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5/16/2026 0 Comments Chemistry Is Never Enough I hear this a lot lately: there MUST be chemistry.
Well, I hate to be the one to throw sand on all the promising chemistry experiments being conducted out there, but chemistry may be the most overrated element of a romantic relationship there is. Why? Because as mind and body altering as intense chemistry can be, it's nowhere to be found when the normal challenges of a Tuesday show up with no regard whatsoever for chemistry. Tuesday brings flat tires and forgotten appointments. Tuesday brings sick kids and overdraft fees. Tuesday brings silence after stressful days when neither person has much left to give. Tuesday brings piles of laundry and dishes that somehow returned even though you swear you just did them yesterday. Tuesday brings one person wanting to talk while the other wants to be left alone. Tuesday brings anxiety. Exhaustion. Bad moods that have nothing to do with the relationship but still somehow land inside of it. Tuesday brings traffic jams, rising bills, aching backs, interrupted sleep, and text messages misunderstood because someone read them while frustrated. Tuesday brings disappointment. One person forgot something important. One person feels unseen. One person is carrying more than they know how to explain. Tuesday brings routines. And routines are where relationships either quietly deepen or quietly decay. Because eventually love stops asking: “Do we have chemistry?” And starts asking: “Can we carry ordinary life together without destroying one another in the process?” Can we grocery shop together? Can we survive stress together? Can we repair after conflict? Can we sit in silence without panic? Can we make an average Tuesday feel safe instead of exhausting? That may not sound as exciting as chemistry. But it might be far more important. If you're looking to start a relationship, by all means bring that chemistry. But if you're looking for a relationship that flames beyond the flames, you'd better bring the capacity to do a normal Tuesday. Sadly, as it turns out, far more of us know how to do chemistry than know how to do Tuesday. Sadly, that is, because when challenging Tuesdays turn to challenging Wednesdays, and challenging Aprils turn to challenging Mays, chemistry is usually nowhere to be found. Chemistry is never the answer for a challenging Tuesday. But knowing how to navigate a challenging Tuesday together, well who knows, that might just be the answer for disappearing chemistry.
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 I recently read a story of a young lady, Sophia Dick, who was running a half marathon as part of the Cincinnati Flying Pig running series. The story caught my eye because I've run that particular race.
While reading the story, the plot took an interesting turn. Or better put, I guess, a wrong turn. There's a place in the race where the full marathon runners go one way, and the half marathoners go another. I remember that place well because it was there that I thought, "Thank God I don't have to go with them!" Well, Sophia missed her turn at that place and accidentally went with THEM. Once she realized her mistake, she had two choices: turn around and finish the race she'd started, or continue on and finish a marathon she never wanted to start in the first place, and in doing so run a distance she'd never run before and surely hadn't trained for. Sophia chose the latter. A very cool part of the story is that she found herself in a pace group led by my friend and ultra running legend Harvey Lewis - Ultra Runner. Anyone who knows Harvey knows that if you've found yourself in a challenging place, you couldn't have a better leader. Harvey has accomplished some incredible running feats in his career, but equally amazing to me, he's helped countless other people - myself included - accomplish more than they ever thought they could. So, unsurprisingly, Sophia did it. She completed the marathon she didn't know she was going to run. And in impressive fashion: 3 hours and 30 minutes!! After the race, Sophia said something profound. She said: "Sometimes the wrong turn can take you further than the right turn ever could." I mean, right? She did run 13 miles further than she would have if she'd taken the right turn. But that's not the kind of further Sophia was referencing. She was suggesting that unplanned or unwanted experiences in our lives might result in growth we'd never get sticking with the original plan. Or following the plan we thought we were supposed to follow. That hits home with me. I can spend a lot of time lamenting the life that hasn't gone the way IT WAS SUPPOSED TO GO. And I can get deeply stuck in that lamenting. Until I force myself to take account of all that the unplanned and unwanted directions in life have taught me. Of all the gifts that have come into my life via the wrong turns. I wonder how much time we waste believing the secret in life is figuring out the right and wrong turns, when the real secret is to just go. Just freaking go. I'm not trying to suggest a haphazard life. But I am trying to suggest once you're in the middle of a 'wrong' turn - make it right. Lessons in life don't come from the right path, they come from being open to learning from whatever path you might find yourself on. There is NO path that does not teach to one who longs to learn. Sometimes that's not the path you intended to be on. But I wonder: how many people have missed out on beauty in their life by deciding there's none to be found going the 'wrong' way? If you feel like you're going the wrong way today, make it right! Well done Sophia. Not just for your incredible marathon. But maybe more, for helping us all see some of the best finish lines in life are at the end of roads we never intended to travel. 5/14/2026 0 Comments Hurts, Hopes, And Healings I had dinner with my friend Solomon last night. I found myself talking about a relationship from my past that still haunts me - a topic we’d touched on before during one of our Olive Garden chats. He already knew the circumstances; he knew the lingering regrets and the unrelenting sharp edges of the pain.
