​I went to the dentist yesterday. I go once a quarter to get my teeth cleaned. Seems my mouth is really good at producing tartar - like Olympic-level good - so the healthiest way to stay on top of it is frequent maintenance.

It's a bit ironic. In my younger years (which only recently concluded, thank you very much), my dental visits were rare. So rare that each appointment required formal reintroductions. You’d be surprised how much you forget about one another over a five (or ten) year hiatus.

I'd leave those visits, no cavities or damage done, and proudly proclaim once again: "I have low-maintenance teeth."

But yesterday, as the dental assistant worked away in my mouth with a small arsenal of power tools, she said something that stuck: “I know it’s a pain in the butt, and probably more expensive than you’d like, but I think these more frequent visits are really helping you take good care of your teeth.”

Now, my half-awake, "why am I here at 8 a.m." brain was tempted to write her off: “Right. I’m sure you say that to everyone while sandblasting their gums.” But on the drive home, I started to think about it—reasonably.

Well, at least a little MORE reasonably.

I began to wonder, maybe “high-maintenance” isn’t the character flaw I’ve always made it out to be. Maybe it just means something matters enough to maintain.

Maybe maintenance is love in disguise.

Yes, I’m talking about teeth. And health. And maybe even our cars and our lawns. But I'm also thinking about relationships.

There's a frequent proclamation in the dating world: "I'm low-maintenance."

There's an equally frequent demand: "I'm looking for someone "low-maintenance."

Maybe that is where relationships start to fall apart. Not just dating relationships, but families and friendships and even professional relationships. Maybe they unravel when we treat them like we treated our teeth in our twenties. Like they don’t need tending unless there’s visible damage.

Like we can go years between visits and still expect everything to be healthy.

Maybe they start to fall apart when we grow to think we have "low-maintenance" relationships.

The truth?

Showing up can be hard. More frequent connection can feel awkward. Vulnerable. Some of us never learned how to show up at all.

But one thing I’ve learned from these quarterly dentist visits, each trip gets easier, each time showing up teaches me something new about the value of showing up.

Showing up is both emotional and skillful.

So maybe showing up doesn’t start with wanting to or even knowing how to. Maybe it starts with first realizing we need to. It starts not by asking if this is going to be "high-maintenance", but rather, do I care enough about this to maintain it?

Very little in life is as low-maintenance as we want it to be.

Especially the things we care about most.

​Yesterday, I wrote about failed marriage.

Failed marriage in a general sense.

Failed marriage in a much more personal sense.

After sharing my article, a sweet friend reached out to me and said, "I don't think you can call your marriage a failure when you have two amazing young men that are a product of that marriage."

I assured her that when I use the language "failed marriage" I am using cultural language, not mine. It is culture, not me, that quite often labels divorce a failure.

It is culture that can get obsessed with deciding what is success and what is failure, and placing those definitions upon each other in the form of expectations and burdens.

For the reality is, I know from personal experience and from stories I've heard along the way, that many people who are married are experiencing 'failures' within a the marriage.

Failure to communicate.

Failure to connect.

Failure to offer mutual respect.

Failure to know one another at all, or even desire to.

So no, limiting marital failure to divorce is a cultural reflection, not mine.

I had a conversation with an old high school friend last night. He and I hadn't talked in many decades. We were talking about the book I am finishing up - Demons Too Big To Hide: Living Life Under the Influence of Trauma.

My friend asked, "does writing a book like that make you feel a lot of regret?" I didn't hesitate to answer.

No. It does not.

Certainly regret pulls at you when writing a book like mine. Regret invites you to wish you had done things differently. But that is NEVER a possibility - to go back and do a single thing differently in life.

Therefore, regret in many ways is an evil invitation. It is always a false narrative.

I told him that I had never wanted to be a father, that my boys' mom and I committed to one another before marriage that we would never have kids.

Not ever.

Many years inside of marriage she changed her mind, and in turn, she changed mine.

This side of heaven, that changing of my mind is the greatest gift of my life. To be called dad is my most beautiful experience - I can't think of an experience that even comes close.

On top of that, the mom my boys have is a mom who wanted nothing more in this world than to be their mom. This dad who treasures his boys above all would not choose another mom for his sons.

So regret? Failure? No.

Life, all of life, it is an experience. It is much more useful for us to decide what we will do with our experiences going forward than it is to look back upon them and assign them labels.

My article yesterday was not nearly as much about assigning labels as it was about charting a path forward.

