It's really fun being a douchebag but it feels very satisfying to be a douchebag for a reason.
We consider Christmas as the encounter, the great encounter, the historical encounter, the decisive encounter, between God and mankind. He who has faith knows this truly; let him rejoice.
The worst case scenario is you really like someone's work, then you meet them and they're a self-involved, entitled douchebag.
I never feel a huge need for backstory in my novels or films. Quick sketches are often enough. When you encounter people in life - like a chance encounter at a bar or wherever you happen to be - you make these incredibly quick, quite intricate decisions about people based on very small amounts of coded information. We're good at that. Long descriptions prior to meeting someone or as you're getting to know them almost don't work.
It's not often real that you encounter the real person behind a good-natured mask, the darkest part of someone. It's not comfortable what you do.
Sometimes it's Tune-berg, sometimes Thunn-berg. I mean, I think it's funny that everyone pronounces it differently. So, that is just - I don't mind anyone pronouncing it wrong. There's no wrong way to pronounce it. Everyone pronounces it in their own way.
When God spoke to Moses and others in the Old Testament, those events were encounters with God. An encounter with Jesus was an encounter with God for the disciples. In the same way an encounter with the Holy Spirit is an encounter with God for you.
The odds are definitely better on getting the right job than getting a good partner for life. Someone who will grow with you. Someone to develop memories with. Someone who was there in the beginning. Someone who will be there at the end.
Anytime someone calls you and identifies themselves with their full name, odds are it isn't someone you want to talk to under any circumstances.
Religion doesn't start with a set of laws or rules and it doesn't start with a set of ideas. It starts with an encounter, with the living God and in our case, Christ risen from the dead. In that encounter you meet someone you can trust. That's faith: trust in truth.
Sure, I always chose rebels to identify with - I still do - but to me a rebel isn't so much someone who breaks the law as someone who goes against the odds.
Odds are you know some narcissists. Odds are they're smart, confident and articulate. They make you laugh, they make you think; the first time you met, they probably charmed the pants off of you - perhaps even literally. The odds are also that that spell didn't last.
I think people turn to poetry more often than they think they do, or encounter it in more ways than they think that they do. I think we forget the places that we encounter it, say, in songs or in other little bits and pieces of things that we may have remembered from childhood.
You can't just count on becoming a syndicated cartoonist. I actually tried to calculate the odds once, and the best I could come up with is a 1-in-36,000 chance. And the odds of getting hit by lightning are 1 in 7,900 - which kind of shows how long those odds are.
Rather than set aside daily time for prayer, I pray constantly and spontaneously about everything I encounter on a daily basis. When someone shares something with me, I'll often simply say, 'Let's pray about this right now.
Rather than set aside daily time for prayer, I pray constantly and spontaneously about everything I encounter on a daily basis. When someone shares something with me, I'll often simply say, 'let's pray about this right now.'