​It's Leap Day 2024.

On this leap day, maybe consider taking a leap into something that you know will change your life for the better. Maybe take a leap into something that will change your life more than anything can. Maybe leap into human connection.

Real. Human. Connection.

In our training yesterday, when talking about the power of human connection, a young lady said, it's easy for me to take care of myself doing the things I can do by myself, but it's harder embracing the care that requires me to connect with others.

I get it. Many of us get it.

Connecting with others may be the hardest new habit to form. Because human connection is a choice and it is a habit.

The reason we don't do it is the same reason we don't go to the gym. Or go for daily walks. Or eat our vegetables. Or put our screens down. Or get 8 hours of sleep. Or do countless other things that we know would make us healthier and feel better about living.

Until it is easy to do those things, until we are so overwhelmed with their benefits that we can't NOT do them, it is much easier to NOT do them.

After a long day of work, it's much easier to NOT go for that walk I planned than taking it. Even as much as I know it will make me feel better about my day.

Well, there is growing research to support that the thing that will make us feel best about our day, above and beyond any other thing, is our interpersonal human relationships. This is true for extroverts and introverts and every vert in between.

But there is also growing bodies of research that tell us that far fewer of us than ever before claim to have strong interpersonal human relationships. Much like taking that walk, we know connecting with others is good for us, but most days we just don't feel like doing it.

During one of our activities yesterday, one of our participants said that one thing she does to connect with others is answer her phone. I laughed because it was so honest.

Years ago, long before caller ID, we answered every call. Today, we decide whether we feel like it or not based on whom the call is coming from. Or whether I'm in the mood to talk to anyone at all.

We get to decide if we're up for human connection. And more than ever we decide no.

I think there's a misconception about relationships. And that misconception is that a relationship should always feel easy, it should always feel like something I feel like being engaged in, it should always feel like something that comes natural and requires very little effort.

What healthy things in life require very little effort?

Right. None.

And so, wouldn't it make sense that the absolute healthiest element in life, human connection, might require the most effort?

There are a lot of healthy habits we've collectively abandoned in life. Maybe human relationships are at the top of that list.

Maybe today, in honor of Leap Day, you'll take a leap into connection. Send someone a note, make a call, sit with someone at lunch, join a book club, invite someone to church this weekend.

There's no doubt in my mind that many of you have been wrestling with making a connection you know would be valuable but you've failed to take the leap.

Today, take the leap.

It might be the healthiest leap you can make.

And oh, happy Leap Day friends.

​I am often caught off guard by the profound things people say when they aren't for a second trying to be profound.

Yesterday, Amy, my friend and training partner for the next few days, told the group, I'm not always great at remembering people's names, but I always remember their stories.

What a gift, I thought.

In a world where we often memorize names, are often enamored with someone's house or car or title, in a world where we so often identify people by the things we can see on the outside, how beautiful that there are people who just can't forget the parts of us that often live on the inside.

This didn't surprise me about Amy. She's a counselor by profession; she's naturally curious about people as a person.

It got me to wondering, though, would I rather be remembered by my name or by my story?

For the longest time, I'm sure my answer to that would have been my name. Probably because for much of my life I used my name and the surface level parts of me to hide my story. To protect me from anyone ever discovering the story beneath the name.

Over the last several years, though, I've come to own my story. I've begun to break free from the judgment of good story or bad story, good guy or bad guy, and just embrace - this is my story.

I have a name attached to my existence, but my story defines it.

Owning my story has largely come to be because I've discovered over time that I can live with people never knowing my name, but the pressure of living with the belief that no one will ever know who I am, that the world will never know my story, well that has become too suffocating to live with.

It's a prison to live in relationships all your life with people who know your name but have no idea who you are. It's a hell of sorts to have your name serving as a prison guard against the world and not a door to it.

Our stories are our ultimate escape. Claiming our stories as simply that, our stories. No need to assign shame or guilt or defense or explanation. No explanation other than, this is who I am.

You have forever known my name, now meet me.

I love these trainings like we're leading this week. I love hearing people's stories. Often stories that sound tattered and broken and damaged. But they are not.

They are simply who the participants are beneath their names.

Stories that feel broken to the story teller that eventually feel like healing don't often shift because someone fixes the story, they often shift because someone hears it.

Someone hears it and then remembers it.

Maybe even more than they remember that person's name.

​A friend of mine lost someone very close to her last year. We've been planning a work event together, and in those meetings I have seen the sadness. I have heard the struggle. Even as she doesn't mention it much.

