5/31/2020 0 Comments PrivilegePRIVILEGE
I'm not sure anything ever revealed the privilege I've had in my life more than my trip to Honduras last summer. When I came back from that trip, I struggled. Much of that struggle was rooted in owning up to some basic privileges I have in my life that other people don't have. A friend shared these words yesterday. I've been thinking about them. "If I am not aware of the barriers you face, then I won't see them, much less be motivated to remove them." (Robin DiAngelo) When you step into people's barrier filled worlds that you've never stepped into before, when you see them for the first time, privilege slaps you in the face. It slaps you on one cheek and says, see the barriers here in Honduras you've had the privilege of being blind to. Then, just as you've recovered from the sting of that slap, it slaps you on the other cheek and stares at you and asks, what other barriers do people have that you have the privilege of being unaware of? Since coming back from Honduras, I've discovered one of the best measuring sticks of my own personal awareness about my privilege is my outrage. What are the things that outrage me? What barriers do I see people trying to put up in my life I feel entitled to live without? Entitled enough to make me outraged. Yesterday, the Governor of Virginia mandated that starting Friday, we all have to wear masks in public. And there was quite a bit of outrage - to put it mildly. I guess it caught me off guard a bit. Many people feel like they are entitled to not have the barrier of wearing a mask built into their lives, so the threat of that barrier angered them. And to be clear, everyone is entitled to their anger and outrage at any barrier they so choose. I just personally couldn't go there. First and foremost, I have a hard time believing a Governor who has delivered hundreds if not thousands of babies and who has served our country in the military is suddenly asking me to wear a mask because he has a plan to hurt or discomfort me. That's just my own personal logic on that one. Naive or not. But much more than that, a black man was killed in Minneapolis this week when police officers put their knees on a man's neck and kept it there even though the man said he couldn't breathe. No, all cops are not bad. But for too long, I've had the privilege of not being in a black man's shoes and the privilege of not seeing that these "incidents" happen to black men in this country with a far greater frequency than they do men privilege to be white like me. I've had the privilege of being outraged at my own barriers at the expense of not being outraged at others. I've had the privilege of being outraged at issues in my life that pale in comparison to the reality that hundreds of millions of people in this world have barriers to eating a meal today. Have barriers to medical attention while I go to physical therapy for 2 months because my back is bothering me. I've had the privilege of walking through the world without fear or anxiety or any concern whatsoever riding on the color of my skin. And you know what I personally discovered about myself when I came back from Honduras - I was using a lot of outrage about the barriers in my life to protect me from having to even take a peek over the barriers imprisoning so many other people's lives. And I went on to discover, personally, life is far more rewarding when you get busy helping people break down the very real barriers in their lives than it is being outraged at barriers I've had the privilege of believing or imagining were somehow threatening to mine.
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Times are really different. In my 56 years of living, this morning I live as worried about our country and the direction we're going as I've ever been. I say that with a hurting heart more than a fearful one.
We're dealing with an unknown virus that's taken over 100,000 lives in just a couple of months. We have more people out of work than have been out of work in decades. We have more people than ever in our history taking their own lives through suicide and drug overdoses. And across the country people are rioting and burning down cities to protest injustice. I say all the time we all have two things in common. We all hurt and we all refuse to hurt. I would argue almost every action we take in life is to deal with the hurt we've experienced or the hurt we're trying to avoid. Either way, we are all one way or another saying I refuse to hurt. I think the struggle with that reality is that for far too long we've all been consumed with our own hurt. We've all been far too busy soothing our own pain or working to avoid or delay our own hurt that we've failed to notice the rest of the universe is in the same boat. We've failied to come to understand a beautiful world isn't one without pain, a beautiful world is one that gets absorbed in the pain of others. We've failed to come to understand that healing isn't the absence of pain in my life, healing comes from the devotion to healing the pain in someone else's life. I am a Christian. I follow the teachings of Jesus. I long for his life to come fully alive inside of me. To date I've come up woefully short of living like he is. But in desiring it, I have to acknowledge the New Testament is all about Jesus going into the pain of the marginalized and the oppressed. In the end, Jesus died on a cross saying this is about me understanding your pain, your pain today and tomorrow and forever. This is not about me caught up in my own suffering. Me and you, whether we believe in Jesus or not, we've both fallen, at least to some degree, for the trap of blaming. Blaming is easy. It requires little understanding of anyone else. Blaming says this is your fault not mine. Blaming says your responsible for my pain or for your own pain or both. Blaming assigns responsibility for pain without