Last Christmas, our daughter gave Mindi and I a free night of babysitting that we used to catch a concert at one of our favorite venues. I wasn’t expecting a new insight into grief as Johnnyswim walked out onto the stage that night, but that’s what I got. The husband-wife duo talked about how they had […]
In the years after my brother died, I began to interact with a lot of people who were facing loss. As a counselor I sat across from more and more people in the gray days after someone’s death as they tried to pull the pieces of their life back together. I noticed something in them […]
I remember one afternoon a couple of months after my brother had died. Things were really busy at the time. I was serving as Interim Pastor at an amazing church in addition to my counseling job. After work, Makena and I flew to dance practice or looked over homework. I got to bed late every night […]
My brother and his family lived about an hour away from where I went to college. So, from time to time I would go up and spend the night, eat real food and have some family time. I remember one weekend, Randy and his wife Margaret where doing some spring cleaning. They determined to make […]
We don’t like to get too serious about things, especially about ourselves. When we are with other people, we are apt to talk about almost anything under the sun except for what really matters to us, except for our own lives, except for what is going on inside our own skins. We pass the time of day We chatter. We hold each other at bay, keep our distance from each other even when God knows it is precisely each other that we desperately need.
“So, don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” (Matthew 6:34, NLT) Those words were spoken to an audience over 2000 years ago, they are still applicable today. Losing someone you love changes everything, and change is hard. It’s hard to imagine a future without that […]
Grief can be an uneven process. It’s often unpredictable, coming in waves of sadness and then yielding to days of reprieve. It can bring depression, anger, relief, and confusion, sometimes all in the same day. Memories play an important part in the process of grieving. The way that we engage our memories will often determine our […]
Last week marked six years since my brother died. I’ve thought about him and the intervening six years a lot over the past few weeks. My brother was possibly the best human I’ve ever known. Our family didn’t have a lot, and it had even less when he and my sister were growing up (he […]
When my daughter was in middle school and high school our daily schedule was insane. She had school during the day and I had work. When we got home, she would do homework, and I would mow, or wash the dishes, or do whatever chore that had been most neglected during the past week. After […]
There are two things that we all have in common. First, we all want our relationships to be good. We want them to be strong and healthy, and beneficial for everyone involved. Second, we have all had relationships that fell far short of that. We don’t set out to wreck our relationships or to cause […]