life on planet earth on Losing Yourself

The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss – an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wi...

My friend Wendy calls the incremental disappointments we endure over the years “the slow leak of life.”

A number of years ago, when sabbath laws were still a contentious issue, a church group was picketing a stadium just before a Sunday game. When Tampa Bay Bucs coach John McKay arrived, the minister co...

In their excellent book Invitation to a Journey , M. Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton describe the reality of what it means to “take up our cross” in our daily lives: Sometimes we suffer u...

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

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

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me), It's always our self we find in the sea.

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 ...

[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...

"What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup."

I once was significantly lost. When I was a college student in northern Wisconsin, my dad and I were hiking on a trail that was somewhat familiar to me. I had been on this trail just a few weeks befor...

You follow your desires wherever they take you, and you approve of yourself so long as you are not obviously hurting anyone else. You figure that if the people around you seem to like you, you must be...

The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere, is to be nowhere.

I need to have a reason why I'm doing something. Otherwise I'm lost.

Before God can divulge our God-given identities in our desert-of-the soul wilderness experiences, there is something we need to know: he requires that we be brutally honest with ourselves and with him...

The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And hav...

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...

“I live in a small, rural community. There are lots of cattle ranches around here, and, every once in a while, a cow wanders off and gets lost . . . Ask a rancher how a cow gets lost, and chances are ...

God does some of God’s best work with people who are truly, seriously lost.

"It's a lot easier to be lost than found. It's the reason we're always searching and rarely discovered-so many locks not enough keys.”

One’s own heart can be foreign territory, a terra incognita, and this lack of at-home-ness with oneself generates our propensity to run. We still can’t find what we’re looking for because we don’t kno...

You may feel lost in a sea of people but remember — He knows you by name. He knows your story. He knows your pain. And He loves you the same.

If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.

It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way.

As long as we live, our self-absorption and our insecurity will walk together, holding hands and swinging them back and forth like two little girls on their way to a pretend playground they can never ...

God of our hearts, we come to You admitting that we are lost. In our lives of chaos, we have lost our peace. In our selfishness, we have lost our ability to care for others. In our self-reliance, we h...

If you don’t come apart for a while, you will come apart after a while.

A group of tourists spent hours Saturday night looking for a missing woman near Iceland’s Eldgja canyon, only to find her among the search party. The group was travelling through Iceland on a tour bus...

If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.

“What’s wrong with me is me. Somebody needs to pull me from the raging waters I call ‘me.’