“When the door of the steambath is continually left open, the heat inside rapidly escapes through it; likewise the soul, in its desire to say many things, dissipates its rememberance of God through the door of speech, even though everything it says may be good. Thereafter the intellect, though lacking appropriate ideas, pours out a […]

When I originally sat down to write acknowledgements for my book The Anxious Christian: Can God Use Your Anxiety for Good?, I realized about 10 pages into the acknowledgements that that wasn’t going to work. The publisher was looking for 1-2 pages, but I was 10 pages in and only partly done thanking all the […]

The last year and a half of my life has been a complete whirlwind. That’s the best word that I can use to describe all the things that have been going on. So today, I’m excited to announce several different events and changes that have happened and that are on the horizon. First: As many […]

A few months ago, a friend of mine pointed me towards the blog and online shop of Katie Clemons. My friend knew that I love to journal and thought I would like her stuff and her story. And he was right. I love the story of how Katie came into journaling and how that passion […]

I’m currently reading a really great book, Restoration Therapy: Understanding and Guiding Healing in Marriage and Family Therapy by Terry D. Hargrave and Franz Pfitzer. In fact, I can’t recommend it enough. But as I was reading last night this section of the book jumped off the page at me. It jumped off the page […]

My wife Heather and I will never forget today…May 19, 2011. As of today we are completely debt free. We owe no one any money for anything. We got up this morning and paid off our final debt to Citibank…goodbye graduate school loans. It has been a long, hard process, but one of the most […]

High-Tech Flirting Turns Explicit, Altering Young Lives But adults face a hard truth. For teenagers, who have ready access to technology and are growing up in a culture that celebrates body flaunting, sexting is laughably easy, unremarkable and even compelling: the primary reason teenagers sext is to look cool and sexy to someone they find […]

Doctors Warn About ‘Facebook Depression’ in Teens Dr. Megan Moreno, a University of Wisconsin adolescent medicine specialist who has studied online social networking among college students, said using Facebook can enhance feelings of social connectedness among well-adjusted kids, and have the opposite effect on those prone to depression. You can read a post I wrote […]

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us […]

He discovers how much of his life is guided by what he thinks he should be, not by what he is. Often he discovers that he exists only in response to the demands of others, that he seems to have no self of his own, that he is only trying to think, and feel, and […]

I recently just wrote the article, Maintaining Relational Presence in a Technological World, for the Fuller Youth Institute. In the article I quote a comment from a nun in Ronald Rolheiser’s book, The Restless Heart: My vocation is, at each moment, to make the person in front of me the most important person in my […]

In all wars, whether large or small, whether carried out on battlefields, city streets, living rooms, or faculty lounges, we come across the same basic exclusionary polarity: “us against them,” “their gain–our loss, ” “either us or them.” The stronger the conflict, the more the rich texture of the social world disappears and the stark […]

Shame occurs when you haven’t been able to get away with the ‘who’ you want people to think you are. Carl Whitaker in Facing Shame: Families in Recovery by Merle Fossum and Marilyn Mason

Brene Brown: The Power of Vulnerability

In any case, when we avoid the legitimate suffering that results from dealing with problems, we also avoid the growth that problems demand from us. The Roadless Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Brene Brown: The power of vulnerability This is just a great, great TED talk by Brené Brown, Ph.D., LMSW, who is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. She has spent the past ten years studying vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame. Brené spent the first five years of her […]