having to express any desire or willingness to bring healing to it. Blame says I have all the answers I need about this. Blame says I'm the only one who could possibly have those answers. Blame says I'm far more interested in you being held accountable for your actions than I am in understanding and healing the hurt that may be connected to them. Well, Jesus spent his life modeling others care and not self care. The key evidence is how much time he spent understanding and not blaming. I always find it interesting that if you go through the bible, God tried getting us to love and understand one another from afar. At some point he acknowledged this distance loving thing isn't working out so well, so I'm going to go physically enter into their pain. I'm going to go physically be a part of their healing. I'm going to go pysically enter their lives to say I'm hear to tell you I understand you, I'm not here to blame you. Whether you are a Christian or not, I think there is value in that story. Because it's our story. More than any time in my life, I see us trying to dictate and judge and encourage our idea of love from a distance. Often from behind a screen. Maybe it's time to not be so distant. Maybe it's time to go enter lives, leave our own pain behind for a few minutes and ask someone to tell us about theirs. The biggest threat to us is not unemployment or a virus or looting. The threat that has me more concerned about life this morning than I think I've ever been isn't the painful things I see going on in the world. It's our thirst for assigning blame for those things at the expense of wanting to fully understand the pain beneath them all. We've become far more consumed with finding out who is responsible for all the pain instead of simply asking someone why they are hurting. Because trust me, we all are. And one way or another, we all refuse to. There's a popular Christian song out call 'surrounded.' I've heard several artists and groups sing it. I heard it while I was running yesterday. It's not a terribly complex song when it comes to the lyrics. Essentially, the song is an ongoing repetition of these words:
This is how I fight my battles. It may look like I'm surrounded but I'm surrounded by you. When I heard this song yesterday, it made me wonder. How is it that when some people are in battles, to them it looks like they are surrounded by God, which suggests they feel surrounded by power and hope and love, while other people simply feel surrounded. They feel surrounded and they feel like life is closing in on them. Why is that, I wondered. Why is it when I feel like I'm battling life these days, that song resonates with me. Why is it that I don't see a world closing in and threatening to destroy me, and instead I see a God reaching in with a loving hand and assuring me he's got me. As Christians, I think some days we feel like that perception is as simple as belief. We think that if you believe in God you instantly go from feeling suffocated and hopeless to liberated and happily ever after. I think we're guilty, sometimes, of looking at people fighting battles in a way that doesn't look so Godly to us, and we walk up on them in their battles and shake our heads and say those people need some God in their lives. And then we walk away with some level of disgust as if we weren't supposed to be that God in their lives. The battles in my life changed the day I wanted hope in my life and there was a crowd of people surrounding me saying let us show you the way. In time, I came to discover those people looked like God in my life. They didn't show up because I suddenly started believing in God. My belief in God suddenly strengthened because they showed up. One of the things I've long said after working with groups of at-risk kids who were hopeless is that a group of hopeless people can talk themselves into some destructive ideas of what moving forward looks like. They can come up with some destructive ideas to feel less surrounded. Ideas they genuinely believe will leave them feeling less suffocated in life. I learned that when you spend your whole life being abused and taken advantage of and mistreated in ways I never could have imagined, the idea of fighting your battles can begin to look a lot like the battles that have been fighting against you. I used to watch these kids, and witness their poor and destructive choices, and silently and sadly sometimes out loud I called them nothing but a bunch of thugs. Then one day I started listening to their stories. I started listening to them tell me about the battles they'd faced in life and realized they weren't nearly as much thugs as they were kids who'd spent much of their lives being thugged. I noticed when the other counselors and I started listening to them and being their allies instead of their enemies, they felt less surrounded. The way they fought their battles started looking remarkably different. I confess, it felt good to call those kids thugs. It felt like they were getting what they deserved. But that's the difference for us Christians, isn't it. When it feels like we're surrounded by God, we know we're surrounded by someone who isn't interested in giving us what we deserve, we're surrounded by someone interested in giving us what we need to feel loved and like we belong and like we're equally appreciated in this journey of life. But that God surrounding us isn't represented by a belief. That God is represented by real people surrounding us. People who understand life has already given us way more punishment than we deserve. People deeply committed to doing the hard work of listening and reaching and walking with us toward hope. People who make all the difference in what it means to feel surrounded. I hate it when Bob Goff - or anyone really with credibility - makes an assertion like "humble people pray for God to open their eyes to the pain of people around them."
