job on Self-Awareness

What is the shape of your pain? Is your pain a gaping wound? Is it stuffed into the back corner of a closet, or is it neatly categorized and filed away with annotations that no one but you understand?...

Preaching Commentary Straight Talk from Jesus Jesus Christ did not mince words.  He seems to have always spoken the unvarnished truth, but, I think, with a smile on his face and compassion in his a...

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

In her compelling memoir Still Life , author Gillian Marchenko recounts her struggles with depression. In this excerpt, Marchenko describes one of the many paradoxes that come with depression: how ...

Stop being so sure that you are always right, and others wrong. Don't trust your own opinion, when you find it contrary to that of older men, and especially to that of your own parents. Age gives ...

The guillemot, a small Arctic seabird, nests in dense colonies on the rocky cliffs of the North Atlantic and Arctic. Thousands of these birds gather in tight spaces, with hundreds of females laying th...

There's a humorous, apocryphal story about a man standing by a river. On the opposite bank, a woman calls out, "How do I get to the other side of the river?" The man replies, "YOU A...

“Empathy” literally means “in-feeling”—it is to project myself into another person’s feelings so that I begin to understand what it is like to have his experiences. If I want to gain empathy for a nei...

“I know” seems to describe a state of affairs which guarantees what is known, guarantees it as a fact. One always forgets the expression, “I thought I knew.”

The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy describes a view (not his own view, because Tolstoy was a Christian) of the human person, based on a theory of reality he saw emerging in his day. It is a narrative that...

Awe encourages us to think of God as a transcendent presence: someone outside and beyond our own small concerns and our own vulnerable lives. Awe opens us up to the possibility of living always on the...

One Ash Wednesday a decade ago, when I was new to Anglicanism, I knelt at a rail as Fr. Thomas, my priest, smeared a black cross on each forehead. “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall ret...

One of my favorite sayings is, no matter how difficult it is to hear, “Reality is always your friend.”

The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes.

We don’t know what we are doing, and I think this is especially true about the way our society deals with mental health. In just the past fifteen years, I have witnessed a massive shift in how evangel...

Breathing is one of the few body processes that can be regulated both consciously and unconsciously. We cannot intentionally lower our heart rate or willfully regulate our blood pressure, but we can c...

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

We probably got a bit too cocky about how well our lives were going. But after disability showed up in our family, we learned that life is not tame. It’s not here to align with our desires and plans. ...

We should aim for rational confidence in these sorts of pursuits because certainty is a mere will-o’-the-wisp. Finite minds simply can’t pull it off. Though the distinction between aiming at certainty...

It is as if in creating us God asked a question, and in awakening us to contemplation He answered the question, so that the contemplative is at the same time, question and answer.

God uses our identity crises to reveal who we are and who he is. Sometimes these crises come out of nowhere. Something devastating happens. Someone close to us dies. We are diagnosed, or someone we kn...

Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will percei...

Breathing is the bridge between the brain and the body.

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain an...

In our modern materialistic world, it is easy to lose sight of that sense of longing. In her wonderful collection of essays Teaching a Stone to Talk , Annie Dillard speaks about that growing void...

Be humble. The world is bigger than your view of the world. And certainly, God is much bigger than your view of God.

We would do well to keep in mind that Solomon’s words on the necessity of friendship were written toward the end of his life, well after he scaled his own Mount Significance. His accomplishments were ...

I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity. On the near side of complexity is simplistic; on the far...

Uncontrolled temper is soon dissipated on others. Resentment, bitterness, and self-pity build up inside our hearts and eat away at our spiritual lives like a slowly spreading cancer.

In ordinary times we get along surprisingly well, on the whole, without ever discovering what our faith really is. If, now and again, this remote and academic problem is so unmannerly as to thrust its...