In the middle of the conversation, without a hint of hesitation, he asked: "Have you ever apologized to her?" Two things struck me about that question. First, I’d been wrestling with that exact thought lately, and it felt as if he could see into the center of my internal struggle. Second, as I drove home, I thought about the ease with which he asked it. "Have you ever apologized?" can easily sound like an attack. This didn't. It sounded like care. Solomon and I mused last night that we’ve been meeting for these dinners for six years. At our first meal, we would have been hesitant to even mention our hurts, hopes, or healings. These days, those topics are the main course. In fact, I think we keep showing up for the possibility of those conversations (and for him to pressure - I mean, encourage - me to return to ultra-running). Driving home, I wondered if this is the true measure of a meaningful relationship: the capacity to ask, without hesitation, "What are your hurts, your hopes, and your healings?" I’m not talking about superficial hurts, like a back that aches in the morning, but the deep wounds that feel like they are on a mission to haunt a life forever. Not the superficial hopes, like wanting clear skies for a birthday party, but starting your own business hopes that terrify you. And not the superficial healings of visible injuries, but the quiet, internal restoration required to become the whole person you've longed to become. If you want to measure the depth of a connection, ask yourself: How comfortable am I asking these questions? What are your deepest hopes, hurts, and healings? And just as importantly: How safe do I feel answering them? I look back at my failed marriage and realize that at its heart was an inability - perhaps even a lack of interest - to ask these questions of one another. That is no small void. The "insides" of us are largely constructed of these three things; our minds and bodies are almost always occupied by at least one of them. When Solomon and I started out, we talked about the world around us. We still do, but more and more, we talk a lot about the worlds inside us. We all need "Inside World" people. Without them, we only have connections built on "Outside Worlds" that serve to hide who we really are. That isn't a connection at all. It's a barrier - it does a much better job of keeping two people apart than bringing them together. Part of my own journey has been learning to share my inside world. These Olive Garden chats have played no small part in that. Our hurts, hopes, and healings are vital parts of who we are, but they were never meant to be carried alone. They are meant to be the magnets that draw us toward one another - and ultimately the glue that keeps us there. 5/13/2026 0 Comments The Confessions Of An Avoidant There are people in this world who fear abandonment. And then there are people like me. People who feared connection so deeply that we abandoned ourselves long before anyone else had the chance to leave.