I hate it because once I read an assertion like that, the world releases a force that stops me and forces me to hear a question like, "when is the last time you stopped and asked God to open your eyes to the pain of the people around you?" Tic - toc - tic - toc: I'm waiting, says the world..... I'm having a hard time answering, world. If I'm being honest, a majority of my prayers are focused on me opening God's eyes to my pain and to my world, not someone else's. There's a story in Matthew chapter 9:_______And Jesus went throughout all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom and healing every disease and every affliction. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”_______ A few thousand years ago, Jesus was begging his disciples to pray that people would open their eyes to those who were being harassed and to those who were helpless. A few thousand years ago, Jesus was saying people are too busy doing harvest in their own lives to have their minds and hearts opened to the pain of the people around them. A few thousand years ago, Jesus wanted his disciples to pray that we would all become humble enough for his compassion to become our compassion. You know what I believe. I believe as Christians we fail to pray that prayer - we fail to ask God to open our eyes to the pain of people around us - we fail to pray that, not because we don't believe Jesus, we fail to pray that because we DO believe him. Sitting here right now, if I close my eyes and get still and quiet and real serious with God, and I ask God to just one after another start putting people in front of me who are in pain - God is going to do it. Like Nike, you'd better believe he's going to just do it. If for one minute I ask God to show me the people who need compassion as fervently as I've spent hour after hour asking for God to have compassion on me, he's going to do it. I don't hesitate to pray that prayer to God because I don't believe, it's because I do. And once God answers that prayer, once he starts showing you people in pain, well then you have to respond. Or at least, if you don't, you can no longer hide behind the veil of ignorance. You no longer have the Christian privilege of pretending God wants me to stay out of this. Once you pray that, you have to ask yourself why it's mainly black people protesting in Minneapolis and not the entire collection of Christian churches. You have to ask yourself why we so forcefully demand to be allowed back in our church buildings to worship together in a pandemic instead of daring someone to stop us from spilling into the streets of Minneapolis to be with people who REALLY need us together. Once you pray that, you have to ask yourself why you don't speak out with more humility for the people who are daily hurt and harassed publicly by people who call themselves our leaders. Once you pray that, every bite of food becomes a call to feed the hungry. Once you pray that, every closet full of clothes we'll never wear becomes a call to cover the poor and the homeless. Once you pray for God to open your eyes to the pain of the people around you, once you make a commitment to that prayer, oh, you've prayed the prayer God's been waiting on you all your life to pray. Every single day. I think as Christians, if we do indeed fail to pray that prayer, it's not because we don't believe in God. It's because we absolutely do. 5/26/2020 0 Comments We Are All BecomingI thought about this idea while I was running yesterday. This idea that we are all becoming. That's tricky, though, isn't it. If I said to you this morning I'm becoming, I might be suggesting to you that there is something attractive or lovely or elegant about me.
I could also be saying, take a good look at me now, because I'm in the process of becoming something completely new by dinner time. Or at least by tomorrow. One word, two different meanings. I thought about this because yesterday I shared a story with you about a transformation that happened in my life built largely on the stories I was telling myself about me. Today, I need to add that very rarely do we wake up and change the story from "I am a thief" to "This is not who I am" without someone or many someones in our lives telling us "this is not who you are" first. We need people planting seeds of a new story in our lives before it can ever start growing in our hearts and in our minds. Too often, though, when we see someone who is acting "unbecoming" - we lose sight of the fact that they are becoming. Too often when we see people going through struggles in life, we let those struggles define them, or worse, maybe we are the ones defining them by those struggles, all the while conveniently forgetting we've been a transformation act our whole lives. The gift of my story has been that much more than before, when I see "unbecoming" people, they get the benefit of the doubt from me. More often than not, when I encounter a thief or read about a thief, I know that's not their story. I know that's a stop in the story of who they are becoming. I also know this. Who I've become has a lot to do with the stories people believed about me. I'm grateful there were people in my life who said this story you're telling yourself about being a thief, well it's a lie. And you know, yesterday, several of you reached out and said thank you. Thank you for giving me permission to be honest with the idea that I'm becoming. You said thank you for allowing me to give myself grace. You're welcome, but more importantly, thank YOU. Thank you for saying this story you're telling yourself these days, it's a good and true story. One of the most meaningful things a boss ever said to me was when I was working with at-risk kids. He said this simple thing to me: catch them doing something right. I think sometimes we see people acting unbecoming and we believe that's their story. We let THEM believe that is their story. I'd encourage you to pause - pause and reflect and ask yourself if you've ever been someone you wish you hadn't been in your life. Someone you'd never go back to being today. If so, maybe stick around in that person's life and catch them doing something right. Be the seed that let's them start telling themselves a new story. Help make their journey of becoming make them more becoming. We are all story tellers.
