thought exercise on Being Stuck

Timothy Cipriani’s idea was simple. He would lower himself into the pizza restaurant from the ventilation duct, rob the cash register, and climb back out. The plan backfired. Either he had been eating...

In a surprisingly honest confession, the millennial writer Veronica Rae Saron shared this interesting fact in her 2016 article for Medium: Conversation after conversation, it has become more and mor...

Why is change important? Why do we avoid it, even when it means experiencing much more pain staying stuck? Writer Ann Lammott explains: If we stay where we are, where we’re stuck, where we’re comfort...

If you think of a problem as being like a medieval walled city, then a lot of people will attack it head-on, like a battering ram. They will storm the gates and try to smash through the defenses with ...

Remember Miss Haversham in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations? Her entire life was defined by the fact that she was jilted on her wedding day. People can become very attached to their pain and i...

Some people find themselves stuck in a rut. Without challenge or new opportunities, they begin to sound like Snoopy from the Peanuts cartoons: “Yesterday I was a dog. Today I’m a dog. Tomorrow I’ll p...

Have you ever felt like a part of you was dying while sitting in traffic? Apparently, you’re not too far off. A team of German researchers found that being stuck in a traffic jam increased your chance...

In his important book When Narcissism Comes to Church, professor and therapist Chuck DeGroat makes an important connection between shame, narcissism and addiction by looking at the myth of Narcissus. ...

Right around six years into what would become a thirty-three-year ministry at Bethlehem Baptist Church, John Piper was stuck. His board wanted to enact some significant changes and he felt like he had...

One day a father decided to take his son to play at the local park. The boy quickly gravitated to the sandbox and found himself mesmerized by the colors and textures surrounding him. After a short tim...

When legendary magician Harry Houdini came into a town to do his show, he often went to the local jail, gathering a crowd of people along the way. To get buzz going about his upcoming performance, he ...

A Louisiana farmer’s favorite mule fell into a well. After studying the situation, the farmer came to the conclusion that he couldn’t pull the mule out, so he might as well bury him. It would be the h...

I read somewhere that in the early days of the Alaska Highway, tractor-trailer trucks would make deep ruts in the gravel as they carried construction equipment to boomtowns up north. Someone posted th...

In 2007, author J. K. Rowling was struggling to finish the final novel, The Deathly Hallows , in her seven-part Harry Potter series. She was feeling stressed, trying to connect the dots in a way ...

In 2014, researchers at Northwestern University, Boston College, and the University of Melbourne published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , a prestigious academ...

When most of us grow up in a faith tradition, we begin with an assumption that faith is good, while having doubts is bad. As we mature however, we realize that faith and doubt are not opposites, but i...

Mending is an act that requires courage. To mend can be to repair a relationship, as described in the line above from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing . In this splendid play, Benedick and Be...

Sometimes moments of forgiveness and friendship come from unexpected places. In 2018, the comedian Pete Davidson appeared on the “Weekend Update” segment of Saturday Night Live (SNL). Davidson made a ...

We all crave a meaningful life. This is good and holy. But in the quest for meaning, we get mixed up, turned around, and accidentally end up constantly in a hurry. We rush to grow successful businesse...

In The Good and Beautiful God , James Bryan Smith describes a new Christian he happened to know who came to him one day feeling dejected. He was so excited to be a follower of Jesus, but he just co...

Get to know someone really well, and almost without fail, you will discover a person who routinely struggles to get out of bed in the morning. And not just because they’re tired. They can’t get out of...

ABC News ran a story about neighborhood roads that have literally become commercial thoroughfares because GPS systems are routing traffic there, rather than along larger highways. There are other prob...

Author David Seamands once wrote, “Children are the best recorders but the worst interpreters.” I remember a lot about being a kid. I remember colors and moments, arguments and smells… Though my me...

Tennis superstar Andre Agassi was only nineteen years old when he starred in a television commercial for Canon cameras. The spot featured him in all sorts of eye-grabbing poses, a spectacle on display...

I am more or less ready to wash someone’s feet, but, like Peter, I discover I am not prepared to have my feet washed. I am willing to play like I am a servant and wash the feet of someone else. When I...

In this short excerpt, pastor and author Austin Fischer summarizes the late 19th century book Flatland as an analogy for the often-one-dimensional faith that exists our time: tIn 1884, an English sc...

But hope is hard to come by. I should know. I remember the time when I was once busy dying. It wasn’t long after I had broken my neck in a diving accident that I spent one particularly hopeless week i...

The maze It is rare to escape a maze on the first attempt. And when we are stuck in a maze, we can’t escape by following the same path that got us lost. We escape a maze by trying new routes. We don’t...

God knows where you are and has never left you, regardless of how you may feel or how uncertain you are of where you’re going. It reminds me of when our kids were small and we visited Disneyland for t...

The kings Of history are rewarded with many impressive descriptors: majestic, exalted, glorious, sovereign. Men and women bow before such heights of nobility; even the eyes of wealth and status fall t...