​I am leading a training this week with my two friends and forever colleagues Michelle and Amy. We had dinner together last night, and Amy told us something she'd recently heard a young person say. It's got me reflecting.

The young person said, "God loves effort."

It's got me thinking; I don't think we value enough the effort of those around us. Mainly because we don't take the time to deeply enough come to know and feel their effort.

When you spend considerable time with the broken, you quickly stop seeing their brokenness and start feeling their efforts toward healing. You begin to feel the pain and the struggle, and also - the effort of that next step forward.

That next step toward healing.

How often do we judge the clothes one is wearing without wondering just how much effort it might have taken to simply get dressed today?

How often do we judge the poor without an ounce of understanding how hard they are working to not be so? For I can assure you that wealth is at times on the other end of little effort, and poverty at times at the other end of relentless effort to escape it.

How often do we judge the addict as one who is not strong enough or wise enough to leave behind their addiction without ever fully knowing - feeling - the efforts and struggles that have gone into countless days of efforting to do so.

Jesus once said, "come to me all who are weary and burdened." I wonder if that's because Jesus longs for us to know he sees our efforts. I wonder if that's because Jesus longs to HONOR them.

I think we as a world are good at recognizing achievements. Success. But I am wondering this morning, how good are we at letting one another know, "I see how hard you are trying."

Effort doesn't often make for great headlines. But I am grateful to have heard countless effort stories throughout my years that make many headlines pale by comparison.

I have told my boys, I don't know where or when or what the finish line of my life looks like. But I know this. It is my desire that when it arrives the two of them will look at me there and say - he never stopped trying.

So I want you to know, if you are out there trying today - I see you. I honor you. If at the end of your day, like has been the case at the end of many of mine, all you can say is, "I tried," I want you to know - that is more than enough.

SO MUCH more than enough.

And maybe today, as we finish this week, you'll see someone who many not be there yet, but is surely trying to do so. Let them know - "I see your effort."

Let them know - it counts.

It counts A LOT.

Effort can get lost in the grand sea of perfection. Let's make sure it doesn't. For it's possible that God sees effort as the grandest sea of them all.

​Some days you'll hear me shouting that the real world sucks. It's true. I'll also confess that at times in my life - many times, honestly - I have found it easier to blame the real world for my challenges than to accept personal accountability for them.

If the real world sucks, and I spend two decades or so using alcohol to hide from it, at what point did my choices become more a reflection of 'my' real world than any real world 'out there.'

Or, if I know I have a path where I can personally contribute to making the real world that sucks a better place, but day after day I find reasons to delay following that path, am I not to some degree being a little too harsh with my judgment of the world?

Listen, my life's passion is helping people understand how their real world experiences influence their capacity to make healthy decisions. Real world is NOT inconsequential. And no two people have the same real world.

Yet, even if no two people experience the world the same way, all people's ways are built on their next decisions.

If we're not careful, the world can beat us into a space of believing we no longer have a choice. Maybe our next choice can't paint a picture of the world we most long to see, but it sure as heck can influence its shape and color.

My words may not change the world. So maybe I should quit writing? I feel like the real world would like me to make that decision.

But I won't.

It turns out if we long enough scream the real world sucks - the world sucks the life out of us.

Our only defense is to fight back with life.

With living.

One healthy choice at a time.

​Yesterday, Jack Hughes etched his name in American hockey history. With one shot, in one moment, he became an American sports hero. But, as is often the case, so much can get made of a highlight reel moment that we fail to see the beauty in the rest of the reel.

I am still in awe of the pass that Hughes made to his teammate Zach Werenski that set up the pass Werenski would then feed back to Hughes for his Olympic glory moment. In the Hughes pass, he reached with one arm around a defender and somehow forced the puck ahead to his teammate that he couldn't possibly see. At least looking at it through my non-Olympian eyes.

In the moment, the pass doesn't look like anything heroic - but we never fully know when a great pass is about to become an assist to Olympic heroism.

And this - all of this - happened not long after Hughes sat in the penalty box wondering if he was destined to be an Olympic villain. The U.S. had been in the middle of a power play when Hughes committed a high-sticking penalty that evened things up at 4-on-4. His mistake then forced his teammates to play a man down for over a minute of relentless Canadian pressure - all while the score was tied in the final of an Olympic gold medal game.

And then there is THIS. All of this was AFTER Hughes lost several teeth while being on the receiving end of an opponent's stick to his mouth. I lose teeth in a bloody shot to my face and I'm on my way to an oral surgeon; Hughes gets up from the ice and glides toward Olympic glory.

