​A friend told me a story yesterday about a young lady who came to her and told her she'd recently started reading her her bible. And the young lady relayed that ever since she had, her world had gotten worse and not better.

She wondered out loud to my friend if maybe this was because she'd made some mistakes along the way. Maybe the God of the bible wasn't interested in turning a story she'd messed up into a story that got better.

As my friend told me about this, I found myself thinking - I've been there. I've been there recently. Some of the things we think as a teen are things we are prone to keep thinking as an adult. It's amazing, really, how we outgrow so much yet somehow can't outgrow the echoes of our mistakes.

My friend told this young lady, "that's not how God works."

And my friend is right. I know that. I know that when God isn't turning the story of my mistakes into a story that feels like I'm beyond them, that's not a God who's lost interest in me. That's a God I've started to doubt.

A God I doubt not because I don't think God is God and can do all things God. I doubt because my mistakes tell me God isn't interested in doing for me what I know God can do for someone else.

Someone else who's made fewer mistakes.

Steven Furtick seems to say that kind of thinking doesn't make God smaller. It just means we see him too small.

The reality is the roads of every great bible hero are paved with the exact same mistakes that my road is paved with. And the greater reality is, God didn't use these heroes as a way to demonstrate the power of a new road. He used them to demonstrate what he can do with our old roads.

Because isn't that what we all struggle with most? Our old roads? How do I get anywhere new and beautiful when I'm stuck on this old road?

The answer is I can't. Not alone. And I can't if I can't handle the truth that sometimes life feels like it's getting worse before it starts getting better.

Because God teaches best in the getting worse. God teaches best when he's showing us how to navigate the old roads that haunt us. But God isn't like Siri, shouting out turn left at the light and then make a U-turn at the next intersection. God is like here's a map. Let's look at this thing and figure it out together.

Which sucks some days, because we just want to skip figuring it out and get right to life feels better. We want to pick up our bibles and experience a better story.

Right now.

But the bible is about transformation. Transforming mistakes into something better. Transformation isn't a disappearing act. It's not taking an eraser to our mistakes, it's believing God is big enough to make us ultimately grateful we didn't have an eraser.

Most days I'm there. I look at my mistakes and what God has made of them and think, thank God I didn't have an eraser.

But there are other days, I confess, when I want to open my bible and just feel better. And there are days when I do wonder if maybe my mistakes have pushed God just a little too far away and he no longer sees much use in me opening that bible at all.

And today, I'm here to tell you that is a very reasonable thought born from a very unreasonable view of God. But just because our view of God changes doesn't mean He changes.

I'm thankful for that. I'm thankful that in the moments of this is getting worse not better that it's quite possible I'm experiencing transformation. And when I am willing to see God that way - when I'm willing to widen my view - I trust that when things feel like they're getting worse, that's not always the case.

When I'm willing to hold God's hand in those moments, it is never the case.

​Someone said to me recently, "I am without a plan, feeling like I am on the right track." When she said that, her voice was full of hope and full of confidence.

How often do you hear someone say "I don't have a plan" in a way that leaves you feeling like they have their life together?

It got me wondering, do we put too much pressure on ourselves to have the perfect plan when what many of us might need is just a taste of being on the right track. Is being on the right track maybe the best place to start making the most meaningful plans?

I say that as someone who feels like he is also on the right track. In some ways that is uncomfortable; it's a brand new feeling. In some ways that is a scary feeling; I have no idea where the track is going and one of the things we all long for most in life is to know where we are going.

Maybe that's why we like plans. Maybe that's why we ignore asking ourselves if we're on the right track while we are memorizing and perfecting plans that make us feel like we're on the right track.

What I am discovering about right track - being on the right track feels like being the real you. Right track asks me more questions about who I am than about where I am going. And in so many ways, being true to yourself feels a hell of a lot better than being true to a plan.

Because the truth is - many of our plans - at least many I've had - are put in place to honor the wishes of others. To impress others. To appease others. To follow the direction we feel like the world wants us to follow and not the track that may very well be calling us from deep within.

Listen, I believe plans are good. I'm just wondering this morning if being on the right track might be the best place to be when you start making them. I'm just wondering if when we don't go to that right track place to make our plans, if our plans are what put us most at risk for getting off track.

It might be worth asking yourself this morning: "Am I on the right track?"

If the answer is no, you may need to considering ditching some real plans and pursuing the real you.