The strange thing about being avoidant is that many of us don’t look lonely from the outside. We look independent. Capable. Self-sufficient. Calm under pressure. We become experts at carrying our own weight. Experts at needing little. Experts at convincing the world we are fine. Sometimes we even convince ourselves. But beneath all that self-sufficiency often lives someone who has spent their entire life longing to be known while fearing the disaster of being known. That is the great and hard to grasp contradiction of avoidance. I know now that my patterns were not random. They were learned. Built carefully over years in a world where vulnerability felt unsafe. Where emotions came with a price. Where needing comfort often led to disappointment, silence, shame, guilt, or disconnection. Somewhere along the way, my nervous system decided closeness was dangerous and distance was survival. I didn't decided that - something inside me did. So I adapted. I learned how to stay busy instead of present. How to intellectualize instead of feel. How to leave relationships emotionally before they ever had the chance to leave me physically. How to focus on flaws, create distance, and always keep one foot near the exit. The heartbreaking part is that avoidant people are often accused of not caring. Many of us care deeply. Sometimes unbearably deeply. But caring can feel dangerous when intimacy overwhelms you. So instead of moving toward love, we unconsciously move away from the very thing we ache for most. I know that sounds insane. It does, unless you’ve lived it. It is sitting beside someone while feeling a thousand miles away. It is longing to be chosen while struggling to stay emotionally present enough to receive love from the one who would choose you. It is wanting connection desperately while something inside of you is screaming run. Until eventually you realize something painful: Avoidance may protect you from rejection, but it also protects you from being fully loved. That realization changed me. Not overnight. Not dramatically. But honestly (and honestly has never come easy to me). I've started noticing how quickly my nervous system reacts to closeness. How silence is my sweet sweet refuge from vulnerability. How automatic disappearing emotionally can be for me. And I've started learning to slow down long enough to notice what is actually happening inside me instead of outrunning it. And I’ll be honest: this slowing down work is brutal. Because healing avoidance is not just learning communication skills. It is grieving the life you might have lived had connection once felt safe. And that is a heavy kind of grief. So some days the work feels impossible. But I am beginning to understand something important: The goal is not perfection. The goal is staying. Staying in the room. Staying in the conversation. Staying connected to myself long enough to remain connected to someone else. For someone avoidant, staying is sacred work. I used to think healing meant becoming fearless. Now I think healing might simply mean becoming honest enough to stop running from what we most need. Love. Because maybe the deepest confession of all is this: Avoidant people are not people who never wanted love. Many of us wanted it so badly that we built entire lives trying to survive the possibility of losing it.  I watched the movie Remarkably Bright Creatures last night. What a beautiful movie.
It reminded me of my very favorite quote in the world from Curt Thompson: "We all come into the world looking for someone who is looking for us." It's a powerful quote because it paints a beautiful picture of a newborn baby coming into the world, wide-eyed and mystified, finding life's first comfort in the eyes of a caretaker looking back. But it is also powerful because it predicts the nature of future joy that the baby will find throughout life. Because nothing is truer, I don't believe, than the more people we have in life showing up looking like they've been looking for us, the more joy we will experience. Remarkably Bright Creatures is a movie about humans and animals who have lived through traumatic experiences. Experiences that left them broken and alone and searching. There's a scene in the movie where Tova, an older woman forever grieving the loss of her husband and young son, encouraged her friend Cameron, a young man abandoned by his parents as a boy, to play his guitar and sing at an open mic night. Cameron was quite resistant. Yet, Tova finally convinced him to climb onto that stage. His voice was magnetic. It was as if years of beautiful music had been trapped and were finding their freedom. And as the applause grew louder, and found Cameron, you could see and feel healing re-writing a story. You see, after enough pain in life, many of us stop looking for people who are looking for us. We begin hiding instead. But healing often begins the moment someone sees beyond the hiding place. Not because they ignore our wounds, but because they refuse to believe the wounds are the truest thing about us. That’s what Tova does for Cameron. That’s what Cameron eventually does for Tova. That’s even what an octopus somehow does for them both in this story. They become mirrors reflecting back to one another beauty that has been long forgotten. I think that’s why human connection is so powerful. The healthiest relationships in our lives are rarely those where someone simply tells us what to do. The healthiest relationships are often the ones where someone helps us remember ourselves. Maybe that’s what love often is. Not creating beauty from nothing, but reminding someone the beauty never fully left. I suppose that's why loneliness hurts so deeply. Perhaps that's why movies like this one can be so emotional for some viewers. Because isolation doesn't just remove companionship. Over time, it removes mirrors. Without safe mirrors, we can lose sight of ourselves. This movie had a very happy ending. But the happiness was no surprise to me. Because in a world where people find someone who is looking for them, happiness is sure to follow.  I recently listened to a conversation where two sides debated whether pet pigs count as children when celebrating Mother's Day. On one side of the conversation was a mother with no human children who faced criticism from family and friends because she wanted recognition for considering her pet pigs her children.
