Blue Like Jazz

I'm reading Blue Like Jazz right now. Here is a few things that have really hit me while reading this book.
Chapter 2:“If you don’t love somebody, it gets annoying when they tell you what to do or what to feel. When you love them you get pleasure from their pleasure, and it makes it easy to serve. I didn’t love God because I didn’t know God.”

Chapter 3: “The whole idea of everybody wanting to be somebody new was an important insight in terms of liking God. God was selling something I wanted. Still, God was in the same boat as the guy selling knives and Juliet promising to make Romeo new. Everybody exaggerates when they are selling something. Everybody says their product works like magic. At the time, I understood God’s offer as a magical proposition, which it is. But most magical propositions are just tricks. The older you get, the harder it is to believe in magic. The older you get, the more you understand there is no Wizard of Oz, just a schmuck behind a curtain”

Chapter 5:Teaches us we will never be able to understand everything and that is where faith comes in. Don’t get me wrong, Christianity is not based on faith alone, but also by our lives. We should be able to show with our lives the secret of having Christ in our lives and the passion and strength and everything else that it gives us to make us become truly alive in life. These are the types of things you see when you see someone who is not a believer come to Christ and that is what it is all about. Our lives should be our greatest example of who we have in God and in Christ. It’s simple, but so amazing

Chapter 7: "Rick tells me, looking back, that he was too proud to recieve free grace from God. He didn't know how to live within a system where nobody owes anybody else anything. And the harder it was for rick to pay God back, the more he wanted to hide. Though he understood that God wanted nothing in return, his mind could not communicate this fact to his heart, so life was something like torture..........
I would hear about grace, read about grace, and even sing about grace, but accepting grace is an action I could not understand. It seemed wrong to me not to have to pay for my sin, not to feel guilty about it or kick myself around.More than that, did not seem like the thing I was looking for. It was too easy. I wanted to feel as though I earnedmy forgiveness as though God and I were buddies doing favors for"each other.