Yesterday, when I saw this picture of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, I felt something beautifully uncomfortable about it. Beautiful, because it was a scene of uninhibited feelings. Uncomfortable, because my life has been about inhibited feelings.

I saw this picture, two humans, holding hands, crying - and somewhere in me I longed to be in that picture. And yet, my mind wanted nothing to do with it.

Beautiful, yet uncomfortable.

I am sure this is the case for a lot of men. Many of us have grown up feeling much safer hiding tears, not shedding them. Many of us have grown up believing our hands are for working, not holding. And because of that, many of us go through life believing we are boldly holding it all together, when in reality, many of us are slowly falling apart.

Our mythical strength is actually our own very real self-destruction. A destruction that often takes others down with it.

I saw Federer and Nadal holding hands and crying on the world's biggest stage and wondered, who would they be afraid to cry with? Whose hand would they be afraid to hold? And how blessed are the people in their lives that the answer is likely no one?

We are created to express sorrow and pain as freely as we are created to express joy. The bible tells us God counts our tears; he keeps them in a bottle. God knows our tears tell every bit as much a story of who we are - who we long to be - as our laughter does.

Yet, we are much freer to grant one another permission to laugh than we are to grant one another permission to cry. We will laugh with anyone; we reserve tears for those who invite them. And, for many complicated reasons, many of us are much more likely to run from those invitations to cry than we are to run to them even when we get them.

Over the last few years I've experience moments where my boys cried. It's hard when your boys cry. Life feels better when we are all laughing.

But when they've cried, I've said cry. I haven't wiped their tears, I've asked for more.

Because I've had the chance to discover that when you are invited to cry - and then you cry - in many ways tears bring you to life every bit as much as laughter. I've discovered that the tears I've been holding back haven't been protecting me from life, they have actually deprived me of life.

It's a tough journey from inhibited to uninhibited.

It's a tough journey from uncomfortable to beautiful.

But it's a journey that feels worth traveling.

It's a journey we all need to be more open to inviting folks into.

​I'm pretty good at honoring God for getting me to where I am in this life. I'm a lot less good at inviting him to get me where I'm going.

Steven Furtick says, "you need God to help you fill what God helped you build."

It's so easy for me to walk into the new buildings of my life that God has helped me build and say, thank you God, I'll take it from here. It's so much easier for me to recognize God has been with me along the way than it is to have faith he will stick with me where I'm going.

Why does honoring God come so much easier to me than trusting God?

I think a lot of it has to do with living in an "I've got this culture." So much of our culture is built on grooming the power of the individual at the expense of becoming the power of the collective. We make a hero out of willpower while togetherness goes largely unnoticed.

And when we can't embrace the togetherness of the people we see, it's hard to lean on the togetherness we have in an invisible God.

Why is it so much easier for me to say "I didn't get here alone" than it is to say "I'll never get there alone"? Why is it easier for me to say "thank you God" than it is to say "I trust you God"?

I suppose it's because recognizing what God has already done in my life requires very little of me. It's hard to NOT recognize what is right in front of me. But to trust God going forward, that requires me trusting what I can't see. It requires me to surrender to God's vision and burn the myth of my own willpower.

*Note - nothing in my life needs swallowed whole by an inferno more than the myth of my own willpower.

That inferno is a work in progress. But thankfully, there IS progress. There is more of me saying fill what you've built God. There is more of me saying I see what you've done and I trust in what you are doing.

I long to get to where I invite God as much as I honor God.

Because I know, ten years from now I'll look back and see that God was with me all the while. History tells me that. So why not trust now that he already sees what I know I will surely see?

Why not trust him to fill what he's already built.

​I listened to a book on the way to Georgia last weekend. It was the perfect book to read on my way there. A book I picked out at the very last minute. I believe that wasn't an accident.

The book is called: `Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired To Connect'

At the heart of the book is this idea that the pain we feel when we experience social pain - the pain from a breakup or the pain from losing a loved one or the pain from loneliness - that pain gets processed in the same parts of our brain as the pain we feel from a broken hand.

It's interesting - and again, not coincidental in my world - that while I was in Georgia I received word that my son Ian had broken his hand playing football. When something like that happens, we can all feel our kid's pain. We've experienced our own physical pains enough to feel their physical pain.

And we feel powerless to stop it.

At some point in that, I thought to myself, I feel like there's a difference between the pain of a broken hand and the pain of loneliness or the pain of missing someone dear to me, but the brain doesn't feel that way at all.