I suppose I can feel it so deeply because I can deeply imagine the pain. A pain I know ripples through her precious little family.

And I suppose I can feel it because loss doesn't always come in the form of death. Loss sometimes looks like losing your love for life for many different reasons.

Grief isn't a competition, it's a sadness. It's a struggle. It's one's suddenly difficult relationship with living.

My friend sent me an email yesterday about our work. At the close of the email, she included this poem by Ellen Bass called The Thing Is:

to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air,
heavy as water, more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weighs you down like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think,
How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face between your palms,
a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

I don't know if my friend sent this poem as assurance that she is okay, or as a encouragement that I will be okay, or as an expression of hope that we are all going to be okay.

I really don't know.

But after reading it several times, I know I received it as all three.

I am a visual person. I often find comfort in imagery. And what a beautiful image...

Then you hold life like a face between your palms,
a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

Maybe we all, even if just for today, can take life like a face between our palms and commit to loving it again.

For many, I recognize that won't be easy. Love never is.

But it is hard to ever love anything again if we can't begin with life itself. Life, the gift I've been given this morning, and you as well.

Hold it between your palms. And you say, yes, I will take you.

I will love you again.

If you have loved life before, it is so worth loving again.

​Yesterday, I wrote that I have turned my back on some things in my life this year that haven't been serving me well. Things that have been a part of my life in unhealthy ways for four decades. Things I've always known were standing in my way of a future that offers far more hope than any present I've ever experienced.

People might ask, if you've known that, if you've known you are trading in hope for destruction, why hang on to destruction? Why would someone who knows better not do better?

The answer is simple and complex.

The answer is, it's often hard to trade in what has always made us feel good for the promise of something that might turn out to be good. We are creatures who love comfort; nothing is more uncomfortable than giving up what you know for the promise of something better.

We've all lived with enough broken promises to know the extent of that gamble.

It's a hard thing to understand about humans from the outside looking in. Why do people cling to such unhealthy habits when the clinging is clearly playing out in unhealthy ways.

Do they not see it?

I will say to that, in the event you are one who asks those questions, the people you are questioning are equally questioning of you.

They too are wondering, do they not see it?

Do they not see the inner turmoil? Do they not see the stories of shame and guilt? Do they not see the loneliness? Do they not see the person who would do anything to forget how much they don't like themselves?

It's too easy to look at the outside of someone and assume they are destroying their lives when in reality they are often trying to hold together a life that feels destroyed.

I'm here to tell you, the path to helping someone to a brand new place isn't questioning, or worse, judging the place they are in. The path is sharing with them that you have been where they are.

You have been in this place of knowing there is something better but clinging to what feels better. And you have also been in the place of taking the brave step of leaving behind comfort for the promise of hope.

Because many folks seeking comfort have long given up on having hope, yet still deeply long for it. Hope is ultimately the best commercial we have for drawing the comfortable into the discomfort of change.

There IS hope. I want you to know that.

It's not easy. I know the discomfort you are trying to comfort away, but you won't. I've run a decades long experiment on that one.

You just won't comfort away the discomfort in your life.

But hope, the sweet call of hope. How do I get THERE?

It starts with acknowledging that it's never been comfort you've truly longed for; it's been hope. It's been the hope of waking up one day truly at peace with who you are. Truly confident you are moving in the direction of who you are made to be.

It starts with acknowledging it's been comfort standing in your way of that hope, not providing it.

And then, take the step.

Take that first uncomfortable step.

Hope is waiting.

I promise.

​One of the most familiar sentiments in my life is this feeling, a constant internal nagging, a desperate plea of sorts to myself:

You have got to change!

For the better part of the last forty years I have walked around feeling an internal threat.

Change or else.

And over that period I have changed a lot. An awful lot. Yet, I have also continued to experience my fair share of the or else.

Late last year, through a series of events, I realized that I'd spent an awful lot of that trying to change period clinging to things I'd come to believe I'd never be able to change. My ugly past had made these things such a big part of who I'd become, that my future was just going to have to accept these parts of me are coming along for the ride.

Until I had this come to Jesus moment. It was a dream or a vision of sorts. Jesus was standing at the TSA checkpoint. He looked me square in the eyes and said, you can go anywhere you want, but not if you're bringing that stuff along.

He stood their pointing at three bags in my hands.

For much of my life I have been changing while living a life that felt like there was no change at all. In that TSA moment, Jesus showed up to point at the reasons why.

