Tag: grief

Your Orientation Matters

December 13, 2025

So much of our consternation and anxiety come about because we are oriented against the way life is. When you’re oriented toward always being right, it hurts real bad to be wrong. When you are oriented toward being perfect, you get defensive when it is insinuated you are not. And when you are oriented toward projecting a certain image to the world, you brace yourself against anything less being portrayed. All this fighting against the natural way of things creates anxiety. We spend a lot of ...  Keep reading

Deconstructing Is Saying You Don’t Know

April 6, 2025

Be thankful for these little frailties, mistakes and woundings that routinely throw you off your path. They remind you of your true nature: you are human and wanting. When you are in pain, worried, weak, disoriented and confused, slow down and pay attention. These are your entrance into what you really need: an experience of God in God’s tenderest form. Your little weaknesses are also what keep you tender and vulnerable. That is the best thing that can happen to you.

These little setbacks and ...  Keep reading

Valley Maker – A Couple Days

February 15, 2025

Time is just a game I play

It’s written on the ocean’s waves

Circling beyond my brain

Something I could not contain

Something I could not contain

I know it and I cannot stray

The part of me I cannot break

The loss of you beyond the gray

I’m sticking to the chosen ways

I’m sticking to the chosen ways

I picture you inside my brain

Reminding me to say my grace

Reminding me to be amazed

I missed you by a couple days

I missed you by a couple days

How much of you is who I’ll ...  Keep reading

The Best of All Possible Worlds

January 15, 2025

Sometimes I feel like I’m in heaven now. It comes in small doses: a tender kiss from my wife, a rapturous laugh with my whole family, a soft and pillowy snowfall, a moment of epiphany. Time stands still and you catch a glimpse – if only for a moment – of what it is like to be in wonder. It’s hard to believe it’s happening when it happens. Heaven is never what you thought or hoped it was going to be. It catches you by surprise.

Jesus said, “the Kingdom has come near/is at hand,” but ...  Keep reading

Loss is Where You Live

October 1, 2024

Once you have experienced your first big grief, you live your whole life looking back on that thing. You also spend it looking forward to the rest of life’s losses that will eventually occur. That is why the feeling of anxious anticipation – waiting for the other shoe to drop – is so normal. Life balances itself out. The sum always returns to zero. If things are going swimmingly at the moment, you can be sure a time of want is coming. Don’t worry – once you learn how to grieve, you ...  Keep reading

Mother Death

January 17, 2022

Loving death

With all of its requisite pains,

Has come

To each of us in its own way

Each secret strand is strange to the others

Though they flow from the same spring

Silent and dark, barren and daring

You always feel

It is your fault:

“What did I do to deserve this?

“There must have been something.”

No one else seems to be suffering

In this way

Though they suffer in secret

With the same questions

When you first woke up, you did not know death

Though you were given directly from it

You were born ...  Keep reading

The Foundational Spiritual Practice Of Surrender

January 23, 2019

One more spiritual practice with which to reckon is the practice of surrender. This may be the most far-reaching and sophisticated part of the spiritual life. It appears there are a million ways we can practice surrender. We can probably be practicing it at all times in all circumstances. Surrender is allowing ourselves to be subject to and even overwhelmed at times by what is happening to us, without wrestling to assert our will on others and our environment. We may think of surrender as “letting ...  Keep reading