​One of the greatest consequences of losing our connection to God is replacing it with a stronger connection to our labels.

Labels other people assign us.

Labels we assign ourselves.

God never labels, God names. God names us son or daughter. God names us according to the unique gifts he has given each of us.

If I truly listen to God call me, he will call me son, writer, compassionate, healer.

But when I grow distant from God, and there have been periods in my life when I have kept God at a great distance - there are days I still permit that distance - but when there is that distance, the labels I replace my names with are often much uglier.

They often sound like quitter, drunk, wasteful, divorcer, irresponsible, underachiever.

You get the picture.

And when it comes to my faith, my connection to God, it’s a vicious circle. I allow labels to sneak into my life because I allow distance in my relationship with God, and then it’s the labels that make me question why God would want anything BUT distance between me and him.

So the distance grows greater.

It's why I know labels are from the devil, the enemy, the dark side of life – however you choose to label that part of nature. Because what greater weapon could an enemy of God have than to convince us that God sees us as we often label us?

What greater weapon could the enemy have than to convince us that God actually sees us as the people around us label us?

I want to caution you against labels. Print them if you must. Stare at them. But don’t for a second even think about slapping them on you. You are a package that God has lovingly named: son, daughter, gifted. You are worthy of so much more than a label.

God doesn't even see the labels we attach to ourselves or permit others to attach to us. God sees right through them and wants to love away the hurt and hopelessness and depression that often comes with those labels.

God sees right through the labels and shouts our names.

The names he has given us.

God longs to destroy our connection to our labels and strengthen our connection with him.

That happens best when we listen to our names and not assign ourselves labels.

Print them if you must. But please, don't attach them.

​If you think I can't change, you are clearly not familiar with how much I already have.

If it sounds like I am directing that at you, I am not. I am having a conversation with myself. Out loud. Maybe for the possibility it's a conversation that will be helpful to you as well.

To me, life is always about change and growth. It's taken me a long time to realize that. A lot of my life I imagined a sweet spot where one lands and life no longer demands so much adapting and shifting.

So much daggone changing.

But the more I looked for that sweet spot in life the more life seemed to turn up sour. Until I realized the sweet spot is accepting that life is a journey of change and not a journey pointed to some predefined idea of what the sweet life must surely be.

Living the sweet life is much more about how you DO life and not so much a place where you land in life.

With that said, full disclosure, although I cognitively understand that truth about change these days, I still struggle with the reality of it. There are areas in my life that still invite me to change, some invitations are actually quite persistent and loud, and my response is too frequently, that is a change I cannot make.

It's too hard. It demands too much.

Yet here I am. A man whose life could be best defined by hard changes. In many ways I am nothing near the person I once was. Not decades ago. Not years ago. I am not even the man I was last week.

In most ways, that is a healthy revelation. Not all ways, but mostly.

So I remind myself, if you think you can't change, you are clearly not familiar with how much you already have.

And I remind you, if you think you can't change, it might be helpful to take a close look at just how much you already have.

As long as I am changing, I hold out belief and hope that change is possible for everyone.

For me.

For you.

For them.

​I had coffee with a dear friend yesterday. We've traveled similar roads in life. We still do. It's why our conversations can go in unexpected directions.

Yesterday was no exception.

"Do you love yourself," she asked.

The question - seemingly - came from out of the blue. Seemingly because very little actually comes from out of the blue.

With little hesitation, I told her, yes. I do.

She continued on with our conversation, but as she talked I found myself wrestling with an answer that came with too little thought.

Do I love myself?

When she was done talking, I told her that I think I need to correct myself. Maybe I don't love myself, but I no longer hate myself, and for me that's more than enough.

For me, maybe not hating myself is the same as love. I know it is way more than I ever expected. Or felt like I deserved.

It's been a journey. Not hating myself has followed the pathway of me coming to understand myself. I used to understand myself solely by things I had said and done. Now I know all of those things have things beneath them. Nothing I have said or done has been said or done in a vacuum.

All stories are preceded by stories. Too often we judge one another based on the stories we see, sometimes without ill-intent, because we can not see the stories that preceded those stories.