My point is - and this is for me and maybe many of us - not Olympic heroes - because I think Olympic heroes get this - but our big 'frame it and hang it on the living room wall moments' are almost always about more than that frameable moment.

A pass is never just a pass.

Momentary moments of feeling like a villain can often be the prelude to moments of being carried around with a flag draped over our shoulders.

And blood and sweat and tears and missing teeth don't always have to signal the end of the day - sometimes they can signal that it's time to keep moving toward our big moment.

A moment is never just a moment. A moment is always an introduction to the next moment.

I was a high school sophomore sitting on a girlfriend's couch when I watched the last American gold medal hockey miracle; this all the way back in 1980. Sitting there then, how could I have possibly known that over four decades later I'd be sitting many states away - alone on my couch in my one bedroom apartment - so much in life having changed in between - watching the next American hockey gold medal miracle?

I couldn't have. That's the answer. I couldn't have known.

We never know what future moment our right now moment is contributing to. But we should always know - this moment is not the end of the story. It is a picture; the frame may be waiting for us in the future.

And we can always know this: that in reading the story of this right now moment - there is always more to the story than the gold medal moment. More that doesn't erase the gold, but often makes it all the more golden.

You'll get a lot of moments this week. Don't underestimate your power to turn them to gold.

​At the end of day three of a training experience I led last week, one of the participants confided that they had spent most of their life in physical pain. “But today,” they said, almost cautiously, “is the first time in recent memory that I feel pain free.”

In hearing that, I suppose there are two easy reactions available to us. Skepticism or awe. Dismiss it as coincidence, exaggeration, placebo, or lean toward something that feels much larger. When I heard the participant describe their experience, I leaned instinctively toward the latter. It felt miraculous.

But it was also a miracle that, at least to me, made perfect sense.

There was a time in my life when it would not have made sense at all. Pain was pain. Bodies were bodies. Emotions were emotions. Different categories, different systems. But the deeper I have wandered into the science of stress, trauma, attachment, and the nervous system, the harder it has become to maintain those neat separations.

Pain, it turns out, is not merely a structural event. It is a protective experience generated by the brain. It is influenced not only by tissue damage, but by context, memory, fear, safety, and perception. The brain is constantly asking a survival question beneath our awareness: Am I safe?

When the answer is no, everything tightens.

Muscles brace. Breathing shallows. Vigilance rises. Pain often increases. Not because the person is imagining anything, but because the nervous system is doing exactly what it was designed to do in the presence of threat.

And threat, we now know, is not limited to physical danger.

Isolation is a threat.

Rejection is a threat.

Silence can be a threat.

Living unseen for years at a time is a threat of a very particular kind.

What made the training powerful was not simply the content. It was the environment. For three days, people did something our nervous systems rarely experience in modern adult life. They spoke honestly. They listened without fixing. They revealed parts of themselves usually kept hidden. There was laughter, emotion, recognition. There was, perhaps most importantly, a palpable absence of judgment.

In other words, there was safety.

And the body responds to safety just as surely as it responds to danger.

Heart rates settle. Defenses soften. Breathing deepens. The parasympathetic nervous system, our built-in regulation system, becomes more active. Even pain perception can change. This is not mysticism. It is physiology.

Which brings me, interestingly enough, to Jesus.

Regardless of one’s theology, the healing narratives in the Gospels contain a striking and consistent pattern. Before or alongside physical healing, there is almost always an encounter of profound human dignity. The unseen are noticed. The untouchable are touched. The ashamed are addressed with tenderness. People are not treated as problems to be solved, but as persons to be restored.

“Daughter.”

“What do you want me to do for you?”

Simple words. But relationally seismic.

Modern neuroscience would not be surprised by the power of such moments. To be deeply seen and met without threat is one of the most regulating experiences available to a human nervous system. It quiets alarm systems. It changes internal states. It can alter how the body feels.

I am not suggesting that first-century miracles can be reduced to neurobiology. That would miss the point entirely. But I am suggesting something both scientifically grounded and spiritually resonant:

Perhaps part of what made those moments so powerful was not only divine intervention, but the radical experience of being fully seen, fully safe, and fully accepted.

We tend to think of miracles as violations of natural law. But what if some miracles are, at least in part, expressions of laws we are only now beginning to understand?

What if the human body has always been this responsive to love, safety, and connection?

What if healing has always been, in ways we underestimate, relational?

I am not Jesus. No illusion there.

But moments like this training make me wonder if participating in environments of genuine safety, presence, and human connection is its own quiet form of miracle work.

Not supernatural.

Not explainable away.

