Encouragement for Living On Purpose as we reflect on how God leaves His fingerprints everywhere if we would only notice...
Mar 07
Do you have a list of things you try to avoid? We usually want to avoid things that are bad for us. Even though I enjoy a lot of things that are bad for me, I still maintain a list of ‘avoidables’. I try to avoid most of the usual enemies of happiness and long life: …
Mar 05
What did we ever do before there was the ‘undo’ button? Those of us who grew up with vinyl records were thrilled when we could use the ‘rewind’ button when listening to tapes. Now that’s all ancient technology. But the ‘undo’ button goes way beyond the ability to rewind. Not only do we get to …
Mar 04
This is not your ordinary skyline picture. For our family, it represents one of the most painful moments in our lives. This picture was taken during the fourth of five major pain milestones in the loss of our teenage son, Elijah. Some of you reading this will identify with those milestones. Some will be better …
Mar 01
We all have things we’re afraid of. Your list will be different than my list, but most of us can easily name things we fear the most. In general terms, we fear such things as illness, pain, death, financial ruin, personal failure and loneliness. For the sake of simplicity I’ll call those human fears. Human fears …
Feb 28
What goes up must come down. It’s all about gravity. And gravity is one of those laws of nature that’s simply undeniable. Trying to defy gravity usually results in a painful lesson. No matter how hard we work to elevate ourselves, gravity will always try to bring us back down. I was thinking about this during …
Feb 25
What do you do when bad things happen? More specifically, when bad things happen, where do you find your happy place? Admittedly, bad things come in all shapes and sizes. They almost always surprise us, and they are never pleasant. That’s why we call them ‘bad things’. When the bad things are not too bad, we …
Feb 24
Have you ever seen a sign that asked the question, “Why Die?” For nearly four decades, South Dakota has been placing these signs near the sites of roadside fatalities. I passed one of these signs on the very day of our son’s funeral near the border between South Dakota and Minnesota. My first thought was, “That’s …
Feb 22
Pain and comfort are at opposite extremes. Lingering in either place too long can be destructive to our bodies as well as our souls. If you enjoy exercise and working out, you know what it’s like to go through short-term pain in order to gain long-term comfort. But no one wants to endure unrelenting pain. I am a …
Feb 21
Laughter is the best medicine. We’ve all heard that before. And if you think about it, medicine is not something we normally enjoy. Mary Poppins sang about taking our medicine with a spoon full of sugar to help it go down. At least if laughter is a medicine, it doesn’t need sugar to make it pleasant. I’ll …
Feb 19
We’ve heard the saying many times before: It’s not WHAT you know, it’s WHO you know. I always thought of that in negative terms. But there’s truth in that saying that will change our lives. Forever. I consider the accumulation of knowledge to be a very good thing. In fact, learning never stops with formal schooling. We are always learning. Whether on …
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