has less to do with offering sacrifices than with being a sacrifice ourselves.

We like to talk about having the faith to be healed - what about the faith to be sick?.