But deeply, beautifully human.

​Great actors seem to quietly understand something about being human. Robert Duvall always felt like one of those actors to me. Not because of grand performances or cinematic spectacle, but because he never seemed to be acting so much as inhabiting a life.

That is why Tender Mercies has never felt like just a film to me. It feels more like a visitor. A slow reflection on brokenness, dignity, and the possibility of beginning again.

Mac Sledge is not written as a hero. He is a man who has fallen apart. A man who has burned through talent, relationships, and self-respect. Yet what makes the character so deeply affecting is that the story does not chase dramatic redemption. There is no sweeping transformation, no triumphant reclaiming of glory. Instead, there is quietness. Routine. Small decencies. A life rebuilt in fragments.

That has always resonated with me.

Life rarely repairs itself in a big bang moment. Healing rarely happens to the beat of a soundtrack. More often it arrives in ordinary days, in simple choices, in the refusal to quit showing up.

Tender Mercies understood this. Duvall clearly understood this. His performance carries the weight of a man who is not trying to become extraordinary, only trying to keep standing.

There is something beautifully honest in that portrayal.

Mac does not speak much, yet his silence feels full rather than empty. It is the silence of a man who has lived long enough to know that words are often insufficient. Duvall conveys regret, humility, and a fragile kind of hope with the smallest movements, the slightest shifts in expression. Nothing is exaggerated. Nothing pleads for attention. The humanity simply exists.

I think that is why the film always speaks to me.

It reminds me that redemption is not always loud. That grace can look like stability. That strength can be found in gentleness. Most importantly, it suggests that a life does not have to return to what it once was in order to have meaning. There is dignity in rebuilding something quieter, something truer.

I want to say that again, if only for me - life does not have to return to what it once was in order to have meaning........

Duvall’s Mac Sledge feels like a man who has stopped arguing with reality. A man who has accepted the slow work of living. There is a kind of peace in that acceptance that I find deeply moving and relatable.

Perhaps that is the real mercy the film offers. Not the fantasy of erasing the past, but the possibility of living honestly in its aftermath.

And Duvall, with his remarkable restraint, makes that possibility feel real.

I thank him for that.

I thank him for all the times he showed up to movies seemingly understanding my struggles more than I understood them myself. I thank him for all the times he showed up not as a great actor, which he surely was, but as a man simply inhabiting life.

God bless you and keep you, Mr. Duvall. You leave behind countless memories and treasures.

In doing some reading about Valentine's Day, I stumbled upon a 1990s psychological study that later got billed as 'The 36 Questions That Lead to Love.' It was billed as such because a few of the participants in the original study fell in love and in short order got married.

The original intent of the study, however, was to better understand what strengthens interpersonal connections - all connections, not just romantic.

As I read through the questions - questions designed to manufacture progressive vulnerability - I didn't find myself wondering if these questions can truly build love as much as I found myself wondering how many people 'in love' could sit and answer these questions with one another. It's a curiosity that stems from recognizing the absence of such vulnerability in my own previous relationships.

I wrote yesterday that there's a difference between FEELING love and FINDING love. I think FINDING love has a lot to do with creating a space where two people have the ability to safely exchange inner worlds. Where someone hears your fears without turning away. Where someone can reveal their own uncertainties. Where two people can risk honesty instead of managing a closely guarded image.

That’s a world that is often very different from the often longed for... CHEMISTRY.

Chemistry can make two people feel powerfully drawn to one another. Vulnerability and emotional safety are what make two people feel attached to another when chemistry seems scarce.

Here are the 36 questions from the study. You might find them interesting.

You might wonder, first and foremost, could I sit down with the people close to me and ask of one another these questions? And if I have been close to someone a long time, how many of the deeper answers that these questions explore do I know about them - and them of me?

I think they are great questions. Whether building a new love or looking to strengthen the love you have.

________

SET ONE

The goal of these first 12 questions is to help build closeness between conversation partners. The questions start out less personal, more like something you might ask someone on a first date, before gradually becoming more personal.

Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?

Would you like to be famous? In what way?

Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?

What would constitute a "perfect" day for you?

When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?

If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?

Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?

Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common.

For what in your life do you feel most grateful?

If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?

Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.

If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?

SET TWO

The second set of questions are all about fostering a greater sense of intimacy. They explore things like personal experiences, values, and emotions

If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future, or anything else, what would you want to know?

Is there something that you've dreamed of doing for a long time?

Why haven't you done it?

What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?

What do you value most in a friendship?

What is your most treasured memory?

What is your most terrible memory?

If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?

What does friendship mean to you?

