​I watched Notre Dame win the NCAA men's lacrosse championship yesterday. It was the first championship in the history of their lacrosse program.

Lacrosse outsiders looking in may have wondered where that came from. Notre Dame lacrosse can't be confused with Syracuse or Johns Hopkins or Virginia when it comes to winning championships.

It would be a mistake, though, to think it came all of a sudden.

Notre Dame's coach, Kevin Corrigan, has been the Notre Dame head coach for 35 years.

That's 12,775 days.

For 12,775 days, he's gone to work building a chance to lift up the trophy he and his team lifted after beating Duke yesterday. For 34 seasons, the end result was not a championship, but all 34 of those seasons were building toward season 35: a championship season.

I get in seasons of my life when I want something to happen all of a sudden. And because that all of a sudden thing is NOT happening all of a sudden, my life can feel incomplete. It can feel slow, or even at times like it's moving backwards.

Steven Furtick says, "in the times when it doesn't come suddenly the hand of God is holding me steadily."

I think sometimes it's helpful to recognize in the moments when life feels incomplete that God is beside us completing that moment. And building something with that moment.

All of those kids celebrating on the field yesterday, and all of their coaches - they all had paths steadily engineered to land them in a championship moment.

I know their paths were filled with moments that felt incomplete. I know their paths were filled with moments that felt like life was going nowhere. I know their paths were filled with moments when they had no idea they were building and not struggling.

Maybe you aren't in the moment you want to be in right now, but God wants to be with you in this moment. And God wants you to know that this moment is a really important building block for moments that are on the way. And God wants you to know that when your moment comes, it didn't come all of a sudden.

For our lives are not complicated by struggle, they are engineered on the foundation of it. Our lives are not delayed by the waiting, they are engineered on the foundation of it. But we don't have to wait or struggle alone.

The Engineer is with us. Holding our hand. Reminding us that all of a sudden doesn't happen all of a sudden.

It happens steadily.

​I reflected on Memorial Day on my walk this morning. A thought kept coming to me. The thought that simply remembering someone who gave their life for me isn't nearly enough. It seems like the lowest form of gratitude on the gratitude scale.

All gratitude has worth. I believe that. I also believe that some forms of gratitude can be more meaningful than other forms.

I thought, it's helpful to remember that the fallen didn't give their life for me, they gave life to me.

My guess is, clearly I have no way of knowing for sure, but I suspect that if I'd talk to one who has given their life in service to this country, they would call it a gift to me far sooner than they'd call it a personal sacrifice.

And here's the thing about receiving a gift, once you have received it, you have to decide what you're going to do with it. When one has gifted you life, you have to decide what you're going to do with that life.

Walking this morning, I thought the most meaningful form of gratitude on that gratitude scale would be to press forward with the intent of the gift. To press on with giving life to others.

Maybe when we press on with a life that's been given to us, the life given lives on in some beautiful way.

Remembering a life given is simply that - remembering.

Pressing on with that life, carrying the loving intent of the life given into new life for someone longing for it, that's remembering and honoring.

And building.

Building life upon life.

Today is a beautiful day to remember.

And decide. What shall I do with this gift that has been given to me, this gift of life?

I think the best answer is to give that life to another, and in doing so be grateful that not all of us have to give our lives to give life.

Today I am so grateful.

Today I press on with this gift of life.

​"I did not start my run until midnight after my shift and I definitely wasn’t feeling it. But I made a commitment and I’m going to do my damndest to stick to it."

My friend recently shared those words: "I definitely wasn't feeling it."

I wonder how may people are stuck living in those words. How many people are waiting for the right mood, the right feelings, the perfect life ingredients to magically fall in place before they make the move to accomplish something?

I've come to see it as a super power, this ability to look in the face of I don't feel like it - laugh - and then do what one doesn't feel like doing anyways.

Seth Godin's says, "We change our mood as a result of how we act. If you want to feel a certain way, begin by acting as if you do."

How empowering is that?

I've been on both sides of this mood thing. I've been the guy playing the victim to my moods. I've sat around waiting them out, hoping they will pass. Often they do, only to be replaced by another mood looking to hold me back.

Bad moods always seem to have more bad reinforcements.

These days, though, I am here.

I am here in this place where when I don't feel like writing - I write. Because I want to feel like a guy in the mood to write.

I am here in this place where when I don't feel like I can have relationships, I pick up the phone and call someone and have a meaningful conversation. Because I want to feel like a guy in the mood to have a relationship.

I am here in this place where when I feel like I'm too old to do things I used to do, I go run a long way because I want to feel like a guy in the mood to do things not many people my age can do.