Not everyone comes to Facebook first thing in the morning to tell their story. Some people never share the first word of their story with anyone. In fact, more often than not, the only audience that ever gets to hear our story is ourselves. The bad and good news is we almost always believe the stories we tell ourselves. Looking back on my life, the very best and the absolute worst days of my life happened because I believed the stories I was telling myself. Many years ago I had a gambling problem. At the height of that problem I didn't have enough money to gamble so I'd borrow other people's money without them knowing it. To you that might sound like stealing. But for me, the story I was telling myself was I was a good guy simply borrowing money until the right horse won that day. Then I'd return the money after the big score and all would be good. That story almost never came true. As time went on I changed that story to one I believed was a more honest story. I changed it to 'I am a thief.' Even though that story seemed to fit the crime a little better, it wasn't any more true than the "good guy borrowing" story. It may have been a better depiction of my choices in life, but it allowed me to start believing some pretty ugly things about myself. I spent a lot of my life discovering the quickest way to ugly choices and ugly outcomes in your life is believing the ugly stories you tell yourself. On one of the darkest days of my life, literally lying in a bed in a dark basement, my life changed with this story: this is not who you are. That may not seem life altering to you, but it was a starting place for me. When you can at least recognize the story you've been telling yourself is a lie, you've taken the first step to looking for a more truthful story. That's powerful. When you believe you are a thief, you will go make choices that support that belief. You will spend your days and weeks honoring all that you've come to believe about your story. You will make sure that the props and characters in your life fit this narrative perfectly. You will make any other story in your life hard to believe. The story I eventually started telling myself was that I was made in God's image by God himself. That was my new story. And when you believe you are made in someone's image you start studying that image. You start listening to the stories other people tell themselves about this image and you start adopting some of their stories as your own. The choices I make are remarkably different when I start my day with 'I am a child of God' instead of 'I am a thief.' When you believe you were made solely to love other people, the choice to steal from them becomes a more complicated scene. Stealing from people no longer fits the plot as neatly as it used to. It makes you want to get up and storm out of the theater. Don't let me make this sound like changing the story you tell yourself is an easy thing. It is not. But this part is true - you will never change the direction of your life without changing the story you tell yourself about who you are in that life. Life doesn't always agree with you when you believe who you are is better than life is treating you. But life will ALWAYS agree with you when you believe who you are is as bad as life is treating you. One belief has you fighting every moment to make life look like who you are. One belief says who you are doesn't deserve any better. Either way, both beliefs start with the story you tell yourself about who you are. As you go into this new week after a long weekend - remember you are a story teller. We are all story tellers. In John 15, Jesus is having a conversation with his disciples. In the conversation he basically says, hey guys, if you're in this life thing with me, then we are one. There is no hierarchy here. There is no batting order. There is simply friendship. And friendship looks like this:
Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. Of course, we know shortly after, Jesus would indeed give his life for his friends. Thousands of years after the fact, I'm grateful to be considered one of those friends. Understandably, Christ giving his life for his friends is a cornerstone in the Christian narrative. Christ died and on the third day he rose again and as Christians we cling to that story for dear life. As we should. Here's the thing we miss sometimes, though. This whole "greater love has no one" idea wasn't just a so long speech that Christ offered, it was how he lived his life and regarded his friends long before the day came when he actually lived out his parting words. Whenever I have to sum up the gospel, I usually say something along the lines of Christ going town to town to demonstrate the importance of living life for others. Living for others is love. It's joy. It's the only purpose that will ever bring fulfillment. Jesus lived his life demonstrating that long before he put the exclamation point on his life. I think maybe we look at that declaration about friendship and immediately jump to wondering, would I give my life for my friends? I think the better question might be am I willing to pour myself into loving and knowing the people around me enough where that becomes a reasonable consideration. Maybe even an afterthought. Jesus went around loving people before he said I'd die for you. He spent his time loving them in spite of who they were long before he said I'll die for you in spite of who you are. Today, as we remember our military members who have lost their lives in service to others, I always think about the attitude they approached that service with more than the actual sacrifice of life. In one moment of service, they sacrificed their lives for their friends and country. But for countless minutes and hours and days and years prior to that, they lived with a willingness to do that. Every day. For the entirety of their service, they said you all are worth laying down my life for. Giving their lives for me and you, it wasn't a selfless act of courage. Giving their lives was just the exclamation point on the way they'd lived their lives for others all along. A growing number of headlines I read related to the Covid 19 health crisis in our country speak to a growing mental health crisis.
