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 ...
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 ...
And just when you feel like you have reached the blackest, sickest darkness, that is the time to lean in even further. When God feels out of reach, your only move is to become still, keep your ear to the ground and wait. The waiting itself will change you. And the answers are somewhere there in the dark and stillness.
The caterpillar submits to a kind of death and forms itself into a chrysalis by instinct. If it had consciousness, it might know it was going to emerge light enough to fly. If it ...
Old man in a rocking chair
You wake up, you’ve been living alone
After all these years
Surrounded by these shards of mirrors
And how’d it get so quiet here?
You wonder, “Where did everyone go?”
You tried so hard to make people remember you for something that you were not
And if they so remember you, then something else will certainly get forgot
Life is for the living
I’ve heard tell ...
I’ve had some things on my mind for a while, so I thought I better write them down. I’ve come to believe prayer is just learning to be open. It is not about saying anything or changing anything. It’s about learning to open yourself and practice intimacy. I’ve spent a lot of time exploring my inner world and realize now that it was all so I could learn to let God in. And if you do that, you will soon learn to let others in. The whole goal then is to provide space (“hospitality”) ...
The world will try to convince you to close your heart – that you should always protect yourself, and avoid pain and emotion and learning and growing. One of our great duties in this life, then, is to approach it with an open heart. Though we know struggle is coming, we must receive it with open eyes and open hearts, and work toward transcendence.
Living with an open heart is not going forth without fear. Open-hearted living is knowing what to do with fear. Fear, like all ...
You might have heard: I’ve stopped trying to be happy. Rather than orienting my life toward reaching some island of happiness I’m not sure exists out there, I think I’ll try to foster something different in my life. I think the best word to describe it is wholeness. Happiness for most of us is based on the prospect of having our “ideal life.” It is a place to which we must travel – a place “out there.” Like I said, I’m ...
I have stopped trying to be happy. For a while, I thought it might be possible to be happy, but now I believe something different. There was a point three years ago when my grandmother died and I realized the rest of my life was going to be a series of losses leading up to my own death. Then my family and I lost a few more people before their time and a series of other unfortunate events ensued. It was the most difficult time of my life (still is), but I have also found a lot of meaning in it. ...