She found this to be very reasonable. The other side of the conversation responded as if they'd never heard anything more unreasonable. Me? I found myself wondering why both sides felt such an intense need to win this debate. Why they poured so much energy and stress into winning the other side over. The truth is, I felt quite grateful I had no opinion on the matter. It feels risky to say,"I have no opinion." Because somewhere along the way, we began treating constant opinion as proof of intelligence, engagement, morality, or identity. As if silence means weakness. As if uncertainty implies ignorance. As if every question requires immediate personal positioning. Opinions matter. Convictions matter. Discernment matters. But about everything? To carry an opinion about everything is to carry emotional weight about everything. Every headline. Every controversy. Every social issue. Every celebrity conflict. Every parenting debate. Every political argument. Every viral moment. Every question about pigs and Mother’s Day apparently. And many of these conversations are not actually invitations into understanding. They are invitations into tension. Into camps. Into identity defense. Into proving. Into winning. A dear friend recently told me she has been working on trading in "always" and "never" for possibilities. “Always” and “never” are often attempts to create certainty in an uncertain world. They simplify complexity. They close loops emotionally. They help us feel safer, clearer, more in control. But they also shut doors. Absolutes often leave room only for judgment; if we created a law regarding pets and mothers and Mother's Day, we would know who honors the holiday and who disgraces it. I do understand this need for absolutes. They often stem from emotional exhaustion, fear, hurt, or accumulated experience rather than objective truth. The nervous system loves certainty, even painful certainty, because certainty can feel safer than openness. Possibilities, on the other hand, often require vulnerability. But vulnerability can be the gateway to humanity. I am not suggesting a world without conviction. But I do wish we could loosen our grip on absolutes just enough to allow for mystery, growth, nuance, and maybe even a nice surprise or two in life. I often say I am living in my age of wisdom. So much of that wisdom has come from letting go of things I once absolutely held onto. Too often we think wisdom is gathered; it is often more about letting go. 5/9/2026 0 Comments Alone Or Together? Many years ago, the University of Virginia conducted a study. They put a group of students at the foot of a large hill with a loaded backpack and had them estimate how steep the hill was that they were about to climb.
The catch is - the students were divided into two groups. One group of students stood next to a friend while they looked at the hill. The other group stood staring at the hill alone. The research revealed that the students standing alone estimated the climb would be much greater than the students standing next to friends. Furthermore, an even deeper layer of research found that the more connected students felt to the friend standing next to them, the less steep they perceived the hill to be. How steep is your hill? The answer usually has nothing to do with the hill; it almost always has EVERYTHING to do with who is standing with you when you look at your hill. There is a lot of talk about the impacts of loneliness in our world today. Perhaps the greatest impact is how many people see the hills in their lives as much more daunting than they really are simply because they look at those hills alone. Looking at daunting hills equals stress. Sleeplessness. Depression. Thoughts of suicide. I know. I have experienced some of this. And - I also know just how much hills shrink when you tackle hils together. The Bible tells us: “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” Sometimes finding faith the size of a mustard seed isn't as easy as it sounds. Sometimes that mustard seed seems bigger than the mountain. Bigger - until someone stands beside you and takes your hand as you talk to your mountains. Sometimes the mustard seed is us. Us walking alongside someone lost and staring at their mountain. Us, pouring the faith that runs through our hearts and minds into theirs. Us who say: together I think we can move this mountain. How steep is your hill? Rarely do you find that answer looking at your hill, more often it's found looking around you.  Some of the most important parts of life aren’t things we finish, they’re things we keep returning to.
I work in the world of healing. Helping people heal from trauma. From addictions. From broken and struggling relationships. Healing from emotions and thoughts that often take people to dark places. Maybe the hardest part of showing up for that work is knowing the work will never end. There is no finish line. In fact, any imaginary finish line to the work of healing seems to be getting harder and harder to imagine. So what does one do? Quit? I chatted with a dear friend yesterday who is feeling overwhelmed by mom life. Maybe parents understand this idea of showing up for work while knowing there is no finish line. There is no final victory over caring for a child. The dishes return. The worries return. The conversations return. The need for patience returns. Yet love makes repetitive work meaningful. The same is true for healing. For friendship. For marriage. For faith. For kindness. For building community. For becoming a better person. Some work has no end because life itself keeps happening. Maybe what exhausts us is not the endlessness itself, but the expectation that meaningful things should eventually require nothing more from us. But there is something deeply hopeful - for me - about continuing to fight the feel impossible to win. It means we still believe people matter. It means we still believe suffering is worth responding to. It means cynicism has not completely taken over our hearts. Some days my greatest fight against darkness is to keep showing up in it. Some days my greatest source of optimism is making sure darkness knows I'm not giving up on the idea of light. Perhaps that is one of the deepest forms of meaning available to us: not eliminating brokenness, but refusing to abandon one another inside it. Some work in this world today feels without a finish line, but I am sure that's the work begging us to keep showing up. 5/7/2026 0 Comments Build The Road I stopped and looked out at the length of the pier. And it occurred to me in some silly way, someone actually built this thing.