I am here in this place where when I don't feel like doing ANYTHING that I know is going to move me forward in life, I do it anyways.

Because frankly, I've grown tired of waiting for the circumstances in my life to magically line up for me to become who I'm made to be. I'm tired of my moods standing between me and ME.

I'll tell you what I've discovered early on in this process. Moods are weak. Once you stand up to them and let them know - I'm not going to have my day dictated by you - I am not your victim - they start complying with more of your demands.

When you look the "I don't feel like it" mood straight in the eyes, and you tell it, "I made a commitment and I’m going to do my damndest to stick to it," that mood runs off like the wounded.

My advice today - if you feel a mood come over you that you don't like, start acting like the mood you want. Let the mood you don't want go victimize someone else.

Someone far more willing than you to just sit and wait for the mood to pass.

​It was a timely Ted Lasso episode last night. In a beautiful scene, Ted shares with his mom just how hard it is being a dad. His mom hugs him and tells him, "that's the thing about being a parent, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, but most of the time you just tie."

I've wrestled with being a single dad lately.

When I'm with my boys, every moment feels like a win. The challenge is when I'm not with them, which is more often than not. Those moments get to feeling like a loss.

Ted's mom reminded me last night that not being with them doesn't have to equal a loss. It might simply be a tie.

She reminded me that the victories we share in our time together carry over. The memories in the carry over may not feel as good as being in the middle of the victory moments, but they don't have to feel like a loss either.

Being a dad, or really being anything in life, we long to feel like we're winning. We long for ever present signs of victory. Or, at the very least, some reassurance that we aren't losing.

Life doesn't often comply with those longings. Life doesn't always deliver us the thrill of victory or protect us from the agony of defeat. Sometimes life quietly asks us to be okay with a tie.

Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, but most of the time you just tie.

And maybe coming to understand that is a pretty big win. That and a virtual hug from Mrs. Lasso 😊

​I watched "A Man Called Otto" last night.

In some ways it was a tough movie to watch. The main character, Otto, wrestles with suicidal ideations and attempts suicide several times in the movie. If you are someone who struggles with mental health, I encourage you to watch the movie with someone who cares about you.

But there was also a lot of hope in the movie.

Hope if we will spot it. And receive it.

Otto is wrestling with a lot of emotions. Grief and anger the two strongest. Only he's wrestling with them alone. And to make sure he gets to keep wrestling with them alone, he pushes every human being in his life as far away from him as possible.

Most of those people come to simply dismiss Otto as a grumpy old man.

Everyone but Marisol. The neighbor who moves in across the street. She almost immediately begins to sense that Otto has a hard story living beneath his hard exterior.

In a turning point in the movie - and in Otto's life - Marisol confronts Otto. It was a tough love moment that didn't look like some of the traditional ways we go about offering tough love.

Otto asked Marisol if he could borrow her phone. He'd disconnected all of his utilities and services in advance of his planned suicide. Only Marisol told him no. She told him he couldn't borrow her phone.

She said he couldn't borrow it because he wouldn't tell her why he needed it. He wouldn't tell her why he disconnected his phone. He wouldn't tell her why he wouldn't let her in the house when she was worried about him. He wouldn't tell her why she has to be worried sick about what he's going to do to himself behind the closed doors of his house.

She's telling him all of this while sobbing. And as she does, you can see Otto's grump exterior begin to melt away.

Then Otto tells her everything. He tells her about his anger and about his grief. He lets it all go.

Marisol hands him her phone. In many ways she hands him life; Otto never again considers taking his.

It was a beautiful gift she gave him, pulling back the grumpy disguise he was wearing to protect his grumpy secrets.

Marisol helped Otto discover something we all need help discovering. Grumpy people aren't grumpy people because they are grumpy people. They are often grumpy people because they are hurting people.

Grumpy on the outside often looks like losing your unborn baby in a bus crash on the inside. Grumpy on the outside often looks like losing the love of your life to cancer on the inside. But we never know that inside if we settle for what we believe about the outside.

Sometimes tough love is crying with someone and letting them know I can no longer handle this grumpy on the outside while knowing beyond a doubt it's holding hostage an unbearable pain on the inside.

Too often we are offended by grumpy. We are driven away by it. Marisol wasn't.

Marisol put off being upset by Otto's grumpy long enough to wonder who the man was beneath the grumpy.

Marisol understood we can't judge someone and offer them healing at the same time. It just doesn't work.

Maybe the most beautiful outcome of this story, in the end, wasn't what Marisol gave to Otto, it's what Otto would ultimately give to Marisol.

