2 Easy Ways You Can Be A Light In This Dark World

A recent behavioral study reinforced something I have emphasized in my own journey. The power of simply reaching out and checking in with others is stunningly underrated as a way to love one another. An article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology detailed how people react when others reach out to them. The authors seemed a bit surprised by their results. We kept finding that people underestimated how much their reach-outs were appreciated. We also found that one reason this underestimation of appreciation occurs is that people do not think enough about how positively surprised others feel upon being reached out to. The role of surprise is important. We found that the one situation in which people do not underestimate how much others appreciate being reached out is when the reach-out occurs in an unsurprising context. For example, if someone is expecting you to reach-out to them, then you are pretty well calibrated to how much they will
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Jesus Will Meet You There

Being in community with others means you share in their joys and their sorrows. Sometimes the sorrows come in tsunami waves and all you can do is care, pray, and be present. Good and decent people deal with financial, emotional, and physical suffering all around us and it is easy to lose heart. The news seems to be only tragedy and heartbreaking sadness. What can be redeemed of all of this suffering? A song called “The Hurt and the Healer” by MercyMe resonated when I first heard it but now that same song touches my heart even more. The lyrics ask the question we all struggle with. Why?The question that is never far awayThe healing doesn’t come from the explainedJesus please don’t let this go in vain I can’t explain why things happen. Sometimes it is sin. Sometimes it is simply life. I have learned in my years of following Jesus that He does not let suffering go in vain. I have seen over
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Surviving the Storms of Life

Real growth in relationships, faith, and maturity usually doesn’t just happen. It is so simple to blame circumstances or others for our mistakes. Rationalizations for wrong behaviors are frighteningly easy.  “Officer, I didn’t mean to speed and break the law. I was just going with the flow of traffic.” Think about that. My defense is that everybody else is breaking the law. Therefore, I am innocent.  Since the Garden if Eden the automatic answer to sin and shortcomings is that it is someone else’s fault. That may be true at times. But that thinking will never result in becoming like Jesus. So I have to be intentional about confronting my own heart. Change is hard. Sharing my need to change with others is even harder.  Several years ago I took the risk to trust three men with everything about me. We call ourselves the Redwood Brothers based on a unique characteristic of California’s redwood trees. A redwood alone in a
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We Need Friends on the Journey

The advent of social media has accentuated the difference between friends and friendships. I have hundreds of Facebook “friends” befriended with a click. It is easy to have friends who know what you like, listen to, and read. But it is hard work and risky to cultivate friendships with people who know who you are when the facade comes down. Real friends are a treasure that we push way too far down the priority list. We sure think a lot about pursuing other treasures on our list. Too many of us don’t prioritize the importance of building real friendships. Honestly, when you have a real crisis, would you rather have a promotion or a pal you could lean on? When heartaches come, would you prefer an award or an ally to walk with you?  In the grand scheme of life, you will have just a handful of real friends. Friends whom you can tell anything or say anything to and not
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When Reality Comes Around…

Please forgive me for driving slowly down memory lane as I approach my 50th high school reunion this month. Soon after graduation I became a disc jockey at 1000 watt “powerhouse” WCHI in Chillicothe, Ohio. This was back in the days of turntables and actual vinyl records. I got to pick my own playlist that was mainly Top-40 pop. Unfortunately my playlist was often influenced by my emotional state. I didn’t realize I was doing that until a friend pointed out that I had thoroughly depressed them with my melancholy melodies that day. I would play “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart” from the Bee Gees followed by “She’s Gone” by Hall and Oates followed by the Carpenters singing “Goodbye to Love”.  Not sure the sponsors (except maybe antidepressant manufacturers and counseling centers) wanted me to be such a musical downer. Another one of my go to songs to bring the listeners down was a song by Irish singer Gilbert
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Lessons from Covid Class

Life is full of wonderful moments and blessings. Life also has it’s share of dark valleys and scary storms. None of us gets out of this life unscathed. In the valleys of my life I have taught myself to step back and ask this question. What can God teach me in this trial about Him or about myself? This seemingly never ending Covid pandemic has been rife with lessons. Lesson #1 Control freaks have learned a really hard truth from Covid-19. It doesn’t matter one whit how much money, power, or prestige you had accumulated by March of 2020 because Covid rudely stole your ability to control your life. It is funny to search the term “control freak” on the internet and find that so many people try to paint being a controlling person as a positive. I have worked with control freaks and I can tell you the experience for those around them is not pleasant. It is a
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“Trash Talking” in Community.

Last week we moved out of the house that our family had called home for thirty years. We experienced a lot of love, laughter, and memories in that house. There was also a lot stuff. Tons and tons of stuff. My amazing wife Joni organized a multi-week campaign leading up to the move to decide what needed to be sold, donated, re-homed, or trashed. It was a daunting task. Last Wednesday marked the final day of Operation Downsize as we finished cleanup at the old house and moved a few things to temporary housing. Several people from our church small group came to help us finish up. At our home church, Waterbrook Bible Fellowship, we call these groups “Home Teams”. We wrapped up some final packing and loaded a few fragile items into friend’s vehicles to be transported. But one embarrassing problem remained. The trash overflowed the capacity of our trash container. The solution was surprising. Several of our friends
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