“I don’t think we have stories. I think we are stories, and we’re stories that I believe will all be told.” ~Wm. Paul Young When you are a writer, one of the unexpected twists is that you get accused of ulterior motives. Some would assume we are in it for the money or we’re trying to recruit people to our “team” or we’re on some kind of covert mission from somewhere mysterious. But probably more than anything writers are trying... Read more
Thousands of years of a tradition and philosophy and religion have coalesced together to give us our practices and preferences of the present day. No matter how original we think we are, most of what we do and how we act, especially in religion, is inherited. One of the most unfortunate things we acquire, especially from religion, is spiritual bypassing. I talked about it my recent book, Being: A Journey Toward Presence and Authenticity. “Ever since man invented religion to... Read more
I spent the entire day on my porch today. I’ve been working a 53-hour work schedule on an assembly line. My body has adjusted, but I find myself wrung out at the end of the week and in need of natural sounds and feels that bring me back down to earth (so to speak). I realize I’m fortunate to have the porch that people dream about, even though there are some trade-offs to owning this porch in a smaller town. ... Read more
In my new book, Being: A Journey Toward Presence and Authenticity, the book closes with a summary of two of the most important words to succeeding at anything. They are bravery and vulnerability. They absolutely go together, and you can’t do one without the other. You cannot be brave without being vulnerable and being vulnerable requires you to be brave. In the epilogue, I talked about a time when I was trying to overcome my fear of speaking in public.... Read more
In my book, Being: A Journey Toward Presence and Authenticity, I talked about facing our pain in the chapter Being with Pain. Really, a lot of the book is about facing the pain we often must to heal. Whether it is getting into shape or breaking an addiction or dealing with past trauma, the process is the same. I wrote: Everyone knows that, even after a few days, our bodies will begin to adjust to the new routine and become stronger so... Read more
Consider this wisdom from Eugene Gendlin “What is split off, not felt, remains the same. When it is felt, it changes. Most people don’t know this! They think that by not permitting the feeling of their negative ways they make themselves good. On the contrary, that keeps these negatives static, the same from year to year. A few moments of feeling it in your body allows it to change. If there is in you something bad or sick or unsound,... Read more
In my book Being: A Journey Toward Presence and Authenticity, I wrote the following in Introduction. Don’t Waste a Good Crisis is also the title of the first section of the book. “Part I is an accounting of probably the most significant event in my life. It wasn’t my wedding day—it wasn’t the birth of my children (although both of those are significant). It was a crisis. My friend, Dr. Paul Fitzgerald says, never waste a good crisis.” ~Karl Forehand,... Read more
In my book Being: A Journey Toward Presence and Authenticity, I wrote the following in the chapter titled, Being with the Poets and Prophets. “The Christian Scriptures were written over a period of 1600 years. It is a record of people struggling to understand God. Many of them were prophets and poets. Along with the authors of the Bible, there are probably hundreds of thousands of seekers that have written about their quest to understand God and the Universe and... Read more
I work on assembly line. There are about 40 jobs on the line that I work on. Each person does their job and are greatly encouraged to stay in their lane. Since Evangelicalism is a part of my past, I asked the team leader “Do you assign certain roles to men and certain ones to women?” She said, “No, we try to fit the person to the job.” In other words, there are no gender roles, just like there are... Read more
I always hated English class in high school. I despised learning rules about grammar and endlessly practicing those rules. I was a terrible student and did the little I had to get by. In my senior year, I had the option to take creative writing and I decided to give it a try. The good news about the class was that it let me be creative without having to worry about the rules. I loved the class but didn’t think... Read more
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