It's how it often works, this life thing. When we set out to bring healing to someone else, we often find ourselves the most healed.

But it always starts with curiosity.

Always.

​A growing number of headlines connect our mental health crisis to the Covid-19 pandemic.

On one hand, those headlines encourage me. There are finally conversations about the importance of mental health. On the other hand, it demonstrates how blind we've been to a crisis that was a crisis long before Covid-19 became one.

For decades, hundreds of thousands of young people and middle aged people and our elderly friends and neighbors have been waking up each and every day with a sense of impending dread and hopelessness and fear they have no idea how to escape.

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'd been feeling those things for a long time.

It doesn't mean 70,000 people didn't overdose on drugs last year - many of them trying to bury their feelings of hurt and depression and hopelessness.

Long before Covid-19 got here, more middle school and high school students than ever have been saying they seriously considered suicide last year. Here in Virginia, on a recent recent youth survey, 20% 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 in this struggle 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.

I think we're discovering there's 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 you?'

This notion has robbed people of the help and resources people get without any question when they wake up complaining of a sore throat or a swollen ankle.

People are discovering depression and anxiety aren't as simple as a bad mood or a bad day. It's like swallowing a 150 pound weight. They read a "you can do it" meme on Facebook and feel like, okay - I can do it. I can climb from this bed. And they try.

But then the weight.

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. If Jesus can rise from the dead surely we can rise from the bed.

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 carrying 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 find the help that will help.

Bob Goff says "anxiety doesn't leave a ransom note when it steals our lives." He's right, 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 someone's hand who completely gets our struggle.

This Covid 19 virus may have been novel. But the mental health crisis we're connecting to it, it is not 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 have been suffering.

And we'll extend a hand. A hand that just maybe they'll come to recognize as the hand of God.

​I was watching the final round of the PGA Championship yesterday. It's one of the major events in men's golf. The main headline was Brooks Koepka winning his fifth major championship, but it's not the only headline worth reading.

There was a relatively normal golfer in the field named Michael Block. Block is a PGA teaching pro. He's spent most of his life giving lessons to guys who have dreams of playing on the pro golf tour and not actually playing on the tour himself.

But this weekend he found himself playing in the big leagues. And, as it turns out, playing like a big leaguer.

The crowds in New York fell in love with the guy. Seems anywhere you go people are universally drawn to an underdog story.

But no crowd - no underdog story - is completely ready for the chapter that played out on the 15th hole yesterday. That's where Michael Block pulled off one of the rarest of all golf shots, especially on this stage, and that is the elusive hole-in-one.

To say the crowd went crazy doesn't begin to capture the scene of this best-seller moment. The tears in Michael Block's eyes did, though. As did the tears in mine.

At the end of the round, when asked about the moment, Block said he knows that will be forever the most surreal moment of his life.

It's easy to look at a moment like that and think luck or fate or just good timing. But that takes away from the truth of that moment. It also limits our own chances of landing in the most surreal moment of our own lives.

Although not a tour level player, Block has been hitting golf balls and practicing most of his life. He's hit that hole in one shot thousands of times; yesterday it simply found the hole on a stage he'd been walking toward for a couple of decades.

We can get lost some days dreaming of our surreal moment in life. I'm a big fan of dreams, but I also understand the value of sometimes stopping and asking myself - am I moving in the direction of that dream?

Michael Block's shot landed where he hit it yesterday. And Michael Block landed where he'd been headed yesterday.

Where are you headed today? If you know the answer, you're a lot closer to your hole-in-one moment than you think. So keep swinging.

Your moment is coming.

​One word I would use to describe the bible is storms.

In fact, I think one of the main purposes behind the bible is that that readers and believers come away embracing the reality of storms.

If you're someone who is looking to avoid storms in life, the bible is not your book. If you are someone who believes the path to joy is finding a flight pattern that goes around the storms, the bible is not your book.

The bible is a book about finding joy IN the storms, not outside of them.

At the heart of that is God's desire for joy to be discovered in relationship. In relationship with him and in relationship with one another. And think about it, when do we lean most heavily on relationships?

Not when you are driving your nice new car, but after you've crashed it.

If you read the bible, and you are reading about a character struggle, let me give it away - God's about to show up. Struggle is always a precursor to God showing up.

Which is why I believe so strongly in the bible. In my life, struggle is always a precursor to God showing up. It's been my life's pattern.

Struggle, God. Struggle, God. Struggle, God.

Lately, though, that pattern has shifted. It's a shift that's been life-changing. Because today, more than ever, I see my pattern as:

Struggle AND God.

Struggle isn't a messenger sent to tell me God is on the way. Struggle is God crying out I am here.

