Out from the ashes of myself: My journey through life – Part VI

One of the many things they don’t prepare you for as a kid is the applause and affirmation to stop. You don’t win many awards or get recognition or compliments or words of encouragement when you’re an adult. And if you’ve started to rely on those things as a child without realizing it, their absence […]

How we think, believe and know: My journey through life – Part V

I’ve spilled my guts to you because sharing life is the best way any of us grow and learn. In my late teenage years and into my early 20s, I thought ideas could change people; that if I just crafted the perfect, irrefutable argument supporting something I believed, then you would inevitably become convinced I […]

Collapse of a young adult: My journey through life – Part IV

Turns out the first thing that can go wrong is not having a clue what you want your major to be in college. Archaeology had been my earliest aspiration, but as mentioned, the dread of traveling all over and chasing jobs across universities made me shy away, along with the fact that I was interested […]

Saving the universe in adolescence: My journey through life – Part III

Coming out of my experience with panic, I began to read even more voraciously than I had before. Somehow I got it in my mind that I was going to read the entire Bible. So, without a “plan” in mind, I started in Genesis and just read. And read, and read, and read. I made […]

Dark dreams of childhood: My journey through life – Part II

We are impacted as people by sharing life with others and learning how their stories can shape our own, so here is mine. I was born and raised in rural northern Florida to a middle class, Christian family in the very early 1980s. My dad is from Indiana, where most of his family remains, but […]

Caring: My journey through life – Part I

Often I feel like I just don’t care. “Don’t care about what?” you may retort. Well, a whole lot of anything, according to how I feel. Getting out of bed. Going to work. Interacting with people. Thinking. More often than I care to admit, I’d rather just take a nap or read books or watch […]

How the heart heals and loves again

Some of us are lucky in love. We have a high school sweetheart, fall madly in love, get married and stay married for 60 years. Others of us, it doesn’t work out quite like that. Be it the inability to find anyone to love us; a lack of faithfulness by ourselves or our partner; abuse; […]