What roles do love and affection play in your life?

Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner. Share a total of five items.

How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people's?

How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?

SET THREE

Where the two previous sets of questions were about creating closeness and establishing intimacy, the third and final set is all about forging deeper emotional intimacy.

Make three true "we" statements each. For instance, "We are both in this room feeling..."

Complete this sentence: "I wish I had someone with whom I could share..."

If you were going to become a close friend with your partner, please share what would be important for him or her to know.

Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things that you might not say to someone you've just met.

Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life.

When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?

Tell your partner something that you like about them already.

What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?

If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven't you told them yet?

Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why?

Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why?

Share a personal problem and ask your partner's advice on how he or she might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.

​Yesterday, I stood in a room full of people presenting about relationships. Not romance, not Valentine’s Day, not candlelit dinners or roses, but relationships in the broader human sense. Connection. Attachment. The ways we find one another and the many ways we struggle to.

But to honor the holiday, to open the event, Michelle - my friend and the host - asked the audience a question that felt simple on the surface: What is your favorite Valentine’s Day memory or association?

People smiled. Some laughed. A few shifted in their seats the way people do when a question feels personal.

The audience started answering. Stories. Traditions. Moments. And then it came to me. My answer popped into my head the moment Michelle asked the question. And that answer:

You’ve Got Mail.

Tom Hanks. Meg Ryan. A quiet park bench.

“I wanted it to be you.”

There is something deeply satisfying about that ending, and it has very little to do with pageantry. No dramatic music swelling toward a kiss in the rain. No grand orchestration of destiny. Just recognition. Relief, even. The sense that something real has been found rather than merely felt.

Valentine's Day feels like a good day to point out the very important distinction between found and felt.

Many people, perhaps most people, will feel love at some point in their lives. Biology nearly guarantees it. Human brains are designed for attraction, infatuation, fascination. Dopamine and other neurochemicals flood the system with urgency and energy, narrowing our attention toward another person with a mysterious interpersonal gravitational force.

The experience can feel downright magical, as if it's the unfolding of some unforeseen miracle. But here's the thing about that miracle; the chemistry that creates magical feelings is far less reliable at creating forever.

Feelings arrive quickly. They are intense, consuming, often intoxicating. They convince us that love has happened. Feelings don't lie!

But if I have discovered something about love in my life, it's this: feeling love can be a lie if you come to believe it's the same thing as finding love. Feeling love can become a great betrayer.

Finding love tends to occur more quietly, often after the initial fireworks have softened. It emerges not from the rush of novelty, but from the steady accumulation of safety, familiarity, and choice. It is less about the nervous system’s excitement and more about its calm.

It is less about being swept away and more about staying.

This is part of why the bench scene in You’ve Got Mail resonates so deeply with me. Always has, even if I haven't always understood why. The relationship between Joe and Kathleen was not built on cinematic fantasy or idealized passion. It unfolded through conversation, humor, irritation, misunderstanding, curiosity. Their connection formed in a space largely absent of visual chemistry, shaped instead by words, tone, thought, and presence.

The love, as it appeared, seemed anchored to something sturdier than a fleeting emotional high.

Even if we do not know what happened after the credits rolled - whether they argued over groceries or grew tired of one another’s quirks - the scene feels believable. It carries the emotional weight of something discovered rather than merely experienced.

“I wanted it to be you” is not the language of infatuation. It is the language of recognition.

Valentine’s Day, in many ways, amplifies this tension between feeling and finding. The holiday is saturated with imagery of emotion - hearts, desire, romance, intensity - yet beneath the surface lives a quieter and more universal longing. Not simply to feel love, but to find it. To encounter something enduring. Something not easily frightened away when the chemical currents inevitably shift.

The tragedy for many people is not that love disappears when the feelings fade. It is that we have been taught to believe it should.

When the intensity softens, doubt often rushes in. Something must be wrong. The spark is gone. The magic has faded. Yet biologically, nothing abnormal has occurred. The brain has simply moved from initiating love to holding on to it. The body has done what bodies do.

Ironically, this is often the precise moment where love has the opportunity to truly begin!

Not as sensation, but as decision.

Not as chemistry, but as commitment.

Not as feeling, but as presence.

I have felt love in my life. Deeply. Sincerely. Undeniably. And yet, if I am honest, I still carry the sense of being on a search for it - not for the feeling itself, but for the steadiness of something that remains when feelings fluctuate, when novelty wanes, when the ordinary rhythms of life take hold.

Perhaps this is a human condition beyond my own condition.

