​I recently met with a group of 22 leaders. We were talking about practical things they could do to help remind themselves that they matter. One suggestion was pretty simple: invest in relationships.

I asked them, with a show of hands, tell me how many of you feel like you do a good job with this?

No one raised their hand.

I assumed it was too late in the day. The energy in the room was draining. But I pressed. "Is this really true, no one in here really feels like they do a good job investing in relationships?"

I didn't ask to shame; most days I'm quick to own that I myself don't do a great job investing in connection. But I was surprised to find it so prevalent among such a large group.

As we talked about it, the reasons began to surface.

"I'm tired."

"It takes too much energy, and I don't have much to spare."

"I don't feel like people will reciprocate my energy."

"I always get burned in relationships."

All answers that resonated with me. The reality is, relationships ARE work. And in the midst of a loneliness epidemic, I'm not sure if we've come to think relationships SHOULD NOT BE such hard work—that our relationships should somehow take care of themselves—or if we've simply decided they are not at all WORTH the work.

Research tells us that relationships are among the strongest predictors of happiness, resilience, physical health, and even longevity. So, I think it's pretty important to figure out where our chronic disconnection is coming from.

I told the group that I'd spent much of the past year researching and talking about "mattering." I've discovered that investing in relationships doesn't just remind other people that they matter to us, it reminds us that WE matter. And like I've said often lately, if we feel like we matter, the things we do and the places we'll go will likely matter more to us.

Before we closed our time together, I asked the group to write down one relationship they'd commit to investing in over the next two weeks. Maybe give someone a call, meet them for coffee, go for a walk, write them a thank you note. It doesn't have to be an all-in kind of investment, just a step toward connection.

Maybe a step you've been hesitant to take.

Now, it's not like I'm a teacher and will be grading their homework two weeks from now. Chances are I'll never know if they will follow through on what they wrote down. I just hope they will.

But I did write my own personal relationship assignment down.

I will know if I follow through.

I will know if I care enough about me to invest in the thing that probably means as much to my well-being as anything:

Relationships.

​I was driving home from southwest Virginia yesterday. I looked over to my left and saw a beautiful scene. A train rolling along the tracks against the backdrop of the mountains. And then, a most unexpected surprise.

A caboose.

Whatever happened to the caboose, I thought?

It's amazing how ever present something can feel, only to be caught off guard many decades later by its disappearance.

I remember being a young kid playing in my great aunt's back yard. The yard backed up against a train track. I remember running to the edge of that track every time I heard a train coming, my excitement driven entirely by my desire to see the caboose. Because there always was one.

Sometimes—not always—a conductor or crew member would wave out a window or even step out on the back deck of the caboose to return one. There was something magical about it. I'm sure in those moments I dreamed of being a train conductor or crew member one day, if only to ride in one of those cabooses.

Of course, in the 1980s, the railroads began phasing out the caboose and replacing it with electronic devices that were placed on the last car to help track and manage potential mechanical issues. I'm sure today the technology has made even those devices extinct.

That caboose moment yesterday was a giant reminder that change is slow—but then change is all of a sudden. I felt the all of a sudden watching that caboose cling to the back of the train like the train's long lost friend.

I watched it disappear like it was MY long lost friend.

I couldn't help but wonder as I drove on: what our world today is a future long lost friend. What do I treasure today that will slowly change until it one day feels gone all of a sudden?

Because we never know when today's wave is tomorrow's relic.

Would we would treasure the future relics more if we did??

I don't know.

It's hard for me to imagine being any more excited than I was as that child waiting patiently (and not so patiently) for the last car on the train—my wave locked and loaded. And there is also this, if the caboose had indeed lasted forever, I'm sure my brief encounter with one yesterday wouldn't have felt nearly as beautiful.

We have memories for many reasons, I guess. Maybe one of them is to remind us that things disappear, but they are never truly gone.

It was good seeing you yesterday, Caboose. I've missed you my friend. I hope our paths will cross again soon.

​The things people will praise us for are not always the same things that God will praise us for. And if you're someone who aims to receive the praise of God, that's important to meditate on.

We live in a time when it is easier than ever to seek the approval of people. This very site is willing to pay you if enough people respond to your content.

There's nothing wrong with that. I think people should be able to make money with their messages. But the more one gets paid because people like their messages, the more inclined one can become to create messages they know people will like.

If you're anything like me, and you feel called to put messages into the world that honor God, you eventually discover a quiet competition taking place inside you. It's a competition between the praise of people and the praise of God. And again, the problem is, the things people applaud are not always the same things God delights in.

