I despise feeling like a failure. My daughter has a similar aversion. She clenches her fists, cries, screams, or covers her face if she makes a mistake on a math problem or can’t meet some other seemingly trivial expectation. In these moments, her visible responses reflect my own heart, which is often equally as loud, chaotic, and ashamed. My heart cries, “You are not...
This is an edited version of a blog that was originally written during a hard season. It is something I return to from time-to-time and seems relevant as I journey through another difficult season. I pray that it will be a blessing to you. When my wife was nine months pregnant, strangers would approach to say a kind word or strike up a conversation about her pregnant...
Several years ago, we added a new element to our bedtime routine with our kids. Our kids would ask us to “pray for the storm.” Every. Night. It all started with a particularly bad thunderstorm. For the first few nights, we tried to reason with them. “Girls, there is no storm tonight, so there is nothing to fear.” No amount of reasoning, however, convinced them not to be...
My wife and I both have difficulty making decisions–moving from thought to action. We think about making decisions. We talk about making decisions. But we find it hard to pull the trigger on decisions. What often makes us finally make a decision is when we become pressed up against time. So when it came to making a recent large time-sensitive life decision that would...
“Everybody hurts. Everybody cries.” – R.E.M. We generally don’t need much convincing that this world is not the way it’s supposed to be. We encounter the brokenness of this world around every corner. We are over two years into a pandemic. The war in Ukraine is the latest iteration of armed conflict happening around the world. But we also feel the brokenness more locally....