Growing up in Michigan, I can't think of anything so explicitly communicated to me in my whole education experience as the vileness of in-your-face racism.

As Christians we need to be patient, understanding, and kind. Instead of going on the attack, we can ask genuine questions. Instead of bristling when our narrative is summarily dismissed, we can carefully explain our way of seeing things. And when we are wrong, we won't be afraid to say so.

Just very practically, pastors need to be careful that while they have a right to call people to absolute allegiance to the Word of God, we don't have the right to call people to absolute allegiance to our programs or every ministry we have at the church.

Many of us think in terms in parental determinism: 'If I push all the right buttons my kids are going to turn out OK.' I want to instill in myself and my people a wonderful dose, not of carelessness, but of God's sovereignty. He knows the hairs on your kids' heads.

If atheism solved all human woe, then the Soviet Union would have been an empire of joy and dancing bunnies instead of the land of corpses.

I'm talking about enjoying and finding pleasure and interest and happiness and curiosity every moment.

To say that a family is happy I think is to diminish it, taking out what is interesting. Growing up, I don't think my family was any happier or unhappier than anyone else's. My mother and father should have been divorced or never even married. On the other hand, I remember many moments of happiness.

That should be the measure of success for everyone. It's not money, it's not fame, it's not celebrity; my index of success is happiness.