There’s a difficult place in relationships that I’ve become more familiar with than I ever wanted to be. It’s the place where you’ve recognized something about yourself that needs to change, you’ve taken responsibility for it, and you’ve begun making a genuine effort to do things differently. You’ve had conversations that weren’t easy. You’ve listened…
I’ve had a difficult time receiving encouragement from other people for most of my life. Even now, there are moments when someone says something kind about me, and I can feel myself wanting to move the conversation somewhere else. Sometimes I’ll downplay what they’ve said or find a way to turn the attention back toward…
You’ll hear me say a lot in my writing, “I’ve been learning something about myself over the last few years that has been difficult to recognize.” It’s because for so long I thought I was doing something right, and then I was met with situations that made me think maybe they weren’t. And this time,…
I’ve started a lot of things in my life with great intentions. Working out, yard projects, starting a diet, and many others. Deeper still, there have been times when I recognized something about myself that needed to change, committed to do something about it, and genuinely believed I’d handle things differently moving forward. I wasn’t…
I’ve had to apologize a lot in my life. Some apologies have been for little things, and others have come after realizing that something I said or did affected someone more deeply than I understood at the time. I’d like to tell you that once I recognized what I had done and apologized for it,…
I’ve had God show me something about myself, felt convicted by it, then prayed about it, talked to others about it, maybe even written about it, and then gone right back to living almost exactly the way I was living before. I don’t like saying that out loud, but I’ve done it more than once….
I’ve noticed something about myself that I don’t particularly like to admit. When life gets heavy, whatever has been taking up the most space inside me usually finds its way out. And when it does, it’s not good for anyone. I wish I could say that my first response is always prayer or that my…
Lately, I’ve been thinking about how much of life we live in front of other people. I don’t mean social media or anything like that. I mean the simple reality that most of us spend our days being something to somebody. I’m a husband when I’m with my wife, a dad when I’m with my…
If you knew me when I was younger, I would have spent most of my free time wherever the fun was. I lived life by the moment. I went where the tide was going, which meant I became a flake to the majority of the people in my life. I am not proud of that,…
One of the things I tell my kids is that there are really only three things you can control in life: me, how I respond to people, and how I respond to Jesus. I don’t remember when I first started saying it, but I’ve repeated it so many times over the years that they could…