On one hand, those headlines encourage me. There are finally conversations suggesting mental health is as important as our physical health. On the other hand, it demonstrates how blind we've been to a crisis that's been snatching the life out of too many people and families long before Covid 19 showed up. Long before Covid 19 showed up, hundreds of thousands of young people and middle aged people and our elderly friends and neighbors were waking up each and every day with a sense of impending dread, a sense of hopelessness, with a fear that they are trapped. The fact that many Americans are waking up now experiencing some of this for the first time doesn't mean 50,000 people didn't take their lives by suicide last year because they were feeling those same things. It doesn't mean 70,000 people didn't overdose on drugs last year - many of them tied to feelings of hurt and depression and hopelessness. Both of these numbers are rising rapidly. Every. Single. Year. Combined, they took far more lives last year before Covid arrived than Covid itself has taken to date. Long before Covid got here, more middle school and high school students than ever have been saying they seriously considered suicide last year. Here in Virginia, on the most recent youth survey, 10% of our students said they seriously considered ending their lives last year. I'm simply saying that just because many Americans are waking up imagining how much easier life would be if they weren't here for the first time in their lives doesn't mean a whole lot of Americans haven't been waking up with that feeling for a very long time. Many Americans are discovering there is a difference between feeling down and a little nervous about life than being downright depressed and anxious. For many years, that is what has killed the mentally ill - this notion that 'well I've felt down before and I found a way to get out of bed so why can't they?' This notion has robbed people of the help and resources people who wake up and say I have a fever or a swollen ankle get. People are discovering how depression and anxiety works. It runs deeper than a bad mood or a bad day. It's like swallowing a 150 pound weight. You read a "you can do it" inspirational meme on Facebook and feel like, sure, that is all well and good and I'm ready to jump out of bed, but who is going to come take care of this weight I swallowed that has me pinned to it? I think that weight sometimes becomes 300 pounds if you're a Christian. We've painted this picture that as Christians we're immune to swallowing weights. We have God on our side so if Jesus can rise from the dead surely we're able to rise from the bed after swallowing weights. So we have Christian guilt on top of the mental illness. Well Christians, have you ever read Psalms? How many weights did David swallow? How many days did THAT guy struggle to get out of bed, crying out to God, I just can't do this God. Being a Christian doesn't mean we are immune to the pain and suffering of anxiety and depression, it just means we always have someone who gets it when a lot of the world around us doesn't. That is always the starting point to getting rid of that weight. Knowing someone knows you are buried alive under it. Knowing that because they do know it, they are going to give you a hand. They are going to tell you "I know you can do it," but not without giving you a hand or a hug or a phone number or a crane if that's what you need to help you get up and help you find the help that will help. I love that Goff says anxiety doesn't leave a ransom note when it steals our lives. Because it doesn't. It doesn't send us some demands we have to meet before it sets us free. But just because it doesn't send one doesn't mean we don't know what that note would say. It would say you need a friend. You need a friend to know you're not in a bad mood or just having a bad day - you need a friend who knows you feel trapped and buried. You need a friend who goes beyond cheer up and says let me pick you up. As Christians, we know God is always handing us his hand. It's just often harder to see it when that hand doesn't look like a friend's hand who completely gets your struggle. This Covid 19 virus - it may be novel. But the mental health crisis we're talking about that's coming with it - it is by no means novel. My hope is, though, that by calling this mental health crisis a new crisis, by sounding new alarms, we'll discover for the first time just how much some of our friends need social connection far more than social distancing. 5/21/2020 0 Comments May 21st, 2020I was out on a run the other day in a nearby neighborhood. It's a fairly new neighborhood. It has one of those model homes where people can walk in and out and get a feel for the house and what it might be like to live in that community.
