Cleaning; it’s the upkeep side of life.  It’s the irritating drudgery that’s always following us with broom in hand.  Cleaning is the voracious vacuum that’s never satisfied, the frantic feather duster that spews more dust than it captures, and the less than palatable reality that things don’t clean themselves.  The imagery is one of a collection … [Read more...]

I am backwards.  I don’t think I’m backwards, I wouldn’t necessarily see myself as backwards, nor would I tell you that I’m backwards; but I’m backwards.  And the oddity of it all is that I actually see backwards as forwards.  From where I’m sitting it doesn’t look backwards at all.  However, in terms of how I conceptualize the realities of life as … [Read more...]

What we want is opposite of what we have.  We want world peace, but instead we are beset with world chaos.  We want the hungry fed, but millions go hungry and millions more die from that very hunger.  We want medical cures to the diseases that ravage lives, families and nations, but untold thousands perish hourly.  We want communities that are free … [Read more...]

There is that exhilaratingly incessant drive within us, that unidentified but entirely electrifying spark, that rogue passion that is part of us but whose larger part is so expansive that it seems not to be part of us at all.  There are feelings that completely defy our capacity to create, but not our ability to feel.  There is a seemingly … [Read more...]

Endings can be incapacitating and painful for a variety of reasons, most of which we never identify because we’re too caught up in the loss to see anything but the loss.  We don’t really identify what we’re actually doing with whatever the ending is, or what the ending is actually doing to us because we’re too lost in the loss to even begin to … [Read more...]

Easter is an incredibly rich time.  It is a reminder of the fact we are terribly fallen, but it is a far, far greater reminder of the phenomenal opportunity we have of being restored.  It is inconceivable that God would die on a cross and rise again. Despite our depravity, that death was indeed solely for us.  That is both the striking message and … [Read more...]

  Self-esteem is really the accumulation of beliefs that we have collected about ourselves.  We arrange these many beliefs in some sort of composite much like a tile mosaic.  Each piece is some shard taken from some experience or encounter or event or circumstance that has come our way at some time in our lives.  These many pieces are … [Read more...]

What is the nature of our mentality anyway?  We are a complex collection of experiences, wounds, failures, successes, relationships, genetics and a wholly innumerable array of other things that press together and then settle into some sort of uniquely amalgamated compilation that makes us, us.  The nature of these things and the manner in which … [Read more...]

A conscience is that pressing sense that unerringly guides our choices and pricks us when we don’t heed it’s prompting.  It’s that mysteriously universal compass that relentlessly points true north when we don’t have any idea where true north is, or when prefer to take some other direction altogether out of a sense of convenience or selfishness or … [Read more...]

Isaac Newton's Third Law states that “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”  Or more simply put for the lay-people among us, there’s a consequence to the stuff that we do.  We all know that.  Norman Cousins wrote that “a human being fashions his consequences as surely as he fashions his goods or his … [Read more...]