Endings can be incapacitating and painful for a variety of reasons, most of which we never identify because we’re too caught up in the loss to see anything but the loss.  We don’t really identify what we’re actually doing with whatever the ending is, or what the ending is actually doing to us because we’re too lost in the loss to even begin to … [Read more...]

What we want is opposite of what we have.  We want world peace, but instead we are beset with world chaos.  We want the hungry fed, but millions go hungry and millions more die from that very hunger.  We want medical cures to the diseases that ravage lives, families and nations, but untold thousands perish hourly.  We want communities that are free … [Read more...]

Easter is an incredibly rich time.  It is a reminder of the fact we are terribly fallen, but it is a far, far greater reminder of the phenomenal opportunity we have of being restored.  It is inconceivable that God would die on a cross and rise again. Despite our depravity, that death was indeed solely for us.  That is both the striking message and … [Read more...]

Easter is time of new beginnings.  More than that however, it is a time when we renew our belief in new beginnings. In a world of harsh endings and abrupt conclusions, Easter reminds us that there is always something new on the horizon even if we can no longer see a horizon.  Easter is a promise that no ending, regardless of how decisive it … [Read more...]

There is that exhilaratingly incessant drive within us, that unidentified but entirely electrifying spark, that rogue passion that is part of us but whose larger part is so expansive that it seems not to be part of us at all.  There are feelings that completely defy our capacity to create, but not our ability to feel.  There is a seemingly … [Read more...]

We’re not all too bad at bobbing and weaving.  We’re pretty good at side-stepping and side-lining issues.  We’re quite adept at cutting and spinning, doing a bit of fanciful dodging, as well as deftly running the obstacle course without getting so much as a scratch on us.  We’ve learned to see things coming from a long ways away, and we’ve figured … [Read more...]

We hear a lot of things.  A whole lot of things.  We’re incessantly bombarded with sheets and shards and streams of information.  It’s about bits and bytes and boatloads of data that we ingest and digest without even realizing that we’re doing that.  Either consciously or unconsciously we compile all of that sordid stuff into some sort of choppy … [Read more...]

Complacency is a potently tragic hallmark of our lives.  We’ve certainly got bunches of it.  In fact, as the old saying goes, we’ve got it “in spades.”  Complacency is conceived in the bosom of familiarity, where something becomes so commonplace that we errantly render it as ‘common.’  We’ve yet to beat this terribly corrosive tendency we have to … [Read more...]

  It seems that real love is something that we can touch, but rarely grasp.  Sometimes it visits us in massive surges that effortlessly sweep over us and leave us utterly breathless in the aftermath.  At other times love dissipates into some thin and sparse pool that is barely deep enough to dip the tip of our fingers in.  And at yet other … [Read more...]

It seems one of the oddest dichotomies.  Life is full of strange and downright weird contradictions.  At many times in our lives, at many points both important and not so important we find ourselves pulled in two completely opposite, but equally compelling directions.  At times it seems that two entirely different people reside within us, each … [Read more...]