On January 1, I committed to board the plane to my future and leave the things behind that TSA agent said weren't permitted beyond the checkpoint. The things he said had been standing between me and my future all along.

It was the Agent's way of saying, you can change all you want, but until you're truly done defending your past, there is no such thing as a future.

It's been 55 days since I boarded that plane. Fifty five days since I left three bags at that checkpoint. Fifty five days since I've picked up any of those bags in an attempt to sneak them aboard the flight.

To my recollection, a recollection I'm fairly confident in, I haven't gone 55 days without any one of those three things the last 40 years, let alone all of them at once.

What's in those bags is a story for another day, I promise.

But the story for this day is this:

As clearly as I have ever seen it, I see a future. As sure as I've ever felt it, I am no longer daily fighting to change my life, I am daily taking the next step into the life I have always been created to live.

I am more sure than ever that the future is certainly built on the things from our yesterday that we take along with us. So much of where we've been and what we've experienced has a place in our tomorrow.

But maybe the most hopeful future comes when we give up defending the things from our yesterday that have every intention of destroying tomorrow as effectively as they damaged yesterday. Things we've come to defend as part of us that our future refuses to have any part of at all.

If you feel like you're fighting to change, and maybe even that you are changing, yet life isn't moving into the future you'd hoped would follow that change, maybe examine what you're still holding onto.

Maybe examine the things from your past you're still defending in hopes that they may play some supporting role in the story of your future.

I panicked when Jesus told me there is no flight available to accommodate those bags.

And I won't lie. Some days have been hell without those bags; I'd carried them for nearly 15,000 days of my life.

I'm pretty sure I don't have 15,000 days left in my life, and that's fine. What isn't fine, however, is living whatever numbered days I have left fighting to change instead of embracing my future.

What are you trying to take into your future that has no place there?

It's worth examining.

The answer may be standing between you and the future you've come to believe gave up on you. Well it didn't give up on you. It's just been waiting on you to give up.

Give up defending your past.

​Dr. Alan Shore studies the brain. He says joy is the feeling we get in the presence of someone who is obviously happy to be with us. For him, this isn't a theory. It's science. It's our biology.

As babies, our sense of attachment is built on someone showing up to comfort us with a smile. In that moment, our stress turns to joy. It's our earliest definition of love. A definition that gets wired into our brains. And maybe, in those earliest moments, the definitions of love and joy become very similar?

I suppose we could think that's a baby thing. We could believe that as we get older the definitions of love and joy change.

I walked into a packed conference room earlier this week. I was preparing to deliver a presentation. I love doing that, but I am always some level of nervous.

For some reason, this week it was at a higher level.

Then I ran into several friends and colleagues I've met over the years. All of them approached me with giant smiles. My nervousness turned to joy in an instant.

So for me, I don't think those definitions ever change.

One of my favorite scriptures in the bible - scriptures beautifully poured out recently in the song "The Blessing" - say this in the book of Numbers:

The Lord bless you and keep you;
The Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you;
The Lord turn his face to you and give you peace.

I do wonder these days if our path to finding joy in the face of God is finding joy in the faces of one another.

And I worry, if that is so, is the reason so many people are living lives without joy tied to searches for joy in places other than faces? Is it tied to the reality that our faces have become largely hidden from one another?

And no, that is not a statement on a pandemic or masks. Our faces have been hidden from one another long before masks came along. Masks have just become a convenient place to blame for hidden instead of accepting responsibility for hidden.

Our faces have been hidden from one another as we stare at screens. They've been hidden from one another as we bury our heads in our work. They've been hidden from one another as we race from one thing to another without ever stopping to smile at one another.

Smiles do require stopping.

Stillness.

We are too often no longer fans of either.

I'm afraid we've abandoned the faces we were wired to find joy in because we believe there must be some greater source of joy out there. That is a belief that goes against our biology. And I believe - against our creation.

It's a belief I felt in its truest form standing in that conference room watching joy approach me.

I think many of us long for more joy in our lives. I think we long to spread it. There's a simple thing we can do today to promote both.

We can stop someone. And smile. And let our face shine upon them. We can let them know this smile is dedicated to you. This smile is quite simply because I'm happy to be with you.

I promise you, you will have increased the joy in the world.

It is science. It is faith. It is love.

​A dear friend asked me last night, "who inspires you?"

The best questions to be asked in life are the ones you don't hold scripted answers for. Questions that force you to reflect and discover something about yourself that maybe you haven't defined.

I wrestled with my answer. I didn't want to give the obvious churchy answer, well it's God that inspires me. That would be too simple, and honestly a bit inauthentic.