I believe, to some degree, we all crave praise. We crave to be seen and known and valued. It is written into our being from the moment of birth, when we fight with all our baby might to be accepted by those around us.

It is a fight we never truly relinquish.

For those of us who believe in God, we are asked to find God's praise sufficient. We are asked to find it more than enough to know that God sees us and knows us and values us. We are asked to know this because it protects us from becoming addicted to the praise of man.

But you know what? Personally, I find that difficult. Because the approval of people can sometimes feel more real than the approval of God. And in the moments when I'm just not feeling God's high fives, I can always do something to gain man's high five. Which can make the high fives of man very seductive.

Of course, none of this is challenging if you crave no one's praise more than another's. Praise is simply praise.

But me personally, I long most to receive the praise of God in my life. Which requires me to constantly ask, "I hear the approval of man in this, but do I hear the approval of God?"

And when the answer is no, I must ask, "Am I willing to abandon the approval of man—and all that comes with that approval—to hear the approval of God?"

Those are tough questions to answer, especially living in a day when the approval of man can come with great benefits—to include power and money and fame. But for one like me, seeking to hear the praise of God, they are questions that can not go unasked.

Or unanswered.

"For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God?... If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ."
— Galatians 1:10

​Peter Diamandis is a futurist with degrees from both MIT and Harvard, and he has spent the past two decades telling us that AI is going to help us live forever.

Well—maybe not forever—but certainly for much longer than we live now.

Diamandis recently declared that it's never been more critical to stay alive for ten more years. If you can survive the next ten years, he suggests, then it's possible you'll gain an extra 50 years of life expectancy.

Upon hearing that, I quickly did the math. So, if I can somehow make it to 72, I'll have a pretty good chance of making it to 122?

I suppose some might do that math and celebrate. But honestly, celebration wasn't my initial response.

I found myself wondering, if given the choice between living to 72 or 122, which would I choose? Maybe because I've already lived long enough to know that one's age is a relatively poor measure of a life.

AI, and technology in general, is already turning the world into a something that is unrecognizable to me compared to the days of my youth when I actually assumed I'd live forever. Now that I'm here, forever looks much different.

I wonder, is it even possible to imagine what the year 2086 will look like? Will 2086 just be a place of deeper longing for 1986?

If I lived an extra fifty years, would my life have more meaning—more purpose—or would the work I do and love be swallowed whole by the algorithms and robots?

And suffering. The last decade I have navigated the burdens of divorce, family estrangements, and other deep losses. Would extended life mean deeper and more extended burdens? Would the joys and sorrows of life simply fall into an even greater imbalance?

The last several years, I've come to accept the finish line of my life is well in view. And—I've committed to finishing well. Finding a late sprint of sorts. But if the finish line moves fifty years into the unknown, does that change what finishing well looks like? Does it change the nature of the race?

I also wonder, this extended life, will everyone have access to it? Or will this longevity escape velocity accelerate the velocity of inequalities that already exist around the world when it comes to matters of life and death?

I don't know the answer to any of the questions above. Much of my writing is wrestling out loud with questions more than it is answering them.

I guess I am just grateful that I have reached a point in my life where I don't see death as an enemy. I have reached a point where I am far more concerned with how my story ends more than I am with when it ends.

I have reached a point where a promise of more birthdays isn't a promise that gets me excited. Don't get me wrong, the possibility of extended life isn't in and of itself a bad thing. But, I have seen people get so excited about the idea of living longer that they forget to get excited about the things well worth living for today.

Dreaming of more tomorrows can be a hurdle to making dreams come true today.

Age is a number. And that number is rarely the whole story.

In fact, when we try to make age the main character in our story, that is often when our story fails to come alive.

Maybe even when it starts to become robotic.

​Not everyone is a fan of LSU's football coach, Lane Kiffin. He's made his fair share of blunders over the years to collect a hater or two along the way.

I wouldn't describe myself as a Kiffin hater—or a fan—but I have appreciated the way Kiffin has grown over the years. I appreciate it, maybe, because I relate to his pattern of self-destruction often followed by self-growth.

At his recent SEC media days press conference, Kiffin offered remarks about leaving social media. His son challenged him to quit social platforms because he thought his dad was spending too much time there.

Kiffin compared his decision to abstain from social media to his decision to abstain from alcohol and leaving toxic relationships.

He said, "I think as I look back over my life, one of the things that has been great is subtracting things as you get older. I think that's a big part of growth. If you really want to keep growing, a lot of people add things as they go versus subtracting things that are issues."