And additionally, my article yesterday was certainly not about regret. I learned too much about me in marriage that I was never going to learn outside of it.

Lessons that serve me well going forward.

Do I wish I could have learned those lessons otherwise?

No, because those kinds of wishes never come true, so what's the point of wishing them?

Life is an experience. Whether "Success" or "Failure" - the mission remains the same - grab the lessons and treasure the treasures within the experience - and keep going.

Just keep going, friends.

I​n the aftermath of my divorce, I told a pastor:

“If the church wants to get better at promoting the sanctity of marriage, it will show up more on the front end of marriages - helping two people heal enough to enter one - rather than showing up on the back end of a failing marriage, holding a piece of paper over their heads as if that alone will magically heal what’s broken.”

The former approach is fueled by support; the latter by guilt.

Maybe in that moment with the pastor the judgment I received in the aftermath of my own divorce was still too fresh.

Maybe in that moment I was reflecting on all my years in the church, where I'd heard FAR more outrage about the sin of divorce than I ever heard celebration about the beauty of marriage. And even then, most of the time, in my experience, marriage was most celebrated by acknowledging that two people had found a way to "stick it out" - kept their promise - as if that's the ultimate goal of marriage - to stick it out.

Is marriage more endurance sport than gift? Trust me, I've seen plenty of people stick it out while sticking it to each other and the people around them along the journey of sticking it out.

Maybe this all resonates with me with renewed force right now as I am finishing up my memoir and realizing just how broken I was going into my failed marriage. In so many ways, I am realizing my failure didn't come after I said "I do" - it came in thinking I was ever prepared to "do" at all.

It came in thinking that in spite of never having learned how to love myself or anyone around me, marriage would be the perfect classroom in which to figure that one out. And woe be to the marriage where two people are trying to learn the same thing at the same time; who on earth is the actual teacher in that situation?

In a recent sermon, Pastor Robert Madu said, "If you don't love you, it is impossible for you to love somebody else. Ladies and gentlemen, when are we going to understand that healthy relationships are built with two healthy individuals? Many relationship problems are actually just individual issues that we never worked on in the first place, and I got a news flash. Nobody is coming to save you. Nobody can complete you."

Madu went on to say, "maybe we should quit telling people to get married and tell people to get therapy - get whole."

As I am finishing my memoir, I am realizing just how much I believed marriage was going to be a place that would magically fix my issues, when the reality is, marriage turned out to be the place that most exposed them. I believed marriage would be the place that filled all my voids, when in reality, marriage turned out to be the place where I discovered just how painfully deep those voids were.

I think the REAL beauty of marriage is that it's supposed to expose just how powerful true love can really be. I've come to believe that true love is certainly more powerful than a promise between two people who really don't know how to love. I've come to believe that love can heal what a promise can't, for without true love, it's pretty easy for someone to dismiss a promise.

Right or wrong, that is truth.

I am not writing to diminish the value of a marriage vow, I'm just trying to identify a more successful approach to honoring it. And maybe not even for you the reader, but for me the man who clearly wants to do better by that vow should that day ever come again.

I still believe in the sanctity of marriage.

I’ve just come to believe that sanctity is something we bring to the marriage - not something we wait to learn inside of it.

Or worse, once it all falls apart.

There is no shortage of times in my life when I have called out to God in the midst of my distress. It is also truth that the times I have called out to God in my distress GREATLY outnumber the times I have turned to God in the midst of my decisions that ultimately led to the distress.

It's easy to come to believe I serve a God who really doesn't have much interest in preventing my struggles. I have so many of them, how could the truth be otherwise?

In hindsight of those struggles, the answer to that is generally pretty clear. I can't accuse God of not showing up in my struggles when I totally ignored God when I was making decisions that led to my struggles.

I can't choose my own personal guidance while ignoring God's and then turn to him in distress, wondering - God, why did you let this all go so very south.

When we trade God's thoughts for our own thoughts, that often has a cost.

When life doesn't go better because we pretend we didn't know better - well, God knows better. When God is showing up in our lives with a rescue plan, God knows better than anyone that this was a totally preventable rescue.

Preventable by US, not him.

When I give my boys instructions and they choose to follow their own impulses instead - and that doesn't work out so well - I will always be there to be part of the rescue plan, while likely reminding them that trading instructions we don't like for impulses we think we will - that has a cost.

That's not the same as I told you so.

