​The more I speak and teach to audiences about the impacts of our childhood experiences, the more I come to know I am talking to many people who are armored up.

Brene' Brown says, "we all grew up and experienced to varying degrees trauma, disappointment, hell - and we armored up. And at some point, that armor no longer serves us. The weight of the armor is too heavy. And it's not protecting you, it's keeping you from becoming seen and known by others."

My mission in these conversations is to help people understand why many people they engage with are difficult to engage with. It's often not because they are bad or mean or unkind people, it's often because they are wearing some pretty heavy armor.

The difficulty in that mission is that before people understand just how heavy someone else's armor is, they are often exposed to the weight of their own armor. They often come to see that someone else is difficult to connect with because they themselves are ill-equipped to connect.

Or maybe, when it comes to the armor, they are over-equipped.

I get all of that, intimately.

It's the journey I'm on.

Stripping myself of armor.

I was listening to Notre Dame head football coach Marcus Freeman talk yesterday. It was the first day of football practice. He said this team may be as close to one another as any team he's been a part of.

He went on to say: "when you have that emotional bond, that's when great things are achieved."

I don't know that we often prioritize that - emotional bonds - when it comes to achieving great things.

I don't think it's prioritized in our places of work or worship or education. I don't think it's prioritized in our relationships; friends, parenting, marriages. In fact, often times these things are built, even if unknown, on circumventing emotional bonds.

That is certainly not always the case, but there's a lot of evidence that suggests it's much too often the case.

Social media has been a great experiment on how to mass produce connections without emotional bonds. For social media owners and developers, great things have been achieved. For social media users, well I think we may be more armored up than ever.

It's often hard leading a real-life presentation and seeing people's eyes fill with tears. It's often hard to watch them walk out and get some air. It's hard because I've been there.

It's hard because, like them, I still go there some days.

But I've also been here, here in this moment, here in the knowing the beauty beneath the armor. Here in the knowing the beauty of being seen and known. Here in the knowing that great things start to happen when the armor comes off.

If you feel like your armor is getting too heavy, chances are it is. I encourage you to talk to someone. To find someone you can trust. Someone open to hearing and listening.

Maybe it's a friend or family or a counselor.

Or maybe it's a pen and paper.

And you don't have to go all in on your trauma or disappointments or hell. You don't have to start there. You can just simply say I feel like my armor is getting to heavy.

I promise you that will be a start. A start to losing weight, the kind that will stay off. The kind that will put you on a path to the kind of bonds on which great things are achieved.

Because the armor is no longer protecting you. It's not. It's keeping you from being seen and known by others.

And we are all much too beautiful to be hidden.

​I think about the paths I've taken in my life. If you think about paths as long as I have, you can quickly begin to focus on what you perceive as the wrong paths.

The "if only I'd done this or if I hadn't done that" paths....

With age and wisdom, though - and faith - I can look back and see that no matter what path I was on, God was walking beside me.

We need to know that. We NEED to have that wisdom.

Otherwise, we'll begin to believe our God loves us for the paths we choose and not out of his desire to choose us no matter what path we're on.

And we'll begin to believe our love for God is expressed by our path and not by our gratitude that God isn't condemning our paths nearly as much as we are.

I look back on some of the most wrong paths I've chosen - in my mind at least - and I see the beauty that has come from those paths. Was that because God showed up years later to make something of the wreckage, or because God was with me on that wrecked path the entire way?

I also wonder, is it possible God saw beauty along the way of that path even when I could see no one or no thing at all?

I've come to believe God isn't about path in life, he's about direction. He's about us coming to know all paths point to him when we take his hand on the path we're on.

That's hard to believe when you believe you're on the wrong path.

I encourage you today to ditch the debate you're having with yourself about wrong path or right path. I encourage you to quit beating yourself up about where you are because you're certain of where you could have been or should have been.

I encourage you to quit leaning on location and start embracing direction. That starts with knowing no matter where you are, the one who wants to lovingly direct you is right beside you.

Hand out.

Whispering.

Follow me...

It's the truth. No matter what path you're on.

Right or wrong.

​I had an opportunity to present at a community resilience conference this week. My presentation was on the science of human connection; we are designed to NEED connection.

The thing I found most interesting at this resilience conference - almost all of the speakers and presenters gave presentations centered on a common truth:

Human resilience does not happen outside of human connection.

One of the speakers, author and researcher Tim Klein, has done a lot of research around student success in higher education. Klein indicated one of the greatest predictors of student success, which he defined as students finishing college in six years with a solid sense of what they wanted to do next, was having meaningful relationships with professors or other college staff members.

The grave news of his research was over 70% of students he interviewed didn't have that.