It's true. Many of us stay stuck because when we start dreaming of our better selves, we usually start with things we need to add, acquire, or achieve—and not the things we need to let go of.

We want to do addition when the formula calls for subtraction.

Listen, hand held high here. The reason Kiffin's words speak so pointedly to me is because I've been the king of choosing addition over subtraction. There have been—and remain—areas in my life where I full well know subtraction would equal addition.

So why not simply subtract?

Because subtraction is often a helluva lot harder than addition. It's much easier to imagine that adding something to my life will erase the need to subtract the things I can't or don't want to let go of. So when Kiffin says he began abstaining from alcohol, or social media, or leaving behind toxic relationships—I don't need to be his fan to admire the work.

My son told me recently how brutal calculus was this past school year, and I am thinking, it can't be as hard as subtraction!!

I abused alcohol for 25 years of my life. And there were very few days of that time when somewhere inside me, even if deep inside, I always knew drinking alcohol the way I did was a bad idea for me.

I always knew subtracting it would add value to my life. And yet, I continued on.

So, this is not an article to suggest you just start subtracting things. Because I may be the worst writer in the world to tell you how on earth to do that. At least easily do that.

But it is an article to encourage you to start thinking about the things in life, that if they went missing, it wouldn't be such a bad thing.

I want to encourage you to consider, that if you are one who spends a lot of time thinking about what you need to add to make life better, force yourself to pause and consider how much better life might be if some things you already have—to include habits and obsessions—weren't there.

Sometimes we can get to believing that solving the challenges in our live requires complex calculus.

Sometimes, maybe.

But often, it boils down to simple elementary school subtraction.

Sometimes: Life minus one area of life equals a much healthier version of that life.

​Jim Abbott recently received the Jimmy V Award, presented to a sports figure who overcame incredible odds to achieve success.

Abbott was born without a right hand, but managed to play major league baseball. In fact, in 1993, he pitched a no-hitter while playing for the New York Yankees. He also won an Olympic gold medal with Team USA in 1988.

During his acceptance speech, Abbott said, "Overcoming obstacles on the mound was my way of showing what is possible when you refuse to give up."

There have been many days the last several years when I've had no idea what the next best step to take in my life was, but I've kept this mantra stashed away for just such days:

"I refuse to stop taking a next step."

Confusion about what to do next will never stop us from getting where we want to go nearly as fast as quitting will.

I learned that in my ultramarathon running days. There were many times when I lost complete sight of the finish line; I had no clue how, in my current condition, I would ever get there. But I did know how to take one more step.

I wasn't completely sure how to get to the end of the race, but I always knew how to get to the end of one more step.

I've experienced it in writing a book. There are days I have no idea how to finish up this project. But more than two decades of writing have taught me plenty about how to refuse to quit writing.

May people forget, when Abbott threw his no-hitter against the Cleveland Indians in 1993, just six days earlier that very same Indians team had rocked him. He gave up 10 hits and 7 runs in just 3 innings to them.

Many wondered if he was done.

Abbott didn't wonder. Abbott had long ago mastered the art of refusing to quit.

Maybe you have dreams today. Goals. A vision of where you want to go. And yet, the journey feels slow. Impossible. Like, what's the point?

Well, as I have learned, often through quite painful lessons, sometimes the point is to teach you the value of refusing to quit. Because it turns out there are indeed a lot of valuable answers in life, but maybe none more important than this one.

Question: What on earth do I do now?

Answer: Refuse to quit.

When you run out of ideas for what's next, start with the one thing you know how to do.

Refuse to quit.

​I previously wrote about the book Theo of Golden and how it touched my life. Many others have done the same. And I love that even now, people are still describing their own relationship with the book.

Oprah Winfrey recently hosted Allen Levi—author of Theo of Golden—on The Oprah Podcast. As part of their conversation, she invited musician Walker Hayes to share his thoughts on the book. He too shared that the book touched him in a powerful way.

He said, "Theo to me is an adopter, kind of like God is. And it made me want to adopt every single person I meet."

My beliefs about God say this is true, that God has indeed adopted us all. No matter our size, shape, color, flaws, or insecurities—God looks at each of us and proudly declares, oh how I want you to be my child.

It is also true that in the book—Theo of Golden, the main character, Theo, lives a life committed to adopting people. And in many cases, people others might not be as willing to adopt.

What I find myself wondering this morning, after listening to this conversation between Allen Levi and Oprah and Walker Hayes, is how freely do I long to adopt every single person I meet?

How unconditionally?