The brain processes those pains the same.

This is important to know about each other. The brain is wired that way because we need one another. I say it all the time, life is a WE thing. As much as we need bread and water, we need one another to survive. That social pain is necessary to nudge us to find our WE.

Only that's not easy for all of us. For many reasons, we struggle to connect. We struggle to express our social grief or our feelings of social rejection or social abandonment. And we suffer on. In pain.

Maybe we will feel a little more inclined to interact with one another - connect - if we begin to imagine some of us are living with hidden pains that are as pounding and relentless as the pain of a freshly broken hand.

Only that pain - that social pain - isn't healed by a doctor. It's healed by each other.

You know, this book talked about the healing power of each other as well. When we are connected to one another in a meaningful way, the brain releases natural opioids. Pain killers. We are quite literally wired to be each other's pain killers.

I wonder how many people are turning to synthetic pain killers in this pain killer epidemic to replace that natural pain killer found in togetherness.

I needed Georgia this weekend. I needed a weekend of being with other beautiful people - connecting.

Lieberman says in his book: “In Eastern cultures, it is generally accepted that only by being sensitive to what others are thinking and doing can we successfully harmonize with one another so that we may achieve more together than we can as individuals.”

Our western culture has promoted this idea of going it alone. Independence.

We've promoted it to the point of not recognizing we aren't designed to go it alone. We've promoted it to the point that we aren't sensitive to the pain many people are living with while socially disconnected.

A hidden broken arm pain that feels like it will never be unbroken again.

Unless we enter in. Unless we harmonize. Unless we feel that natural pain killer our WE brings to one another.

I felt that in Georgia last weekend. The book I read on the way there explained why. And my hope is now that we can be more of that to one another.

Because in so many ways, we are long overdue for harmony.

Friday afternoon, when I arrived in Dalton, Georgia, I was flooded with emotions. Not to be over dramatic, but it felt like driving by the hospital in North Carolina where my first son was born. Place can be triggering. Because place is often a place holder for some of our most meaningful memories.  
 
When I sat at the Snake Creek aid station for the Georgia Jewel 35-mile race in 2018 - the place where I'd ultimately quit my first attempt at running an ultra-marathon - I had no idea just how different my life would look 4 years later in the year of 2022. I had no idea how much impact and influence that moment would have on my life. 
 
To say the Georgia Jewel has been personally pivotal – life-changing – that would be quite an understatement. I do get caught up at times trying to figure out whether I should blame or thank the Jewel for the direction my life has gone the last 4 years. I’ve decided it’s possible to at the same time thank AND blame the things we love in life.

So that’s where I stop: I love the Georgia Jewel.
 
I’m sure a lot of folks will read all of that and wonder – or maybe judge – how can someone feel such strong human emotions for an event? How can someone compare a trail race with the birth of a child? The folks who will NOT wonder and judge all of that are the folks who’ve had a relationship with the Georgia Jewel.

Because they know the race is not an event. The race is a community. A community full of people with the most beautiful kind of love.

This past weekend that community expanded for me. Until now, I’ve largely identified my Georgia Jewel community by its runners. But at this 2022 Georgia Jewel, I got to meet the volunteers – because I was one.

I decided several weeks ago not to run this year’s race. I just wasn’t prepared for it for many reasons. But one of the race directors – my dear friend Jenny Baker – suggested a different race experience for me. She suggested I come volunteer at one of the aid stations.

So, I did. And that aid station I’d volunteer at: Snake Creek.

God has a sense of humor. Or, he just has a keen sense of how to use place in the stories he wants to tell us. In the lessons he wants us to learn.  

First, I got to spend the better part of 24 hours with some very dear people. Many of them were indeed runners – runners like me who’d experienced the Georgia Jewel through the lens of running – but this weekend they were there to serve other runners.

Actually , it was fellow runners. Because that’s an important distinction when it comes to serving – we’re not serving OTHER people – we are serving FELLOW people.

One of the beautiful things about watching runners approach Snake Creek in search of nutrition and encouragement and direction this weekend – I have been there. I have approached that aid station in need of all those things.

I was comforted and loved by people when I quit there in 2018 by people who knew what it felt like to quit in that moment. I was encouraged to go on there in 2020 by folks who knew all I needed WAS their encouragement to ultimately climb Mt. Baker and finish the most meaningful physical accomplishment of my life.

