life on planet earth on Disorientation

In a “Peanuts” comic strip, Lucy sets up a small stand with a sign: “Advice—5 cents.” Charlie Brown approaches, looking for guidance. “Lucy, I need help,” he says. “What seems to be the trouble?” she ...

One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore.

Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation.

Lions have an especially pernicious way of hunting their prey. It seems that they terrorize their victims into making the worst possible choice about how to protect themselves from being eaten. The hu...

Walter Brueggemann writes that the movement of the psalms is from orientation to disorientation and then to new orientation. The psalms give us a language for transformation in desert spaces: we move ...

[Describing many of his friends] Something that doesn’t have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It’s more like stomach...

In 1914, not long after the sinking of the Titanic, Congress convened a hearing to discern what happened in another nautical tragedy. In January of that year, in thick fog off the Virginia Coast, the ...

We fixed up the house and swapped it for another house and then another and then another. During the first ten years we were married, we moved six times. It was like being in the witness protection pr...

In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.

In Annie Dillard's Pulitzer Prize winning book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she mentioned the work of Marius Von Senden who became curious about the effect it had on people who had been born blind to...

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...

To understand why the Andrea Gail never had a chance, one needs only to search the clues along the shoreline of the Eastern Seaboard. At first, it went by the name of the “Halloween Storm,” given its...

At the heart of the city of London is Charing Cross. All distances across the city are measured from its central point. Locals refer to it simply as “the cross.” One day a child became lost in the bus...

For many of us, life can easily become disorienting and discouraging. Existential questions often emerge that never have before. As stressful as modern life can be, it is somewhat comforting to know t...

Psychologists tell us that one of the most difficult conditions a person can be forced to bear is light deprivation. Darkness, in fact, is often used in military captivity or penal institutions to bre...

Our culture is afraid of grief, but not just because it is afraid of death. That is natural and normal, a proper reaction to the Last Enemy. Our culture is afraid because it seems to be afraid of the ...

When I graduated from college I was given one of the greatest opportunities of my young life. A group of my friends were told that if we were able to purchase a flight to the Cayman Islands, we would ...

We were created for goodness and perfection. That’s why we innovate, progress, and change. But if our progress loses its purpose, it cannibalizes our humanity, leaving us distracted and disoriented.