For it is one thing to call myself an adopter, it is quite another to actually adopt.

It is one thing to adopt the adoptable, it is quite another to show up at a park bench, day after day, to celebrate strangers who often bring with them lives full of hurts and brokenness.

God's greatest call on my life is to adopt all.

This fictional character, Theo, lived out this call in Theo of Golden as faithful as anyone I've read about or witnessed in a very long time.

And it has me wrestling this morning with some heart and soul troubling questions:

Am I an adopter?

And is there anything in my life I need to strive to better be?

​Sunday, Ryan Fox won the last golf major of the year, The Open Championship. In the aftermath of his win, little was talked about more than his fast approach to the game.

If you've watched much golf—and I have—you know golfers can be quirky with their shot routines. They have practice swings. Shot visualization. Club wobbles and wiggles over and behind the ball. Long discussions with their caddy. Approach the ball, then back away from it again. So much routine that this fan has been caught many times shouting—even if only in my head—just hit the doggone ball already!!

But no such need for that when it comes to Fox.

Fox takes a look at the shot at hand, grabs a club, hits the ball, then he's off to the next shot. His pre-shot routine: look and swing.

The approach is so unusual that most post-championship interviews began with questions about his quick pace. To which Fox responded, "The less time I have to think about it, the less bad stuff can creep in there."

Maybe it was a subtle way of suggesting his fellow players, and maybe even you and me, are prone to overthinking things.

I think about my writing. For many years it was a slow process. I thought about every word I wrote. And then, when every word was finally on the paper, I'd think about them again. Delete some. Change some. An hour later there'd be a paragraph that worked me to near exhaustion to get on paper.

Writing was a miserable experience for me.

Then one day I read some great advice from a famous writer. He said, "Just write."

Quit filtering every word through grammar and punctuation rules, put the thesaurus away, quit trying to come up with the smartest words and simply use YOUR words—quit trying to perfect the story and just tell it!

That advice was life changing when it came to my writing. Because today I just write, and I love doing it.

Options are nice. In golf it's nice to have different clubs to choose from; in writing it's nice to have a lot of words and sentence structures at your disposal.

But at some point, options become paralyzing.

At some point, we can get so overwhelmed trying to figure out the perfect way to do something that we can begin to have serious doubts about everything we're doing. Too many options can make us less committed to the one we eventually go with.

Fox's approach is make a choice, execute it, live with the consequences. No second guessing.

It begs a question of all of us, I think—what stands in our way of success more in the spaces where we long to be successful:

Not enough thinking, or way too much?

If you have to spend too much time thinking about the answer, well, you may very well have your answer....

Don't overthink it.

Swing.

Go. 

​I have recently gone a new direction in my professional life. It's a direction I felt God calling me to go. But there are times when I make this new direction complicated. Very complicated.

Mostly—when I start asking God to give me directions to places he's called someone else to go and not me.

I recently heard Steven Furtick say, "I want to give God the destination and then let him give me the directions because that's what I do on my maps app."

That one hit home.

We live in a world where it's easier than ever to input an end game in life and then have a computer reveal precise instructions on how to get there. This can lead us to wonder why I can't hear God's instructions so precisely.

Well, turns out if our end game is an end game that is someone else's calling and not our own, God isn't much enthused about giving us those directions.

As I've embarked on my community speaking and training and educating journey, it's easy for me to look around at 'more prominent' folks doing this work and start asking God to give me directions to do THEIR work.

Too often we see something others are doing that we'd like to do and we start interpreting that as OUR calling. Then, we get frustrated with God because he's not showing us the way toward a calling that was never his calling on our life at all.

Over the last decade, God has been very intentional about putting people and situations in my life that have made it clear what I'm supposed to be speaking and writing about. Experiences that have made it clear the kind of settings I'm supposed to be teaching in. Only when I start looking around and seeing what others are doing do I start questioning if God has given me enough guidance to do what I'm called to do.

When I find myself longing to go places without ever asking God if that is where he's called me to go, I am at risk for wanting directions to my desires and not God's calling.

When I find myself more obsessed with destination than guidance, I am at risk for placing my desires over God's calling.

It's really quite easy to evaluate, at least for me.

The visions I have in my life, are they visions I am trying to plant in God or visions God has planted in me?

And–do I spend more time talking to God about where I want to go or more time in silence giving God a chance to point me to where he wants me to go?

Those questions lead to convicting answers for me.

But at the same time—they point me to a better place where I can better hear God's perfect directions.

Where I can hear God's call and not someone else's.