Tag: suffering

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

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

Lean into Darkness

February 4, 2024

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 ...  Keep reading

Typhoon – The Sickness Unto Death

January 6, 2024

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 that it is why we are young

In the morning sun

You take every year as it comes

But ...  Keep reading

Becoming Open

June 20, 2022

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”) ...  Keep reading

An Open Heart: What to Do When Fear Presents Itself

June 23, 2019

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 ...  Keep reading

Toward Wholeness, Not Happiness

February 6, 2019

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 not ...  Keep reading