I told my friend that the most powerful part of ceasing to hate myself is it opened wide the door of possibility that God did not hate me either. I had always been taught that God loves me no matter what I've done, but that is very difficult to accept when YOU hate you because of all that you have done.

You come to know that God's greatest gift - God's greatest avenue to loving me - is knowing and understanding all the stories that came before the stories I once hated most about me. God lives inside those stories, with a loving embrace like no other, those stories I have sworn to secrecy.

Sworn to secrecy from God and others and mostly, myself.

The other powerful part of this journey: once you no longer hate yourself, and once you know that God truly does not hate you, all because he understands (which is not the same as excuses) the hardest parts of us - our most damaging choices and paths - it opens the door for us all to exchange our hatred of others for understanding of others.

I heard someone say at a conference this week, "we should meet others with compassion and empathy for stories we will likely never hear."

That, honestly, has been very challenging for me this week. People around me are making choices that are quite frankly impossible for me to excuse.

I've had to remind myself this week that my mission in life these days isn't about finding ways to excuse the things people say and do that I personally find inexcusable, my mission is to try to understand those things.

My mission is to try to understand that the stories that are challenging my life were preceded by stories that were challenging to those who are behaving in ways I have a hard time excusing.

I am better than ever at that mission because I came to understand there are many things in my life for which there are no excuses. But as God has reminded me, frequently, not one of those things is not open to his understanding.

Maybe the hardest part about understanding God is feeling that his love indeed transcends all the things that I have forever hated about me.

Maybe that is the hardest part about loving myself - and others - having a kind of love that transcends choices and behaviors that I hate.

I don't know that I will ever get there - at least not to the place God is with it. He is God for a reason.

But I know I am on the right track.

My friend asked me, "do you love yourself?"

I am still not entirely sure, but I AM entirely sure I no longer hate myself. And for me, that is a beautiful start. If I get no further than that, ever, it will be a more beautiful place to live than I could have ever imagined living.

​Federal funding that supports a young lady's job who works for me was cut overnight this week. The funding was scheduled to run through the end of September - it was COMMITTED to us through then - but that all changed in one overnight email.

How did I find out about this?

I found out when the young lady who works for me called me and told me she'd received an email letting her know her job had been cut.

An email.

An email not from me; I had no idea this was coming. An email not even from my boss or her boss, but rather from a political channel way above my paygrade.

This young lady has worked for and with me for three years. She's done incredible and indeed life-changing work to impact the well-being of our workforce and workforces across the state.

She has done valuable work.

Yet, in our conversations yesterday, I had to help her stop questioning her value. You see, it's easy to question your value when your work is as dismissible as a group email.

My consolation to her, even though I know it was of little consolation, I told her that people who don't prioritize valuing people are not capable of devaluing your work.

Politics is politics. But there are always two ways to implement political decisions. One is to factor in the human toll, which doesn't always mean a different decision, but it does prioritize humanity before implementing the decision. The other is of course to prioritize the decision and let the human toll be what that human toll might be.

As I talked with my friend yesterday, listening to her wrestle with her own toll, one she didn't see coming when she got out of bed yesterday - one she SHOULD HAVE been given the gift of seeing it coming - I couldn't help but imagine the thousands upon thousands who were wrestling with the same thing across the country yesterday.

Some may think I'm talking about wrestling with sudden and unreasonable political changes. But no. That's not what I'm talking about here - change and unreasonableness is the true nature of politics.

I'm talking about wrestling with the lack of humanity. And the reality that politics without humanity can get quite ugly.

Degrading.

There is a lesson in this for all of us. We all have to make some hard decisions now and again. Decisions that impact the people around us. And maybe there isn't always a right or wrong way to deliver those decisions, but there is always a human way.

I am a big fan of technology. That is, until we start seeing technology as a way to circumvent the extra time needed to insert humanity and human relationship.

Would it have taken an extra few days, maybe a week, to coordinate all the right people to have all the right human conversations with people losing their jobs?

Yes. It most certainly would have.

But it turns out humanity can be quite expensive.

So email it is.

​One thing I know about the stories people will share here on Facebook today: some of the stories will be stories about their lives, and some of them will be stories they will tell to protect them from the grief of facing the stories of their lives.