Someone stood at the edge of the choppy and crashing waters and felt some need to go deeper into them, in spite of the chopping and the crashing. And that someone wisely realized they did not have it in them to calm the waters, but insisted, still - there must be some other way. Someone built that pier with a belief there is value in going further. Someone believed there was value beyond the shoreline. And isn't that what roads are? Belief. It wasn't lost on me that the pier allows one to leave the safety of dry land and move out over uncertain waters. Most meaningful roads in life eventually require us to leave something solid and familiar behind. Healing does that. Faith does that. Growth does that. Love does that. New roads can be scary, but if we believe they can take us somewhere meaningful aren't they worth building? And if we are waiting for the choppy waters of life to calm before building them, is it possible we are missing the entire point of building them at all? Sometimes choppy waters are the real story; the pier is just the best way to experience and share it.  In a recent sermon I heard Steven Furtick say, “There are seasons in your life when your insecurities cause you to invent enemies that do not exist.”
I started reflecting on those words through the lens of trauma, both personally and professionally. And how one of the grand impacts of trauma is one can be left in deep and long lasting periods of uncertainty. Out of the uncertainty comes enemies one may not even recognize as enemies. Not always literal enemies. But perceived threats. A delayed text message becomes rejection. Constructive criticism feels like an attack. Silence feels personal. Conflict feels catastrophic. Distance feels like abandonment. Trauma changes threat perception. One of the hardest realities to understand about unresolved pain is that it doesn’t always stay in the past. Sometimes it follows us into the present, quietly shaping how we interpret people, situations, and relationships. The body remembers before the mind reasons. I think many of us believe insecurity is simply low self-esteem. But insecurity is often much deeper than that. At its core, insecurity is uncertainty. Uncertainty about our worth. Uncertainty about our safety. Uncertainty about whether love will stay. Uncertainty about whether we belong. And trauma has a way of wiring uncertainty into us. Especially relational trauma. If you grew up in an environment where love felt unpredictable, criticism felt shaming, conflict felt dangerous, or silence felt emotionally cold, your nervous system learned to stay alert. Hyperaware. Prepared. Not because you were weak, but because your body was trying to protect you. The challenge is that protection patterns that make sense in painful environments can become distortions in safe ones. A nervous system trained by past hurt may continue scanning for enemies long after the original threat is gone. That doesn’t mean the pain isn’t real. It means the interpretation may be shaped by old wounds. I know this personally. There have been seasons in my life where uncertainty caused me to experience situations through the lens of fear instead of reality. Times when silence felt heavier than it probably was. Times when emotional distance felt loaded with meaning. Times when my body reacted before my mind had time to ask better questions. And professionally, I see this dynamic everywhere. In classrooms. In marriages. In workplaces. In churches. In online conversations. People are carrying stories and nervous systems shaped by experiences most of the world cannot see. Which means many of us are reacting not only to what is happening now, but to what happened years ago. Sometimes the argument isn’t just about the argument. Sometimes criticism carries the emotional weight of every time someone felt unseen. Sometimes authority carries the weight of past powerlessness. Sometimes rejection touches wounds far older than the current relationship. Understanding this has made me more compassionate toward others, but honestly, it has also made me more compassionate toward myself. Healing is not pretending the past didn’t happen. Healing is learning to recognize when the past is speaking too loudly in the present. It is learning to pause long enough to ask: Is this person truly my enemy, or is this moment touching an old fear inside me? That question alone can change relationships. It can change leadership. It can change parenting. It can change conversations. And maybe most importantly, it can change the relationship we have with ourselves. Because sometimes the greatest healing begins when we realize we are no longer living in the environments that taught us to be afraid. That our enemies no longer have to be our enemies. |