Spending time with family over the holidays requires a lot of intentional effort. For myself, it begins with taking off from work early in order to get home and pack up for myself and kids. Then on to loading the van with the precision of the 20th level of Tetris- luggage, gifts, snacks and children fitting with only inches to...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