Or maybe it is - I frequently hear God say to me - I told you so.

Not out of ego or self-value, but out of a love that wants to see us escape struggles before the struggles, not after them. Out of a love that wants us to know that his instructions aren't to deprive us but to as much as possible keep destruction outside of us.

God will always be there in our distress. But God will always long to be a part of our lives long before the distress ever arrives.

We will all have thoughts today. I have found it helpful to stop and ask God for a few of his. Trading a few of ours for a few of his can prevent a lot of struggles.

​I presented to a large group of educators earlier this week. After my presentation, a woman approached me, and with tears in her eyes she said, "you love Jesus don't you?"

This momentarily caught me off guard, mainly because I didn't mention Jesus or my faith; that's not what I was invited to speak about.

But the woman went on to tell me that she could hear it in my passion, she could feel it in my spirit.

Before every speaking and teaching engagement, and before every article I write, I do ask Jesus to do with my words what only he can do. This to honor my faith that he can do far more with the gifts he's given me than I ever can. But to be honest, I rarely think much about those requests after I've offered them.

This woman, though, she had me thinking about this a lot on my drive home. She had me pondering why her words meant so much to me. I concluded this: sometimes my outward actions and choices and even my words don't always look and sound like Jesus as much as I want them to, so it's encouraging to me, that even so, someone can sense that Jesus is indeed living in me.

It was encouraging to me that our authentic joy, passion, kindness, and humility often say more about our faith and character than our words and our declarations. Sometimes people can see what we believe without us telling them what we believe.

Her words also reminded me of the toxic influence our spirits can have on the people around us. Our bitterness, resentment, or fears for instance. These are spirits that also need no words or actions to influence people. Only these spirits offer tears of destruction and not tears that lovingly draw us toward one another.

What spirit will people encounter when they meet you today? The answer does matter.

A lot.

As I write this, I am reminded just how often people sensed Jesus' arrival before he ever arrived. His compassion, presence, and authenticity revealed God long before his sermons did.

We are called to be a light on a hill, not a bullhorn. We are light that is seen, not shouted.

I am grateful that I asked Jesus to do what only Jesus can do before I gave my talk this week. I am ever more grateful that Jesus gifted me with an immediate demonstration and answer to that request.

So I will continue to pray, maybe even more so, "May my spirit speak of love before my lips ever try."

Amen.

​Distress is a challenging situation.

Despair is a refusal to believe the situation will ever get better.

Distress is I need a drink.

Despair is the belief that how could it make things any worse.

Distress is marriage counseling.

Despair is what good could that possibly do.

Distress is I am aging.

Despair is I have nothing left to offer the world.

Distress is crying in the dark.

Despair is the belief that the light will never come back on.

Distress is I failed.

Despair is I must be a failure.

Distress is I feel lonely.

Despair is the belief no one will ever come.

Distress is I made a mistake.

Despair is there is no possible way to redeem this.

Distress says this hurts.

Despair says I deserve it.

There have been many distressful situations in my life that I've found a way to use to think myself into despair. And through those experiences, I have found it is much easier to think my way out of distress than it is to think my way out of despair.

Once you land in despair, hope is hard to find. It seems to disappear.

God is ultimately my source of hope, but I have discovered if I allow my distress to become my despair, that is where I am most likely to believe that my distressful situation is beyond even God's repair.

That is precisely why the devil is always more than willing to contribute thoughts that will help me convince myself that this temporary distress is surely a forever hurt. The devil's goal is to keep me as far away from God as possible; despair is a pretty good way of accomplishing that.

There was a day when I was really good at thanking God once he got me through something. (Often on the other side of despair). But today, in an effort to protect my distress against despair, I try to assure God in the midst of my distress that I know he's got me.

For that is the antidote to despair, believing that something greater than us will see us through our distress.

It's important to turn to that voice of something greater in the midst of distress, because there is certainly a voice longing to drag me into a place of despair.

And once you land in despair, hope is hard to find. It seems to disappear.

​I apologized to one of my son's for something the other day. In that apology I told him, you know, when I die, there may be people who will reflect on my brokenness. And I'm okay with that. I've never hid from my brokenness. But I hope you, my son, will simply remember that I never quit.

I never quit showing up willing to deal with whatever might come my way in the day ahead.

All my life I have watched a world try to master its control over the outcomes of life. To become all knowing. Because once you fully control and know the future, you are fully prepared to deal with it.

To survive it and thrive in it.

