awakening

  • Where Fire Has Gone: A Call to Godly Purpose

    I see it everywhere—in my own life and out in the world….men in collapse. Not just tired, not just distracted, but completely surrendered. No fire. No vitality. It breaks my heart… I want to fix it but I’m not even sure how to diagnose it. I think about it a lot as I’m raising my…

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  • The Edge Has Two Sides

    The Edge Has Two Sides

    I have lived on the margins twice in my life, and from the outside I know it looks the same. That’s the strange part. Same distance from the center, same refusal to live the way everyone tells you to live, same sense of standing slightly outside the flow of things, watching instead of participating. But…

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  • From Needles to Notches

    From Needles to Notches

    Heroin was the obvious lie. Perfectionism was the respectable one. Same mechanism. Different costume. One numbed the pain. The other anesthetized it with achievement, productivity, and praise. Both promised relief. Both demanded everything. The needle and the calendar were never enemies. They were accomplices. People like to call that growth. It isn’t. It’s substitution. Perfectionism…

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  • Mirror Mirror |Collusion

    What better way to start a week then introspection. Ask yourself, “Am I in collusion with the person who abused me?” I think we all would like to believe we are no longer in collusion with our abusers. That can only be true when we’ve stopped the secretive cooperation with them. This deceitful agreement we…

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  • All the years I’ve spent in a counselor’s office trying to sift through the rubble of my childhood and heal, I never encountered the priceless, cherished moments that populate the early years of most. They just weren’t a commodity I was raised with. I’m not being a victim by sharing this, it’s just factual. As…

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  • Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves . . . Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a young poet As a very small child, my body and…

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  • Collusion

    I think we all would like to believe we are no longer in collusion with our abusers. That can only be true when we’ve stopped the secretive cooperation with them. This deceitful agreement we have with them keeps us quiet. I knew when I was no longer in collusion with my family. It was when…

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  • The Construction of Pain

    Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves . . . Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a young poet As a very small child, my body and…

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  • All the years I’ve spent in a counselor’s office trying to sift through the rubble of my childhood and heal, I never encountered the priceless, cherished moments that populate the early years of most. They just weren’t a commodity I was raised with. I’m not being a victim by sharing this, it’s just factual. As…

    Read more →