I realized this weekend how important it is for us to be able to predict what others are feeling and going through in our attempts to serve. I realized what a gift it is for those who are the great predictors of such.
And I realized how those of us who aren’t so great at predicting what others are going through – maybe an answer to that is working an aid station. Volunteering. Serving. Looking into the eyes of the struggle approaching you. Holding back the urge to help while embracing the opportunity to feel – and hear – and honor the struggle coming your way. Humbly accepting it’s possible that I don’t know what you’re going through, but I want to know.

Because empathy is something we can learn. It’s something we can all get better at.

I’m so thankful to my friend Jenny for inviting me into a new place this weekend. I’m so thankful for the beautiful friends I go to serve alongside. I’m so thankful for the runners who came to be served, and for their gratitude that at the same time I was serving made it feel like I was being served in some beautiful way as well.

I’m so thankful for the entire Georgia Jewel community – the runners and the servers – you are why Dalton, Georgia is an emotional trigger in my life. I don’t know whether to thank you or blame you for that.

But I know this. I love you all. 
​

​In the book of Genesis, before Eve ate the forbidden fruit, she made the choice to engage in a conversation filled with gossip ABOUT God instead of making the choice to talk WITH God. The serpent lured Eve into a conversation that questioned God's character enough that Eve began to question God's character as well - to the point she ultimately made choices that damaged her own character.

Christians often simplify the 'fall of man' to man eating a fruit God told them not to eat. But a lot happened before that choice. And it all started with slander and gossip and man's willingness to engage in it.

It's a character fall that has continued to be man's fall in destructive ways.

What would have happened if Eve would have paused the conversation the minute the serpent started questioning God's integrity and said, "I think we need to bring God into this conversation."

She just couldn't help herself, though. Just like some days I can't. There is something seductive about talking about people who aren't right there with you. Especially when you feel the freedom to say things about them you would never say to them.

You do it enough and it starts to feel normal. And harmless.

You do it enough and pretty soon you're spending as much time talking about people as you spend talking with people. Talking about people destroys connection; talking with people cements it. In a world desperately lacking connection, that's a big difference.

I wonder what the world would look like if we only had conversations with one another that built up each other's character without drawing into question anyone else's?

I mean, what really is the purpose of talking to someone about someone else's flaws if we have no intention to ever talk to that flawed person about them?

Is it to take our attention off our own flaws?

Is it easier to confront the flaws that aren't in the room than the ones that are?

I don't know, but the more we talk down about someone who doesn't even hear us talking down about them, the more we start to instinctively look down on one another.

And like Eve, the more likely it is we start making choices that reflect us feeling down about ourselves.

Eve could have said, I don't think it's right to talk about God when he's not here.

And we can do the same.

​This is not today's first day of school picture, but today IS their first day of school.

This was 2nd and 4th - today is 8th and 10th.

We were at the gym shooting hoops last night. I watched them playing together. Looking like they were thoroughly enjoying one another.

In 2nd and 4th that enjoyment always seemed forced - like in the picture below. But today it seems real.

There are relationships that grow that way. Closer. More real. I'm incredibly thankful that is their direction.

I pray that is our direction - me and Ian - me and Elliott. That direction has not always been my relational strength, but these two have often been my source of newfound strength.

I love them for that.

Here is hoping my boys have a great year. Here is hoping your boys and girls do as well.

Some days those grades feel like they are rolling on and over like symbols on a slot machine. Faster and faster. But there is something nice about the pause that comes with a 'first day'.

The chance to see that as life goes on - life changes.

That can be a scary thing. Or it can be hope. We get to choose.

Here's to hope boys. For you and for me. For us. 

​I've come to believe the lack of world peace is not because people are at war with one another, it's actually the consequence of so many people living a war within themselves.

The more conflict we have within, the more likely it is we'll develop a need to let that conflict out. And that outlet will likely be a someone else. Demonizing one another is the tool we often grab first as we blindly go to war with our demons within.

Until we're living in a family or community or state or country or world that becomes the battlefield for internal tensions revealing themselves in external wars. And the day comes when we get so far removed from the reality of the things that disturb our insides, that we're fully convinced it's the outside world that needs fixed and not an inside world that needs healed.

It's so backwards, isn't it? Destructive. Hurting one another for causes that are rarely the cause.

And it's sad. Because this peace we are all truly longing for is a peace within. It is a healing within. It is a peace that is far more available to us than we have come to know. A peace that is far more available to us than the peace we are scripting and chasing and trying to maintain in the worlds around us.