Dr. Curt Thompson says, "part of the ways we tell our stories the way that we do is to enable us to cope with our grief."

Sometimes we will see the things people share and think, they are pretending. Maybe that judgment is too simple. Maybe it's more on point to say they are coping.

There are parts of my childhood that were certainly good, that were healthy. And there are parts of it that were really unhealthy. For most of my life I protected myself from the unhealthy parts by simply telling myself the childhood story that it was ALL healthy.

I wrote hero stories about people who didn't always show up in heroic ways. I hid from my grief stories by telling myself stories that looked and felt much better than grief.

It's our nature. We are all story tellers. That can be a curse and that can ultimately be a cure.

When I got divorced a lot of people expressed disbelief. Some even said they were shocked. This was based on the stories they saw of my marriage online. The stories they saw of my marriage as it carried out in many offline gatherings. It turns out when at a young age you learn to tell made up stories that feel better than your real story, you use that skill - or coping mechanism - all of your life.

One can get really good at telling false stories. One can even get addicted to telling them. You never have to face the pain of the real world when you can tell stories of a world where pain doesn't exist. You don't have to reveal ugly stories when you can tell stories that are much more beautiful.

In that way, your false stories can become your alcohol or your drug.

Until the day when you become overwhelmed by the desire, the craving, for just one chance to live out your life as you. The non-fiction you. The unedited autobiography you.

YOU!

I have discovered the hardest part of living out my real story is saying no to the old stories. Saying no to the old stories means coming face to face with the stories those old stories were hiding, protecting me from.

It's like being sober and suddenly having to face the world drunkenness hides me from. Part of the challenge of being sober is giving up a substance, the other part, maybe the more difficult part, is facing the stories alcohol so kindly protects me from.

But on the other side of saying no, that's where reality lives.

Authenticity.

And even though living out my real life doesn't always look and feel as magical as the stories I have told myself and others at times to protect me from - hide me from - the challenges of my real life, there is a freedom in authenticity, in reality, that maybe in some ways is better than magic.

Magic requires people to buy into stories that aren't there; there's a lot of pressure that can in an instant become unbearable keeping up with those stories.

Freedom, on the other hand, comes when there are no expectations that anyone buy anything.

Freedom comes when the only expectation is I tell the story of me just as I am.

That's been a difficult place for me to get to, for sure. But writing the story of me has been infinitely easier than writing the stories of who I wished I was.

Or wasn't.

If you're struggling to tell yourself a new story about your life, the REAL story, maybe part of the struggle is not being able to say no to the old ones.

​"I wish this post-divorce weight would just go away."

I have felt that at times the last 5 years.

Sometimes intensely.

There's a guy in the bible who gets it. Intensely.

His name was Jacob.

Jacob had a favorite son, Joseph, which deeply angered his brothers. Jealous of their father's special love for him, the brothers plotted to get rid of Joseph. They tricked Jacob into believing Joseph had been killed by a wild animal, while secretly selling him into slavery.

Their jealousy and deceit left Jacob heartbroken, convinced he'd lost the son he loved most.

Twenty-two years later, during a great famine, Joseph's brothers traveled to Egypt seeking food, not knowing Joseph had become a powerful leader there. When Joseph revealed himself, the brothers were shocked and terrified. But Joseph forgave them, recognizing God's greater plan. Overwhelmed, the brothers returned home and told their father, Jacob, the unimaginable truth—Joseph was alive!

Jacob was skeptical. He'd carried the weight of grief all these years. How could it even be possible that Joseph was alive?

Then the bible tells us: "But when they (the brothers) told him all the words of Joseph, which he had said to them, and when he saw the wagons that Joseph had sent to carry him, the spirit of their father Jacob revived."

Sometimes we are too focused on the weight of our problems to see the wagons God has sent to us. Sometimes we are too focused on eliminating our weights to realize God's not on board with eliminating our weight, but rather he wants us to get on board with his desire to help us carry them.

When we put our faith in our weight and not in our God, we can miss the wagons.

When I put my faith in my weight and not the wagons God has parked outside my window, I can miss...