I told her the last several years two men I've never met have been my greatest inspirations: Steven Furtick and Curt Thompson. But then I added one that I didn't see coming. One I had never considered until probed.

I told her that I inspire me.

I said I don't mean to sound arrogant with that answer, but for years I let my struggles drag me down. Today, I look back on those struggles and remind myself that I have overcome a bunch of them.

Not all of them, but a bunch.

What greater inspiration is there in a life where we are constantly having to overcome challenges than to have a life full of personal examples of overcoming?

After our conversation, I was doing some reading and came across this quote: "Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself?"

It was God's way of telling me that my response to my friend wasn't arrogant at all. It was God's way of reminding me that for so much of my life, I sat back and listened to me rant at me with negative message after negative message.

I just sat back and listened to me berate myself for things I had done or things I hadn't done or things I wasn't nearly worthy of becoming.

But then one day I stood up and I grabbed the microphone from me and I started doing the talking.

I started telling myself I could do all things through the strength of the God who loves me.

I started telling myself I was not created with a spirit of fear.

I started telling myself that in God I will find not a shred of condemnation.

Life starts changing pretty quickly when you stop listening to yourself and start talking to yourself.

I think we all need to do this. We all need to become bigger voices in our lives. We all need to proudly declare: I inspire me!

I encourage you today, if you find yourself listening to you tell yourself a message that beats you up, grab the microphone from yourself and start talking or yelling or preaching a message that lifts you up.

You might discover the greatest source of inspiration there is.

I spoke at a conference yesterday that promoted healthy connections in our youth. Over the course of the day, we heard heartbreaking stories supported by equally heartbreaking data that portrayed a generation of disconnected kids.

Disconnection is a toxic feeling. It eats away at you. And our youth, just like you and I, will often take toxic measures to escape it.

These stories are particularly challenging for me. Over the past decade I've come to grips with the truth that I have felt disconnected most of my life. And most of my life I have clung to destructive habits and addictions to escape the toxic feeling our young people are battling these days in epidemic proportions.

When I am done speaking, I always receive kind words about my message. A gentleman came up to me afterward yesterday and asked me, are you a pastor?

I told him I was not.

He said, well, you have the fire of a pastor. You should be one.

In some ways, I wish I didn't have that fire. Because that fire comes from a place of deeply feeling this struggle our kids are facing. It comes from a place of deeply fearing the decades ahead for them if they don't find someone to feed their hunger for connection.

I fear loneliness will eventually eat away so much of their lives that they will one day wake up and have no idea who they are.

Or worse, they will come to identify themselves by the person they've become to deal with the pain of no one ever coming to know the person they really are.

They will come to see themselves as an addict or a loser or a monster or someone who is lonely because they are certainly not worthy of anyone noticing them.

At the close of our day yesterday, a principal from a local school shared stories of things his school is doing to connect kids in powerful ways. As part of his presentation, he shared a video with us. The video was called I choose you.

In the video, conversations were filmed between teachers and students. Conversations where the teachers told students they were allowed to choose a student they believed in, and then have a conversation explaining to that student explaining that belief.

Some of the students broke into the biggest smiles in those conversations. Some of them teared up. And some of them had to wipe away the tears that rolled down their cheeks.

Me, I was the latter all through that video. I was wiping tears.

It is powerful to witness a young person have the parts of themselves noticed they were sure no one ever would. Parts of themselves they themselves were likely dangerously close to believing weren't parts of their identities at all.

What a beautiful thing to witness kids moved to such deep emotion by simply being seen.

And believed in.

This principal said they use human connection in their school as a far greater predictor of student success than any standardized testing. And by the way, grades and attendance have skyrocketed in his school.

In so many spaces, including the spaces our kids inhabit, we've traded in being noticed for who we are for being noticed for the trophies we collect.

And now we have a world full of trophies belonging to people who have no idea who they are.

It's at the heart of a world in great pain, an abundance of which is being felt by our youth.

The saddest part of that is the answer is so simple. If you want to experience the beauty of that answer today, find someone you think may have given up on themselves.

Tell them you believe in them and tell them why.

Stand in their smile, or in their watery eyes, and know you are standing in the answer of all that is eating away at so many of us.

Connect someone's disconnection.

Help someone trade in temporary relief for something far more permanent.

Let's help remind each other who we really are.

​In my lifetime, I have seen the rapid development of technology, of medicines, of knowledge, and yet - for many - life still seems to feel much too hard. In a world constantly pursuing an easier way, there are many indicators that people feel as mentally and emotionally and physically uneasy as ever.

