Adventure travel and extreme sports are becoming more and more popular in our culture. People are pushing themselves into CrossFit gyms and triathlon races. We have become an ‘extreme’ culture, jumping out of airplanes, riding roller coasters, swimming with sharks. It’s as if there is a part of us that feels most alive the closer we get to death. Something in us realizes that there are things in life not just worth living for, but worth dying for as well.... Read more
It has to be the most used excuse for why we cannot do something. I don’t have the time. Our world is increasingly busy and increasingly proud of it. We’ve made an idol out of our busyness. We wear our unavailability as a badge of honor. We pretend to loathe it while we put our hope in its worth. And at the end of the day, we most often feel as though we ran out of time too early. There were... Read more
Parenting is enough to drive anyone crazy. Trying to raise good kids is an almost impossible task. How much more challenging, then, to not just be raising good kids but to look at laying a foundation for healthy adults. What is true for rearing children is also true for anyone in a position of influence. The essential goal in leading others is empowering them to self-awareness and self-governance. Often, we are the biggest obstacles. We like to be needed, we... Read more
Every entity on Earth is a culture. Our businesses, marriages, religious institutions and social groups all have a unique atmosphere around them. One the members of the entity establish. The glue that holds every culture together is language. Evaluating and understanding the language of your entity will help you thrive in it. I remember the first time one of the teens I work with used the word “lit”. No kidding, I looked around to see if something was on fire.... Read more
The single greatest plague destroying relationships is our unwillingness to grow. Imagine if tech companies spent all their time trying to defend and validate their previous models and no time innovating new ones. Imagine if an athletic franchise refused to play an upcoming season because they wanted to argue about how great the previous was. Our society thrives on progress. On innovation. In almost every area of our lives, it is learning from the past (mistakes and triumphs) and moving... Read more
In an increasingly global world, the challenge of security and inclusiveness is expanding. From national governments to individual souls, we waver in the difficult balance of the vulnerability necessary for community and the boundaries necessary to protect ourselves. The paradigm we often use is Us versus Them. Like so many things in the modern world, it is not so much that we get the answer to this question wrong; the problem is that it is the wrong question altogether. A Fatal Flaw The... Read more
We spend every day of our lives trying to avoid it. We spend every minute in it trying to escape. Turmoil. The fear of it keeps us hidden and shackled, careful to the point of crippling. Is it possible that uproar is actually good for us? Consider the movies we watch and the books we read. They are driven by turmoil. No great story starts happy and ends happy with nothing but happy in the middle. Tension drives our stories,... Read more
Every one of us has at least one problem at the forefront of our minds. We believe solving this problem will free us from negativity and open up a world of possibilities. The salvation of this circumstance will set us free. Unfortunately, this is almost never the case. What ends up happening is we trade one set of problems for another. The idiom ‘the grass is greener on the other side’ is perhaps the most prevailent lie in our culture.... Read more
Humans have a complicated relationship with truth. It is the thing we are most searching for. The lifeblood of our thoughts and actions. And we all think we have a pretty good grasp of it. Discovering truth is more complicated than we think. Often, truth is a developed pattern, a simple reinforcement of what we have been conditioned to know as right and good. Our perceptions limit us. They are the boundaries with which we view the world. Truth is... Read more
Our post-modern world is becoming more and more compartmentalized. Everything is so fast. Things change so quickly. We are a people who flip through circumstances like an impatient channel-surfer, waiting to land on something comfortable, something familiar. If I feel awkward, I pull out my phone and change worlds with the click of a button. People are more accessible than ever – if a relationship causes tension, I can move to another through a variety of apps and opportunities. The... Read more
Victorious Living
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