Struggle is not a warning sign to get ready for God. Struggle is the opportunity to cling to God.

Maybe that's because God has an important earthly lesson he wants us to take away from that. So much of our earthly unhappiness comes from hiding our struggles from one another. Trying to avoid them. When maybe we're supposed to use our struggles as an opportunity to openly cling to one another.

We will never do that if we see our struggles as the hurdle between you and me. We will never do that if we see struggles as something we have to get around on the way to you and me.

Struggles ARE you and me.

Struggles ARE me and God.

Struggles are what bind us, not divide us.

That's the biblical take, and there's an awful lot of research to suggest it's the earthly take as well.

My friend's daughter recently graduated from college. Family flew in from all over the country to celebrate together.

And then her family flew back home.

My friend told me she was standing at the airport, watching her family head in the opposite direction, when she felt an intense aching in her chest.

I think the name of that aching is love.

Dr. Curt Thompson says you can talk about love all day long, but sensing it in your body is evidence of its truth.

In my work life, I spend a lot of time in three spaces: preventing substance misuse, promoting mental health and growing awareness about the connection between adverse childhood experiences and lifelong health and wellness.

The beautiful and yet challenging thing about my work is how often I have the opportunity to talk about love. I never thought I'd find myself in a space where I'd be paid to talk about the protective and healing power of love.

It's truth, though. There is no greater predictor of our overall wellness than how deeply we sense the receiving and giving of love.

It feels beautiful to be able to teach and promote that.

The challenge?

When you spend hundreds of hours talking about and writing about the power of deeply sensing love, and at the same time realize you are someone who has rarely experienced that deep aching in the chest, that is hard.

You begin questioning a lot about yourself. I suppose at the heart of that questioning is what kind of a person doesn't deeply feel or give love?

Love - the aching kind.

I find solace in recognizing that I DO feel that kind of love every time I drop my boys off; every time I see them once again walk toward my car. It's a reminder that I'm not broken.

Full of cracks, maybe, but not broken.

But there is a conflict, of sorts, maybe even an ever present longing, when you live a life where love is far more academic than ache. When love is something you spend more time discussing than feeling.

I do feel it more these days. Love. 

For that I'm thankful.

Because more than ever, when I pass my messages on to audiences, whether it's speaking or writing, I know I'm not teaching them but rather feeling them.

Whether the audience is experiencing the aching of love or the longing to ache, I get it. And more than ever, I know the answer to so many questions we are all trying to answer is found in that ache.

It's found in soothing their longing.

It's a gift these days to journey in pursuit of that answer WITH others far more than I am trying to teach that answer TO others.

Because this answer is far more ache than lesson. It is far more heart than pen and paper and voice.

It is far more together than alone.

Because no speech or article can heal the destructiveness of alone.

But love can.

The aching kind.

​The world constantly pressures us to change.

Most of it comes from the world's desire or our own desire or a self-destructive combination of both to look more like some random corner of the world.

Because we aren't assigned a corner. We land unwittingly in the corners we live in. But those corners do become the corners shouting the loudest about who we are supposed to be.

What we are supposed to look like.

Until the corner becomes too loud.

And we explode.

We suddenly realize we can no longer live up to the demands of the corner. And in our broken bits we begin to wonder, maybe for the very first time in our lives: who am I?

Who am I is a drastically different question than who am I supposed to be.

The world has reversed the order of that discovery on us; much to the world's benefit. Because when we ask - who am I supposed to be - the world will gladly sell us things to help us look like their answer.

Until we have bought it all. And with all of the things of the world in our hands that the world has assured us would make us whole, we feel as broken as we've ever felt.

And we retreat. Inside. Where the world grows quiet and dark.

But it is in here where the beauty can happen. As unwittingly as we landed in the corners of the world we find ourselves suddenly inside the corners of us.

Someone recently reminded me that the beauty of spring requires the darkness of winter.

Rich Roll says, "Transformation demands a commitment to going inward, stripping away the layers of our crafted personalities, and deconstructing the narratives we tell ourselves about who we are and what we’re capable of."

Inside, in the darkness, we begin to strip away the personalities we have crafted to meet the demands of the world outside. We begin to deafen ourselves to the voices crying out from our corners.

Until slowly but surely we begin to emerge.

New.

Looking nothing like we are supposed to look and everything like who we are.

We no longer have a corner; we have an us.

An us emerging, together, from winter into spring. No demands, just sweet acceptance.

With nothing to sell here we are left with nothing but curiosity. We are left with nothing but one of the most beautiful questions ever asked.

Who are you?