At the heart of this, I think, is the constant fight against reality. It's a fight against accepting that life is hard. We are indeed a world fighting an uphill battle while longing to find a way to coast downhill.

That easy day is not coming. We somehow keep proving that truth while refusing to believe it.

As I make meaning of the world, as I search for wisdom, one of the truer pieces I've discovered is that the people who seem to experience the most joy in life are folks who embrace the reality that life is hard.

They not only embrace it, but they lean into it.

In the bible, James tells us, "Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything."

Is James really telling us that joy is found in perseverance? The kind of joy that will make us feel like we have it all?

Last summer, the boys and I were hiking to the top of a mountain. We'd been told the view was spectacular. On the way up we passed an older couple on their way down. I was stopped, panting and resting and guzzling water. I jokingly asked the couple (or maybe not so jokingly), is it worth going the rest of the way?

They smiled. A smile that said, oh yes. Oh yes it is.

They were right. It was worth it. The joy we felt looking at the world at the end of that climb could never have been experienced at our stopping point.

It's true. Joy is found in the continuing.

Joy is found when I finish an article I don't want to finish.

Joy is found at the finish line of a marathon I wanted to quit at on mile 18.

Joy is found showing up for the work assignment I wanted to call in sick for.

I have a lot of running friends. If I told any of them there was a pill that would simulate the joy they get from running ten miles, they'd refuse the pill and run the ten miles.

I'm sure of it.

Because they've discovered that joy is in the chance to keep going when there are many invitations along the way to quit.

Wanting to quit is a fact of life. Because life is so uphill, there will be plenty of invitations to stop. To throw in the towel. To look at pictures of the mountain top instead of experiencing it yourself.

But at the same time, there are plenty of invitations to keep going.

Maybe that's the shift in mindset some of us need. Start accepting that life isn't tempting you to quit, it's inviting you to keep going.

Because whether you believe James or whether you believe the many who have kept going when life felt intimidatingly uphill, joy is found in the perseverance.

This world will never advance itself beyond that truth.

So maybe today we embrace that great truth. Life is hard. And not embrace it as a threat, but an invitation.

An invitation to joy.

​Maybe it started when I was a kid. I made a list of everything I wanted for Christmas. I received some of the list, some of it I didn't. But because there WAS a list, an inventory of sorts, I was aware of what came up missing.

I don't remember throwing any ungrateful tantrums. Although I was a kid, so it's possible I guess. But to this day, many decades later, I can remember certain gifts I asked for but didn't receive.

If we're not careful, we can develop the same way of thinking when it comes to the gifts inside us. The gifts we've been given to become who we were fully made to become. The gifts we've been given to fully contribute to the world all we are capable of contributing.

If we're not careful, we can find ourselves focusing on the gifts we've never received instead of using the ones falling asleep inside us.

The ones weary from waiting on us.

For most of my life, I wanted to write. Sometimes I was fully aware of that, sometimes it simply felt like there was a writer renting an apartment inside me. But one way or another, writing has always been whispering to me.

For many years, though, I never wrote a word. I always said I'd love to have a job being a writer, but since I didn't didn't have that job, writing just wasn't an option.

Then Elliott was born back in 2006. It was a rough beginning and he spent a week in a NICU in North Carolina. While he was there, I started writing updates on the hospital care pages platform to keep people up to date on his progress.

After we took the recovered Elliott home, I quit writing the updates. But then people reached out saying they missed my writing. So, for a bit I kept writing those updates.

And one way or another, I've been writing ever since.

I learned a lot of lessons through the earliest days of Elliott's life. No small one was God letting me know I have a lot of gifts inside me I'm not using while I'm waiting on gifts I think he need in order to use them.

Gifts that might never come...

I wonder how many of us have 'if only' gifts inside us. Gifts we'd be able to use 'if only' the right circumstances came along.

I have figured out a key to life, at least a key to my progress and fulfillment. That key is this: often times we have to create the circumstances to share our gifts instead of waiting on the gift of circumstances to invite us into sharing them.

How many people die with gifts that fell asleep and never woke up?

Gifts that might have lived on long after they are gone.

I encourage you to make a list of gifts today. Not the ones you are wishing for, but the ones you have. And then give yourself and us the best gift of all.

Start using those gifts like you never have before.

Don't spend another second waiting on the circumstances to share them, start creating those circumstances.

I promise you, our gifts love a great wake up call.