Unexpected friendships or supportive connections: People God placed in my path to offer support or encouragement, connections I am sure I've overlooked or undervalued at times.

Moments of quiet reassurance: The gentle reminders on my walks and hikes or quiet times where God whispered that I'm not alone—even when life is feeling chaotic or uncertain.

Opportunities that are constantly emerging from my hardship: Invitations to speak, write, or connect with others specifically because of my experiences, turning pain into purpose.

My own personal growth and resilience: New perspectives and deeper empathy, signs that God has been quietly reshaping me, even when outward circumstances don't always feel like they are being reshaped the way I'd like them to be.

Deeper bonds with my two boys: Conversations that feel like a stronger relationship is coming alive through our shared challenges.

I know our weights are real.

I know they are heavy, for sure.

But they can also be blinding. They can blind us from seeing the wagons God has sent to help carry our weights.

Not carry them away.

Not make them disappear; we will always be carrying ALL of us all of our lives. Divorce will ALWAYS be a weight I carry.

But God isn't afraid of my weight. In fact, I suppose in some ways God delights in our weights. He sees weight as an opportunity. Because it's in our weights that we are best positioned to see all the wagons that only God can send to help carry them.

Best positioned, that is, when our faith is in the wagons rather than the weight.

​It was an intense sequence.

Players scrambling for the ball, sticks flying, a bump (or shove 🤷‍♂️) or two.

It was lacrosse at its most heated.

When the dust settled, I watched Ian approach an opponent. I saw his smile, even through his mask and from 50 yards away. I saw his hand rise and then settle in a gentle pat on the opponents head.

Then back to business he went.

To me, his dad, I felt like I'd just watched him make a big steal or score a goal. Such a simple moment, less than a second, but the kind of dad moment I want to forever freeze in time, a memory that outlives his teen years by forever.

Lysa TerKeurst says, “Gentleness is not weakness. It is strength under control.”

We live in a world that too much lately, in my opinion, hesitates to operate from a place of gentleness. I think this is especially true of men. Is it because too many have come to believe gentleness is a sign of weakness? Have too many men been conditioned to believe that gentleness is the opposite of strength, when in truth, it often takes more strength to be gentle than to be forceful?

From a young age, many boys are often taught to “man up,” “tough it out,” or “never let them see you cry.” These messages equate emotional softness or empathy with weakness. Gentleness becomes something to suppress, not something to practice.

For many reasons, I have never once encouraged my boys to "man up." I spent most of my life out-toughing the toughest of them only to get to the end of my capacity to hold onto one more ounce of toughness feeling like life had beaten every ounce of toughness from me.

So to stand there and see my kid instinctively respond with gentleness - to see him retreat immediately from the fight of sport back to the kindness of humanity - that was encouraging to me.

Encouraging as a father.

Maybe more encouraging as a human.

The world can make you think gentleness will get you eaten alive. I have come to believe little actually makes you feel more alive.

Gentleness.

​I woke up yesterday morning and looked out at a brilliant sun rising over the ocean waves.

It made me quite happy.

It turns out, though, that when it comes to predicting how long I might live, what I do with that sunrise means more than what I feel looking at it.

A recent study (Which Predicts Longevity Better: Satisfaction With Life or Purpose in Life?) found that having a sense of purpose plays a more crucial role in promoting longer life compared to merely being satisfied with life.​

I have had a long week. Three days in a row I led 3-hour trainings in the morning and in the afternoon. That's exhausting, especially when you pour your heart and your passion into the trainings, which I do.

Driving two hours home yesterday, I don't know that I felt happy about my week, but I sure felt full.

Full of purpose.

The older I get, and the more studies I read, I come to believe that the greatest source of our collective unhappiness is our pursuit of happiness. The older I get, the more I wonder if happiness isn't a great distraction pulling us away from our purpose.

Don't get me wrong, I loved the feeling I experienced looking out at that sun. But if I had to make a choice, the sun or the trainings, I'd pick the trainings.

Maybe because I spent so much of my life without purpose, or at best, dabbling with purpose in the middle of an all out pursuit of all the ways life could satisfy me.

Which leads to a very destructive cycle.

Seek satisfaction. Wake up unsatisfied. Double down on search for satisfaction. Wake up more unsatisfied than ever.