We are chasing a peace amongst people who have long lost sight of it. Who no longer believe in it.

Nearly all religions and spiritual practices are built on the idea of quieting ourselves - finding a peace that lives within us - as the foundation for creating the peace we long for outside of us.

Prayer and meditation and mindfulness and contemplation and reflection - all practices that offer the chance for inner peace - are often ignored because to many of us, those words themselves have come to mean something other than what they are - peace.

They are often ignored at the expense of us chasing our own methods of peace, that many times start to resemble war.

In many ways, it's the same reason that counseling and therapy and vulnerable connections with friends and family and pastors are ignored. The minute we start addressing the demons within us is the minute we begin to see the demons around us aren't our demons at all.

They aren't our fight. They aren't our path to peace....

We are our own path to peace. We are the navigators of the inside out process that long ago got redefined as the other way around.

But it CAN be turned around again. It can be made right. It starts with quieting the noise within that so often hides itself in the noise outside of us. Noise we yell louder and louder to quiet.

Only to have the noise go on. And on.

The peace you're searching for is right there. Inside you. It's a peace that is found in the quiet corners of your mind and your heart and your soul and in your body.

The world peace we are longing for will never be found fighting wars outside of us. It can only be found healing the wars within.

Peace starts with knowing that. Then turning around. And fighting for the right cause.

That cause is you.

Don't neglect it. 

​One of the very first things God decided about us is that it's not good for us to be alone. In the book of Genesis, God settles Adam - the first human - in a beautiful garden. But then he said that wasn't enough, that as beautiful as that garden of Eden was, it wasn't good for Adam to be there alone.

So, he created Eve.

He created a relationship as the answer to it is not good for us to be alone.

Dr. Curt Thompson says that newborns come into the world looking for someone who has been looking for them.

I have a picture of my oldest son Elliott taken the day he was born. I call it my baby Elliott picture in presentations I do. In the picture, Elliott is about 12 hours old. He's in an incubator in a NICU, and I have come to see him for the very first time.

My hand is reaching inside the incubator, Elliott's eyes are fixed on me with a stare that looks like it might never be broken. For years I struggled to find the words to describe that moment. These days, though, I say it's a picture of Elliott finding someone who had absolutely been looking for him.

I believe God created those incubator moments because that's what God wants our experience to be with him. Us finding God - us seeing God's face shining upon us - and feeling like we found someone who has been forever looking for us.

A serpent came along in the garden of that first human relationship and convinced it that joy isn't found in one another - or in the face of God - it's found in knowing all there is to know about life and not in the experience of togetherness.

We've been chasing joy outside of togetherness ever since.

It's a toxic pursuit, because we were created for joy. Nothing else. Created to experience joy and created to sow joy's seeds. To experience joy in the faces around us that say, "I am so excited to see you; I've been waiting."

Sown from the seeds of our faces that gift that same excitement to someone else.

The serpent convinced Adam and Eve that joy could much easier be found in an apple than it could be found in one another. The serpent convinced Adam and Eve that the God who created them to find joy in Him - through our connections to one another - was actually hiding the TRUE source of joy in a tree.

Adam and Eve believed that lie. It's hard to be too critical of them for that, because it's a lie we believe too.

We come into the world newborns looking for a world that is excited to see us. And we wake up every day - born once again - looking to find it one more time. Too many of us don't find it.

That, more than anything, is at the heart of a loneliness epidemic. It's at the heart of a hurting epidemic and at the heart of all the obsessions and abuses and addictions people are turning to in an attempt to sooth that hurt.

What an eternal success story for a serpent who was hell bent on turning us away from a life of joy and toward a life of hell. What a success story for a serpent who needed us to crave truth more than we crave each other.

But the serpent doesn't have to win.

It is never too late to turn away from him, and then toward one another, and wear the face that says oh how I've been waiting to see you - you are looking at the one who has been looking for you.

We can do that for one another - today. In our own homes and in our own communities. In our own gardens.

Maybe you didn't wake up this morning feeling like the world is excited to see you. I get it. Maybe a good first step in changing that before tomorrow morning is showing someone a face today that says, "I'm excited to see you."

Leo Tolstoy says, “Just as one candle lights another and can light thousands of other candles, so one heart illuminates another heart and can illuminate thousands of other hearts.”

Light a candle today. It's what we were created for.

May God be gracious to us and let his face shine upon us - like a candle. And might it begin with us being equally gracious with one another.