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I started my journey of blogging in 2003 — mostly to capture what I called “transitioning life’s journey”.
In 2023 I took a 3 year break from blogging, but have decided to return to it. I hope you enjoy.
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Do Churches Try and Protect Their Congregants from Anxiety?
A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine shared an article with me on my Facebook profile called, How to Land Your Kid in Therapy. It is a fascinating read for sure, and well worth your time. But I was especially taken by this passage: Paul Bohn, a psychiatrist at UCLA who came to […]
An Experience and a Book to Radically Transform Your Marriage
If you find me talking about something a lot then that means I’m a huge believer in it. And you would be hard pressed to find me talking more about something this last year than The Hideaway Marriage Experience and 5 Days to a New Marriage. I blogged about my first experience at The Hideaway […]
Managing Anxiety in the Family System: How Couples Can Do a Better Job of Owning Their Own Anxiety
I would estimate that in about 70%-80% of the situations in which kids are brought into my office for counseling, the presenting problems have less to do with the individual child, and more to do with what is happening in the larger family system, and more particularly in the couple’s marriage (or former marriage). The […]
How Ministry Leaders Avoid the Hard Work of Boundary Setting
We talk a lot about boundaries in our culture. “Boundaries define us. They define what is me and what is not me. A boundary shows me where I end and someone else begins, leading me to a sense of ownership. Knowing what I am to own and take responsibility for gives me freedom.” (Boundaries, Townsend […]
Our Emotions and Grace
“Many years ago I was driven to the conclusion that the two major causes of most emotional problems among Christians are these: the failure to understand, receive, and live out God’s unconditional grace and forgiveness; and the failure to give out that unconditional love, forgiveness, and grace to other people….We read, we hear, we believe […]
Today We Are Debt Free: $75,000+ Paid Off in 31 Months
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 […]
Orthodox Christian Theologian Vigen Guroian on Gardening and Easter….
Yesterday morning as I was out on my early run I was listening to the podcast of On Being with Krista Tippett. She was interviewing Orthodox Christian theologian Vigen Guroian in a segment called Restoring the Senses: Gardening and Orthodox Easter. I thought it was a brilliant interview all the way through. But I was […]
Writings on Marriage, Katy Perry and Grace…
Here’s a list of three pretty distinct articles that I wrote or contributed to in the last month. Check them out and let me know what you think. Transform Your Marriage at the Start Marriage Right blog. Katy Perry’s Comments Prompt the Question: How Strict Is Too Strict? at the Christian Post website. Avoiding Grace […]
Why ‘Pastors’ Become Therapists
Several weeks ago I was at The Hideaway Experience doing co-therapy along with another former ‘pastor’ turned therapist. It’s not unusual to find therapists and counselors who were former pastors, but I think that vocational movement is often looked at with a sense of skepticism. That somehow, when a pastor leaves the pastorate to do […]
Don’t Place Your Anxiety on Your Kids
A few weeks ago I taught a parenting class at Highland Park Presbyterian Church where I made the claim that many of the anxieties that children experience are due to issues within the family and marital unit at large, rather than just in the individual kid. This isn’t just my own belief, but something I […]
Daily Dose #20: Teenagers and Sexting
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 […]
Theological Anxiety: Underneath All the Theological Debating
I believe that underneath all of the current theological debate is a theological anxiety that is intolerable to many people. The need for certainty in everything is a way to assuage one’s anxiety…an anxiety that is normal as we wrestle with the things of God. We must be able to live with a certain amount […]
Daily Dose #19: Facebook and Depression in Teens
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 […]
Daily Dose #18: Padded Bikini Top For 7-Year-Olds
I was pretty much speechless when I saw this news story this morning. And as the father of a little girl I was saddened to think about all the pressure by marketers that will be aimed at her to look a certain way. That’s why we have an important job as parents. Don’t let culture […]
Daily Dose #17: What’s One Thing You Wish You Understood Better Before You Got Married?
What’s One Thing You Wish You Understood Better Before You Were Married? Okay, so that’s the question…any thoughts?
Daily Dose #16: “Why do we let them dress like that?”
“Why do we let them dress like that?” All of which brings me to a question: Why do so many of us not only permit our teenage daughters to dress like this—like prostitutes, if we’re being honest with ourselves—but pay for them to do it with our AmEx cards? I posed this question to a […]
Daily Dose #15: What is a healthy marriage?
This comes from Sue Johnson, founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy
Daily Dose #14: That’s An Amazing Friend
“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 […]
Daily Dose #13: Dr. David Schnarch’s Definition of Love
David Schnarch’s Definition of Love
‘Taking’ a Triune God Into Our Pastoral Counseling Work
A book that I read about seven years ago, and have flipped back and forth through on occasion in the last few years…I have just recently picked back up again and started re-reading it because of my interest in the integration of theology and psychology, especially pertaining to pastoral counseling in the context of the […]