I got to thinking, that's what love is really. When we love someone we open up our hearts and let someone come in and take a good look around. No, really, we say - just go explore. Look in the closets and sit on that couch and you can even go up in the attic if you want. Love says I'm not afraid of what you'll discover. Love says I trust you're going to see beauty and possibility in every corner - even in corners where most of the world wouldn't dare venture. Love sees order where everyone else sees things all out of sorts. Love trusts that once someone walks out of that model home, they are going to say "I'll take it." I think we forget that sometimes when it comes to our loving relationship with God. So much of the focus on that relationship is how much God loves us. Jesus loves us yes I know, for the bible tells me so. No matter what, we're encouraged, don't ever forget how much God loves you. Here's the other thing you shouldn't forget. God created us to love him. God created us so we could take a walk through his heart, deeply explore it, and say "I'll take it." So much is made about how much God knows about our hearts, but I think we should talk more about the secrets we discover on God's heart. I think maybe the best time to take a walk through the model home of God's heart is when we're tempted to look down on someone else's heart. When we get to a place where we're tempted to think or act unlovingly toward someone, it might be a good time to pause. Pause and say I'm going to go love God for a minute and explore the secrets of his heart. What God's heart will say is I love that person you're about to not love. I love them and I want the best for them and I need you to be the one to reveal that secret. So go reveal it. That's the beauty of love isn't it? When you discover it, when you live in it, you're suddenly more equipped to share it. 5/21/2020 0 Comments Who are we?I've come to really appreciate my mornings here. Right here.
I listened to Elizabeth Gilbert talk the other day about writing as a form of prayer and meditation. She described how her mind, in writing, escaped a lot of the noise of the world. It allowed her to connect with parts of herself she couldn't discover outside of writing. That resonated with me. I think it's helpful for us all to have that place. Maybe it's writing or drawing or walking or prayer and meditation itself. I believe we all have to have a place to discover the mystery of who we are. I think in many ways we are all walking around in this noisy life craving a moment of silence to explore the question: who am I? I would also argue, that much of the noise going on in the world is really the world asking the question: who are we? As a people, who are we and what do we stand for? Oh, it's a question that plays out in arguments and strong opinions and television commercials and often doesn't even look like a question at all. But it's a question. Don't be fooled. The world is constantly asking out loud, who are we? I think that question best gets answered when we offer each other views into who we really are as individuals. Not who we are in the noise of the day, in a world that pressures us to dress like this and talk like that, but who we are in those quiet moments of life. Who we are when we are most honestly answering that question about ourselves: who am I? I come here most mornings with the window wide open, giving you a look at the mystery of God's presence in my life. I don't do it nearly as much to make the mysteries of my life the mysteries of your life, but far more to simply encourage you to explore you own mysteries. And share them. My mysteries have been influenced most by people who share with me the answers to their question: who am I? I think people coming together, allowing each other to have windows into each other's answers, has a powerful influence on the direction the answer to 'who are we' goes. There are a lot of movements and heated opinions out there about what the answer to 'who are we' should be. They all have a meaningful place in this world. But I think we often skip over the part of looking inside each other's windows to get right to what should be happening outside of them. I think that's often because we don't stop and get quiet long enough to figure out what's inside our windows. I think the noise of the world screaming at us about who we should be as a people holds us back from exploring who we truly are as an individual. I just think it would be helpful, especially now that the weather is warming a bit, if everyone would just open their windows a bit. Let the breeze in. Let each other in. |
Robert "Keith" CartwrightI am a friend of God, a dad, a runner who never wins, but is always searching for beauty in the race. Archives
February 2025
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