Listening to Klein, I reflected on the truth of my own college story. It took me 11 years to get my 4-year degree. I had no clue what I wanted to do once I got it. And not one single time in that 11 years did I ever have a meaningful conversation with a professor or a staff member.

In fact, today, I couldn't begin to give you the name of any non-student connections I made in those 11 years.

I have a college degree, but I would never include that degree on my list of successes.

I also reflected on this. I know my mental health challenges started long before I got to college, but they blew up when I got there. And listening to Klein, I realized that college exposed - without me witnessing the exposure - that I was living in practical isolation.

I left the superficial popularity I experienced in high school and entered one of the loneliest worlds I would ever know. On campuses full of thousands of people, I was lost at sea.

You would think that would have pointed me toward those professors with wide open doors. But often, loneliness doesn't drive one toward connection, it increases one's need to hide from it.

Connections are built on being able to say "I have a hardship in my life." And if you've never been able to say that, no open door policy in the world makes you feel like you want to start doing it now.

Popularity is often built on being good at hiding "I have a hardship in my life." Popularity will always want to protect you from revealing hardships and challenges and secrets. It can be a best friend that way.

But hiding has an expiration date. The anxiety and depression of practical isolation becomes too much to bear.

For some that expiration comes in college. For some it comes in marriage. For some it comes in their first job or their last one. For some it comes when they become a pastor. Or a parent.

And maybe it even comes on a death bed, but the expiration date always comes.

I believe we are living in a day when those expiration dates are coming quicker and quicker, and with it comes a rise in suicides and overdoses and addictions.

I stayed drunk and blacked out and significantly numbed through most of college. As a result, I missed the most important lesson college was trying to teach me, one that would have prevented a lot of grief in my life: you can't make it through life living on the energy of superficial connection.

Eventually, even the strongest of superficial connections with alcohol won't protect you from that truth.

These conferences scare me in a way. In them you practice and experience the beauty of meaningful human connection. It's hard. In so many ways it goes against the current of the relational wiring many of us have.

It's true that we are wired to need human connection. Many of us have experienced life in a way that leaves us rewired to run from connection.

But in these spaces where you are prompted and encouraged and safely pushed into human connection, often with complete strangers, you feel like it's the last thing on earth you want to do. Yet, in the aftermath, you feel like you have just experienced the most authentic and reliable answer to all human challenges.

Research suggests it's so, the feeling you get when you escape the prison walls of social isolation confirms it.

It scares me because I know many of us don't have conferences to push us into those meaningful connections. But I want to encourage us all to push ourselves into them. I want to encourage us all to beat that expiration date on our practical isolation.

Maybe it starts with a simple text or message to a friend. Maybe it starts with a cup of coffee. But I would encourage you to start it with this question:

"I'm curious about something, do you ever feel alone?"

Chances are it's a question you've been needing to ask, and chances are really good it's a question your friend has been needing to hear.

Maybe ask that question at your next book club meeting, your next church small group, your next dinner party. All of those things have the opportunity to be superficial connections, and yet they all have an equally great opportunity to be a mass escape from practical isolation.

I know. That would take a lot of courage to go there. But I assure you that you'll receive nothing but gratitude in the aftermath.

Because we need each other even if the vast majority of us have no idea how to live a life with each other.

It's true though, now more than ever we need each other.

Open door policies are no longer enough. We have to grab a few hands and walk people in.

​Maybe we spend too much time praying for rain when the answer is a bucket.

If we're growing things: a garden or trees or flowers or a lush green yard - or a life, rain makes things easier.

Until we find ourselves standing around waiting on rain when a bucket is the answer.

Running taught me that. Getting where I want to go often requires me taking a step far more than it benefits from me standing around and waiting.

Running taught me that rain dances rarely change anything as much as taking a next step does.

In the bible in the book of Ecclesiastes, in chapter 11, we find these words:

If the clouds are full of rain,
they empty themselves on the earth,
and if a tree falls to the south or to the north,
in the place where the tree falls, there it will lie.
He who observes the wind will not sow,
and he who regards the clouds will not reap.

Yes, clouds bring rain. Winds blow over trees. But if you stand around watching and waiting for either of those things, nothing in your life is going to change.

Life can be hard. We experience droughts. But maybe what makes it hard is waiting on the rain. Well don't wait. Grab a bucket. Make your own rain.

Because we know this. Doing nothing will change nothing. We know while we're waiting on the rain to water what we need to grow, that thing we need to grow is dying a little more each day.

So what do I do?

I have no idea. All I know is in running, no finish line has ever turned out quite like I imagined. But I got to every one of them the same way. By taking a step toward them. Some days without having any idea how I'd get there, I just took a step.

And then another.

And then another.