While it's true that we have certainly made some intellectual gains as a culture over my lifetime, have we really made any gains at all in being able to control the future? I mean, as an individual reading this, are you any more certain about what tomorrow will bring your way than you were thirty years ago?

I mean, REALLY certain?

I am not.

And that's okay. Because I learned long ago the secret to life isn't knowing the future but being willing to tackle with everything you have the unknowns that will inevitably come with it. Because that is the most predictable thing about the future: you really have no idea what it holds.

It is wise, certainly, to plan for the future. But it is wiser yet to grow strong and persistent enough to tackle a future that doesn't show up according to your plan.

Too often, we get set back weeks, years, even a lifetime lamenting a future that didn't show up looking the way the future was supposed to look. But the reality is, an unexpected future isn't a surprise, it is life. An unexpected future isn't a reason to quit, but an invitation to take newfound strength into a future that will NEVER arrive as expected.

I love hearing people's resilience stories. Stories of how they kept going when life tried to talk them out of it. Those are stories I can relate to. Find inspiration in.

I find those stories more useful to me than the stories of people who've created lives that come with no surprises. Because the reality is, those aren't stories at all, they are fairy tales.

Surprises don't upend life, they define it. The less we understand this, the more at risk we are for the upending.

I expect that unexpected challenges will show up in my life this week. I also expect that will make something unexpected out of them.

That is my life.

That is resilience.

​I went for a walk yesterday morning. In spite of a bazillion warnings online, I was caught off guard by the excessive heat.

(In fairness, all heat is excessive in my world 🤷‍♂️).

I came around a corner on my way back home and saw a little walking bridge in the distance that I would eventually have to cross. It looked so many miles away, but in reality, it wasn't more than 1/2 mile in front of me.

I was growing tired. Cranky. I just wanted to be done. My plan had been to walk about a mile further once I crossed that forever away bridge, but I knew my apartment was just across the street once I'd cross over it.

I started trying to talk myself into an abbreviated walk instead of sticking to the original plan. Then I heard this voice - sudden and emphatic - and it asked, "If you can't make it that far, how will you ever make it as far as you long to go?"

This voice, it seemed angry. Frustrated with me. As if losing patience, growing weary of my constant willingness to find reasons between here and there to give up on ever getting THERE.

I recently listened to someone talk about Steve Job's efforts to eliminate noise in his life. Jobs would identify three things each day that were priorities in his mission to get where he wanted to go in life. Anything that popped up unrelated to those three things, Jobs considered them noise.

The bridge yesterday - that was noise.

I finished my walk yesterday according to the ORIGINAL plan. And I spent the remainder of that walk reflecting on the noise that often stops me - and maybe you - somewhere between here and THERE.

The articles or chapters that get stopped because of writer's block on the way to the finished book, when writer's block is simply noise. It's a bridge.

I think about the dates we don't ask for or say yes to, the times we refuse to have hard conversations or apologize - all the relational noise that stands in the way of getting where we long to get in relationships.

I think about my life as a dad. Parenting is filled with moments when we second-guess ourselves, should I have handled that differently? Did I say the wrong thing? Am I messing them up? That overthinking becomes an unintimidating bridge that we insist on making intimidating.

And it slows us down or paralyzes us altogether.

I thought about all the times the bridges look so far away when they are really right in front of me. Just like that distant-looking bridge, progress often feels farthest when we're closest to reaching it. And we start questioning ourselves: Am I good enough? What if this fails?

That noise so often convinces us to pull back, to settle, to abandon what we were building. It’s not truth, it’s noise masquerading as wisdom. And unless we recognize it for what it is, we walk away right before the view would have changed.

I guess it's worth reminding myself that Steve Jobs didn't build Apple into all that Apple has become because Apple was a great idea. He built it by getting good at dismissing the noise that might have tried to convince him it wasn't.

He built it by building, not getting talked out of building.

I am thankful for that timely voice yesterday. I hope I will continue to hear it. For that voice is NOT noise, it is direction.

If you can't make it that far, how will you ever make it as far as you long to go?

​I stood behind her as she ordered her orange chicken. The nice lady behind the counter said, "that will be $17.15."

The woman pulled a wallet out of her purse, fumbled with some bills inside it, then handed them over. She told the lady behind the counter to hold on a minute, that she would find the change.

