I Committed Before I Was Ready – and I’m Glad I Did
Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay I sat, frustrated, on the couch in the living room. I squinted at the clock. It was after 12:30am. I took a deep breath and scrolled through YouTube, poring through the search results for “easy fingerpicking patterns”. Only 8 1/2 hours until I had to play in front of […]
Looking for solutions in the wrong places
Image by Bruno /Germany from Pixabay My stomach has had a rough 13 years. It honestly started a couple years before 2007. Intermittently, without warning or pattern, my stomach would turn on me. I would feel as though I was being stabbed in the abdomen with a knife. It could come in the middle of […]
Fear will make you miss out on life
It’s almost depressing how clearly I remember this. I was playing shortstop, for some reason. Normally, the other kids would send me to right field. That’s where they always sent the kid who was picked last – and I was always the kid picked last. On our playground (which was just a parking lot), right […]
The 2 Simple Tools to Replace Social Media with Reading
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay We’ve all done it. I don’t normally like to talk about the bathroom, but let’s just be honest: whenever we head to the bathroom, we grab our phones. It’s automatic. It’s a habit. We will sit there, and we don’t want to just stare at the wall. In the […]
An Antidote to 21st Century “Book Burning”
We’ve forgotten about intent, and it’s leading us down a scary path. There’s a great scene in the TV shows Scrubs where JD, the main character, has just moved out of his apartment with his best friend, an African-American man named Turk, and into an apartment with his ex-girlfriend, a blonde named Elliott. Elliott does […]
“Everything happens for a reason.”
It’s one of those phrases that is retroactively positive, but mind-numbingly frustrating in the present. It’s always issued by well-meaning friends and loved ones, doing their best to encourage someone going through a rough time. “Everything happens for a reason.” In high school, I had to remind myself of it when I had girl troubles. […]
35 Things I’ve Learned at 35 Years Old
This Sunday, May 31st, 2020, is my 35th birthday. As someone who still feels like he’s twelve years old, this information is a little difficult to process. Thirty-five?! I remember when I used to joke about how long it would be until my golden birthday… and my golden birthday was four years ago now. I’ve […]
“Jesus was a Republican.”
I don’t remember the design of the shirt. I don’t really remember much about it at all, beyond the slogan plastered across the front of it. I do remember the girl wearing it, for a lot of reasons – none of them good. The year was 2005 or 2006. My hunch says ’06, because this […]
My 2019 Annual Review
I want to get into the habit of taking some time to publicly run through my previous year. During the last week of December, I spent a few days reviewing how my year went, taking down lots of notes and assessing where things worked and where things fell short. After several really bad years, 2019 […]
Nobody has it “figured out”
I tried not to sell the surprise on my face. I had spent the better part of the previous hour sitting in a local coffee shop with a gentleman that goes to my church. It was basically our first-ever conversation after having sat near each other in church for most of the last 5-6 years. […]