All the while, purpose is following behind, waving frantically, I'm right here.

Satisfaction with life, well that's a hard calling to get out of bed for. Because life satisfaction is fickle. Some days the sun doesn't look quite so brilliant over those ocean waves.

But purpose, once you know that, you can be sure it's waiting for you every single morning you wake up. When you find your purpose, it quits following behind you waving and starts walking right beside you - a forever friend.

Purpose might leave you exhausted.

Purpose might even leave you feeling a bit unhappy at times.

But purpose will never stop being a reason to get out of bed in the morning. And really, is there a greater gift than having a reason to get out of bed in the morning?

And as a bonus, as the research shows, purpose actually increases our chances of having more mornings to get out of bed.

That's pretty satisfying to know 😊

​I was in Chesapeake today speaking to school counselors about trauma and bullying, two topics quite intertwined.

Before speaking, and before introducing me, a young lady addressed the audience.

She told them she was glad to be back; it was her first day back on the job after a bit of a layoff. She told them how much she appreciated their cards and texts and phone messages. She told them she was thankful for their prayers, "they carried me", she said.

She told them her doctor asked her before starting her treatments if she had a strong support system. She responded to the doctor: oh, you have no idea, doctor.

I didn't know in the moment what she was going through, but her sense of connectedness with the room was overwhelming. Beautiful even in what felt like heaviness. It made it hard to get up and follow her brief welcome back moment.

At lunch I went up to her and told her that I had no idea what she was battling, but she could welcome me to her prayer chain. Stage 4 blood cancer she told me, but with a spirit and body that seemed every bit as healthy, if not healthier than mine, she said "I've got this."

You never know who you will encounter in a day - who God has decided you NEED to encounter in a day - but I needed to encounter this beautiful human in eastern Virginia.

I needed reminded that there is indeed great power in letting people know that we are praying for them. Sometimes people believe that before they believe God hears and answers them.

And I needed reminded, because I confess there are still days here and there when I do doubt it, but standing in her presence, I had no doubt whatsoever that - I've got this.

​I have felt God's pull on my life for as long as I can remember. I have also come to know that what has most prevented me from fully responding to that pull has not been my resisting it, rather, it has been my responding to pulls that are not his.

The great challenge in responding to his pull is it gets very easy to convince ourselves that OUR pulls are HIS pulls. It can get very easy to convince ourselves that the many things I feel like I need to do today are the things he is calling me to do today.

Many of us will head off to busy jobs today. We need those jobs. We have obligations.

The question becomes, what is shaping those obligations? Am I working to support a quality of life that lives up to God's calling in my life, or am I working to support a quality of life that lives up to my neighbors' callings, or Facebook's calling, or comparison's calling.

Is it possible that God's pull on my life looks a lot more minimalistic than my neighbors' pull on my life?

Not all jobs are God's call for our life.

Or how many relationships are we battling to hang on to or chasing after or over and over again try to repair because they feel like relationships I am being pulled to have in my life. Maybe they are, but have the energies I am pouring into them become so intense that I am no longer sensitive to the relational pull God is trying to offer my life?

Not all relationships are God's call for our life.

As a father, am I being pulled to provide things and opportunities for my kids that look like things other dads have provided for their kids, and in doing so, unintentionally leading them to believe that God's pull on their life looks like straight As or a college scholarship or a well-paying job in the future. Because at this age, be sure, to them God's pull on their life feels exactly like the directions I am pulling them in life.

Or pushing.

Not all dads look to their kids like the dad God wants to look like to them.

It is a demanding world. That is not changing. And quite possibly that is not what needs to change.

Maybe in the moments of feeling overwhelmed - overburdened - unable to keep up with it all, maybe in those moments it's a great time to ask, how many of these demands are God's demands on my life, and how many of them are demands I myself have created for my life?

God's pull and the world's pull are often very different. Not knowing that difference can leave us feeling like we are being pulled in too many directions, being pulled apart.

Sometimes responding more intensely to God's pull simply requires letting go of the things that are not his pull.

How do we figure it out those things we need to let go of? It starts with spending a little more time talking to God and a little less time listening to the world.