The woman dug through who knows what to get to the bottom of her purse, seemingly in no hurry, and eventually pulled out several coins. She placed them on the counter. The lady behind the counter looked confused as she picked up the change, but then looked up to the woman and kindly said, "I'm sorry, it's 50 cents - five zero - not 15."

The woman apologized and went once again to digging. It was a purse seemingly with no bottom. She eventually found the other 35 cents and placed them on the counter.

Thank you, the lady behind the counter told her.

I stepped forward. Ordered my shrimp and broccoli (and egg roll and wonton soup 🤷‍♂️). That will be $22.35, the lady behind the counter told me. I tapped my debit card against the card reader.

Thank you, she said.

In a bit or irony, I had purposely left my phone at home. We needed a little separation, my phone and I. So I sat quietly in a booth while I waited on my to go order.

I thought about what had just happened there - the past meets the present. I thought about how the only way I knew how to pay for things as a child was now in many ways an outdated way of paying for anything at all. As a child I used to celebrate the chance to hold a pile of dollar bills in my hand; now I struggle to remember the last time I held one at all.

I thought, forty years from now tapping a card against a card reader will be outdated. It will become the new way of slowing lines down. I wondered, what on earth will that look like.

I came home and asked ChatGPT about it - the official voice of the intelligence that is literally mapping this all out for us.

ChatGPT told me:

In forty years, tapping a debit card will be as dated as handing over a wrinkled dollar bill.

Maybe we won’t carry wallets at all—just a chip beneath the skin, a blink, a nod, a fingerprint scanned invisibly in motion. The transaction will be seamless—no button to press, no pause. You'll step out of the restaurant and your lunch will already be paid for.

And someone behind you—maybe younger, maybe not—will look at you strangely if you hesitate, nostalgic for the "old" days when you tapped a card or at least got a thank-you from a human being. Because in forty years, maybe there’s no one behind the counter. Just an AI interface and a robotic arm handing over your orange chicken.

When I was a child, we would fret over the possible means of human demise. What would make us, like the dinosaurs before us, extinct?

Nuclear wars?

Global pandemics?

Alien invasions?

Fireballs and mushroom clouds.....

Will there come a day when I will be standing in line, watching a robotic arm handing the woman in front of me orange chicken, while I look around and wonder - where did all the people go?

It's hard to imagine, for sure.

But then again, 40 years ago I would have had a hard time imagining the extinction of dollar bills

For a long time, I told myself I would write this book SOMEDAY. I told myself I needed more time. More clarity. More courage. More proof that it mattered. What I didn’t realize until yesterday was that sometimes what we’re really waiting for… is people.

Not because we need permission. But because the right kind of support can feel like fuel - not a pat on the back, but wind at your back.

Yesterday, I launched a campaign to raise $7,500 by September 1 to help me complete, edit, design, and publish my first book: "Demons Too Big to Hide: Living Life Under the Influence of Trauma".

By the end of yesterday - the first day of the campaign - 19 people had helped me raise nearly 20% of that goal. Additionally, and contributing just as much to the wind at my back, were all of the encouraging words of support, a giant squad of cheerleaders.

The money raised isn't just about dollars. It’s about the undeniable jolt we feel when we feel truly seen. When we feel like we have a story that matters. It’s about people saying, “We believe in this. And we believe in you.”

If you’ve ever tried to do something bold, something long put off or deeply personal, then you know how fragile confidence can be.
You know how easy it is to put your dream on a shelf, to shrink from your calling, to convince yourself that now isn’t the time.

But when people show up, even just a few - something shifts. The fog lifts. Your doubts fade. The momentum begins.

Momentum - that's it - that’s the gift I received yesterday.

To everyone who contributed, shared, or simply whispered a prayer: thank you. You didn’t just support a project, you activated a voice.
You gave permission to a project I'd kept quietly inside me for years to step into the light.

I’m still raising funds, and there’s a long road ahead to reach the $7,500 goal. But what I know this morning - with more clarity than I’ve ever known it - is that this is happening. Not because I decided it would - (although that certainly matters) - but because so many of you showed up.

If there’s something you’ve been putting off, something that matters but feels too big or too risky, I want to offer this hope:
Sometimes the confidence you’re waiting for doesn’t come from inside you. Sometimes it shows up in the faces, words, and actions of the people around you.

So if someone’s dream stirs something in you — let them know.
Your small act of belief might be the thing that helps them finally start.

Just like so many of you helped me.

You can support my campaign here:
https://www.rkcwrites.com/demons-too-big-to-hide.html