There comes a day when you just say I'm tired of watching the clouds, I'm tired of standing around worrying about this wind. To do either is simply standing around watching life pass you by. To do either is to go on avoiding the bucket.

Some days the best thing to do - some days the ONLY thing to do if you want to grow - is grab a bucket.

Grab a bucket and start watering. And maybe dance a little while you do. Call it a new kind of rain dance.

One that eliminates the waiting.

​God doesn't bring storms into our lives to see what we're made of, he brings them to see what we make of them. And what we make of them, that's our story.

I led a training this week. It was a much smaller group than I'm used to training. The upside of the smaller group was we had more time to share our stories. And, with smaller groups, people feel safe enough to share their stories quicker than they might in larger groups.

So the stories flow...

When I say stories, I don't mean their Facebook stories.

I don't mean their tell us what you think we want to hear stories.

I don't mean the stories people tell to protect themselves from having to tell the stories they don't want to tell.

I mean THEIR stories.

I think we do people wrong by labeling stories. By categorizing good stories and bad stories. Positive stories and negative stories. I think we do people wrong when we do anything to make someone wonder if their story is one worth telling. Because I believe more than ever everyone has a story worth hearing.

When people get a chance to tell THEIR story, it is almost always a challenging story. A challenge that they've overcome. A challenge they are battling to overcome. A challenge they wish had never happened.

When given the chance to tell THEIR story, people will almost always tell a challenging story because deep inside they know that's the challenge that has most written their story.

Or is most writing it.

I love hearing their stories. Because it's in challenging stories I can most see my own story. It's in challenging stories where I can most see our common denominators.

Our greatest opportunity for unity.

Shared challenges.

When we pressure each other to tell stories that sound like we've risen above all of our challenges in life - that sound like we've risen above EACH OTHER in life - we lose all chance for unity.

We lose all chance to see ourselves in each other.

We lose all chance to make something of our shared challenges.

We lose all chance to have stories about togetherness, which leaves way too many of us lost in stories of loneliness.

Invite someone's story into your life. Not their good story. Not their happy story. Not their positive story.

Just simply invite THEIR story.

Driving.
The clouds above.
I can almost touch them.
But maybe that’s not the point.
Maybe the clouds are reaching for me.
Like life.
I’m always reaching for it.
But maybe life is reaching for me.
It would catch me.
I know it.
If I’d stop.
Pause.
And let it.
I can almost touch the clouds.
They can almost touch me. ​

​Anyone who has ever entered an endurance event of any kind knows the importance of the aid station. The further and longer the event, the more important those aid stations become.

Having run a few ultra marathons myself, I know the feeling of seeing an upcoming station. The food and hydration are a huge part of that feeling, for sure, but more than that, there's an excitement in seeing the people who greet you with both.

Last year, I had the chance to be a part of an aid station at the Georgia Jewel. Runners approached our station who'd run upwards of 75 miles. Many of them had been running for 12 hours or more.

They were ready to be aided.

It's a different feeling working on that side of the aid equation. As a runner, you approach an aid station knowing quite clearly how much you long for helpers. But until you work an aid station, you don't fully understand just how much the people there are longing to BE helpers.

Having been in a runner's shoes, I had a good idea the distresses runners were feeling as they approached our station. This only deepened my longing to ease their distresses.

I had a good idea that they indeed wanted food and drink. But often what they wanted as much was reassurance, a gentle pat on the back, a voice to remind them they aren't alone. Because the longer an event goes on, the more that event tries to convince you that you are indeed all alone.

Many of us who aren't runners can relate to this feeling. Many of us feel like life has turned into an endurance event that has no aid stations in sight. I have been there, on the trail and off.

The bible tells us in James 1:27: Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

I have wondered from time to time, why orphans and widows? Why is aiding them offered as an example of purity here?

This morning, I wonder if it's because widows and orphans, in a very acute way, understand the distress of facing a battle that feels like it will never end. And often while feeling all alone. No aid stations in sight.

This morning, I wonder if someone polluted by the world is far less capable - or interested - in seeing the distressed. I wonder if the polluted no longer see and deeply feel the value of working an aid station.

Of being a helper.

If you are feeling the least bit polluted in this way, as I assure you I at times have, I encourage you to volunteer at an aid station. I encourage you to feel the desperation of the distressed, and witness it begin to evaporate with your mere presence.

Because often that is what a widow and orphan are looking for most, a reminder that their deepest longing - human connection - is not lost forever. Your presence can be service to that reminder.

And often that is what that ultra runner is looking for.

Twenty five miles feels like a long way to go. But not nearly as long when you aren't going it alone.

We can all begin to feel like widows and orphans.

We can all make sure no one has to.