Perhaps this is why a simple fictional moment on a park bench can linger for decades in our imaginations. It captures something many of us hope is possible - that love might be less about the intensity of how we feel and more about the quiet certainty of who we choose, who stays, who feels like home when the noise subsides.

Home. Safe and sound and seen, even if not always filled with excitement. Home, a love not dependent on the surge of chemicals, but capable of surviving their ebb.

A love not merely felt.

But found.

Social media can begin to feel like a catch-all for rage. It's an easy place to unload rage without any obligation to articulate where the rage is really coming from, and - more importantly - what direction one plans to go with it, what changes will one fight for to change that which enrages them.

As Mrs. Obama suggests: rage without reason or plan is just more rage.

I know our world is running short on some things, but rage sure the heck isn't one of them.

I actually value people who share their rages - even rages born in circles I don't and likely never will belong to - if they are thoughtful and articulate well where it's coming from and where they are going with it. From that rage, I get to learn and grow. And even become more empathetic and understanding.

But rage for the sake of rage, where it feels like I've stumbled into an audience where rage is the main act, I personally find that enraging. Which isn't healthy. And makes me oh so grateful for the unfollow feature on social media.

Rage can be good. Useful. A great motivator.

Unless of course the motivation is simply rage.

I've seen the rage for the sake of rage approach.

I fail to see the value.

It seems to destroy more than it fixes.

​The brain treats familiarity as safety. And the brain loves nothing more than safety.

When you stop doing something good for you, let's say exercise, that initially shows up as restlessness or guilt or unease. But if you keep NOT doing that thing, the discomfort fades. The brain recalibrates. And now, inaction feels normal, and restarting that thing feels like a threat.

Getting back to your broken routine can actually feel harder than when you first started it.

We often think of momentum as a good thing, but that works both ways. Action breeds action. But avoidance breeds more avoidance.

This is true of exercise. Relationships. Writing. Going to church.

Stopping behaviors actually starts to shift our identity. We go from "I'm a runner" to "I'm someone who used to run." The brain is deeply motivated to keep a consistent identity - the brain loathes change - so once "non-doer" becomes the self-image, becoming once again a doer feels like a psychological threat.

And here's the thing about stopping. When we run or write or engage in meaningful connections with other people, these activities usually provide delayed rewards. But when we stop, and replace them with substitute activities (snacking, drinking, scrolling, watching television), we start to get low-effort QUICK rewards. So now the brain isn't just used to stopping - it's being rewarded for it!!

Re-starting can be hard! But here's the thing. Once we know why it's hard, once we know the brain has really tricked us into believing we are no longer who we used to be, we can go about the fight of reclaiming who we used to be.

We can use the brain's trick against itself.

Because once you go back to doing the healthy thing you used to do, the brain will quickly adapt and once again feel best in the identity of a doer. The brain won't go there willingly, but the brain WILL go there.

Apologize to your brain today. Apologize for allowing it to believe you've become a non-doer.

Then go do!!!

​I am preparing for a presentation later this week. I used this slide in a presentation to a local college psychology class a few weeks ago. Although the data only runs through 2011, the trend is striking. While I am cautious about extending conclusions beyond the study, I think there are reasonable cultural and social conditions that suggest the pattern may not have reversed.

So what does the slide say?

Over a 25-year period, the percentage of college students identified as having secure attachment styles declined by seven percent.

Why does that matter?

Attachment patterns influence how we experience all relationships, not just romantic ones. When two people both operate from relative security, the relationship has a greater likelihood of feeling stable, trusting, and emotionally safe.

But when insecurity dominates - whether expressed through fear of abandonment, discomfort with closeness, chronic guardedness, or chaotic relational patterns - connection becomes more difficult to establish and sustain. These dynamics do not automatically doom relationships, but they surely introduce predictable challenges.

I often teach, and sometimes even preach, that relationships are among our most powerful sources of health and healing. When you examine the lives of people who report high levels of well-being, supportive and meaningful relationships almost always appear prominently in the picture.

Which brings me back to the data.

If fewer individuals experience relational security, it raises important questions about how easily people can form and maintain deeply supportive bonds.

What is a central requirement for secure attachment within relationships?

Safety.

Not perfection. Not constant agreement. But a consistent sense of physical and emotional safety - the experience of being able to exist in another person’s presence without excessive fear, guardedness, or self-protection.

I look around and wonder how intentionally we are creating that sense of safety for others, both in person and online.

If our capacity for secure human connection truly is one of the strongest predictors of well-being, then even modest shifts in these patterns should grab our attention.

The world is full of struggling people. Disconnection is rarely the only cause, but it is very often a giant part of the story.