I often contemplate love. I know how important it is because it’s all over Scripture. It’s in every movie, and on the pages of every book. Somehow in a world that is unsure about this whole “God thing,” love prevails as an essential theme of the human race. Even when we are our culture forbids us to pray, talk about Jesus, or share the Gospel, it allows us to love. So I recently read 1 Corinthians 13, which I have read a hundred times, heard at dozens of weddings, and practically have memorized. Paul talks about love being patient and...
A Lesson from Ivan- life on life interaction
Emma was asked to read an award-winning book for school and make a diorama, so we headed to the bookstore to find one. She’s in second grade. She had a few choices —-a Newbery Medal and Honor Book or a Caldecott Medal Book. The Newbery award is given to “the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.” The Caldecott Medal annually recognizes the preceding year’s “most distinguished American picture book for children.” In short, one has a bunch of words and the other has pretty much nothing but pictures. Our choice was obvious, so we headed to the local...
Little Things Make Small Kids Big
My 5 year old daughter has a runny nose and congestion. It’s just that time of year. Lucky for me she remembered to remind me that she needed her medicine tonight as I was tucking her into bed. She’s moved up in the world from the chalky chewable’s (Have you ever tried one? They taste nothing like grapes or cherries), and on to the more sophisticated swallow-whole pills. Needless to say, this is a very big deal for a five year old. As she gulped down the medicine and handed back her glass of water to me she made the...
Grateful Remembering
I write this during the week of Thanksgiving, a holiday which seems set apart for counting my blessings. This year however is vastly different for me than the ones that have come before, primarily because in the month’s leading up to this Thanksgiving I’ve spent time nightly remembering the day and writing down what it is I’m grateful for. The importance of gratitude has been slowly creeping in on me for years now. In my younger days I thought being grateful was nothing more than a decent virtue, another tool in my belt so to speak. Sadly, through the years...
A Country Boy Can Survive….But Can He Grow?
I grew up country, in the hills of Arkansas to be exact. This is a fact most people might not notice about me at first. At some point I laid down my thick southern drawl; but I still wear the boots, get my hands greasy under the hood of a car, use duct tape to fix nearly everything, smoke meat, and stay outside as much as possible. There is so much about growing up country which I’m grateful for. As a kid I could walk behind our house to fish, shoot snakes, work on broken down cars, and have bonfires...
Intimacy – to know and be known
As a therapist working with couples, my goal is to try and give them what I did not receive (or ask for) as a young man engaged at the age of 20. Over a decade of marriage and four children later, to say that I have done the following poorly for most of the years of my marriage is a vast understatement. To be perfectly honest, for most of my years I have remained hidden behind and within work, anger or alcohol. For me, healthy marriage comes down to one core thing, which is knowing and being known. It seems that at the...
Being Sandwiched
Three Short Insights of How to Stay Emotionally Healthy in the Craziness of Caring for Aging Parents According to Wikipedia, The Sandwich generation is “the generation of people who care for their aging parents while supporting their own children. According to the Pew Research Center, just over 1 of every 8 Americans aged 40 to 60 is both raising a child and caring for a parent. I’ll confess -I’m a super-sub ham-n-cheese. I’ve been sandwiched for ten years when it became apparent that my mother’s memory-loss issues were far too severe for my dad to handle. Ten years into it...
Trying to Understand
Marriage may be the most infuriating, brilliant, amazing, and humbling of creations. The Apostle Paul actually describes it as a “profound mystery” in Ephesians, which is probably the best description for it. There are more books, seminars, Sunday School topics, sermons, and research about marriage than almost anything else, and yet most of us are still deeply confused about how to “do life” with another person. I’ve been involved in the mystery for four years now and have experienced the full gamut of emotions. I have been more richly blessed, more deeply heartbroken, and more graciously forgiven than I could...
awake
One of my favorite vacation destinations is the beach. I love essentially everything about it: The ocean, with it’s waves rhythmic and crashing; the sounds of the sea soothingly breathing in and out. I love getting in the water, surrendering to the tide’s calm rocking, feeling cleansed and rejuvenated. My favorite thing to do is to get out where the water is about chest high, plant my feet in the ocean floor, and go weak in the knees so that the waves bob me up and down like a cork. I like walking barefoot in the sand and feeling that...
Great Betrayals
How do you put the pieces of your story back together after finding out about a great betrayal? How do you reclaim a past when you find out it was seemingly built around a longstanding lie? In her article ‘Great Betrayals’, Anna Fels explores how ‘robbing someone of his or her story’ through a longstanding lie or betrayal may be ‘the greatest tragedy of all’. FREQUENTLY, a year or even less after the discovery of a longstanding lie, the victims are counseled to move on, to put it all behind them and stay focused on the future. But it’s not...