​A friend once told me a story about crossing paths with a stranger who was in obvious distress. She asked the stranger, "is there anything I can do to help you?"

The stranger responded, "would you please just tell me everything is going to be OK."

The woman didn't want to tell the stranger everything was going to be OK. How could she know that? But it was clear how badly the stranger wanted to hear those words, so she said them.

Everything is going to be OK.

And for at least a moment, the stranger looked like she believed it.

For a moment, the stranger was sure enough about her circumstances to stand firm in them. Because she, like us, simply wanted to feel sure about a circumstance that was overwhelming her with uncertainty.

If you think about it, that's what we're all in pursuit of one way or another, assurance that the story we're in is going to end OK.

Steven Furtick says, "faith is the willingness to abide in a place you don't fully understand the ramifications of."

The bible defines the word abide as 'continuing to be sure or firm.'

I would say it like this: faith is being sure that no matter how unsure you are about it, the story you are in is going to work out OK.

I frequently find myself in places I don't fully understand the ramifications of. Yet, more than ever, I stand firm. I stand with the assurance offered in the book of John in the bible.

Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.

There's a lot of truth there when I measure those words against my life. I spent large chunks of my life putting my assurances in things of this world, desperately begging the world to tell me and make me feel like everything was going to be OK.

But as I bounced from assurance to assurance, person to person, destructive habit to destructive habit, self help book to self help book, the assurances were all fleeting.

None of them allowed me to stand firm.

Through all the bouncing, though, I heard a silent and nagging calling inside me, find your assurance in me.

Abide in me....

I am in a place these days I don't fully understand the ramifications of. Only, I no longer need to know them.

I live with the assurance that as long as this branch stays connected to the vine, I will bear fruit. And for a branch that's tried aimlessly connecting to a lot of different trees in life, only to walk away fruitless, that's all the assurance I need.

It's hard to find assurance in mystery, but I've found that's the surest place to find it.

It's where I discovered the power of faith.

A faith that willingness recognizes I don't, won't, and can't have all the answers, but I can stay connected to the one who does.

​I woke up Thursday morning in southwest Virginia to pouring rain. Weather bulletins were blaring from my phone and on the television in the hotel dining area. For the safety of everyone, I shortened our training and sent everyone home. Little did I know as we drove away just how much worse was yet to come.

Many of you have seen my pictures of my stays in Damascus, Virginia at my friend Stacy's quaint little home there. By Friday night, Damascus was under water. Bridges washed out and homes swept away. Thankfully, my friend Stacy's house was relatively spared and she is safe, but many were not so fortunate.

I have joked for years that southwest Virginia is my home away from home. I have begged everyone down there to adopt me as their own.

Many of them certainly have.

This weekend, though, as the images from that area filled my scrolling, I realized I haven't been joking about that area being my home away from home. Maybe it is more home than home away from home the way my heart has hurt for the people there.

My friend Stacy wrote this about her love affair with Damascus. It speaks to me. She said:

"The history of my love story with Damascus, VA started almost a decade ago when I first arrived there to run a Yeti ultra. There was something about the way the mountains and gently rolling Laurel Creek hugged the town that felt special. Magical even, the town just has an energy that beckons people to stay in its isolated embrace. I immediately knew Damascus was an important part of my life story."

Southwest Virginia, and especially inside the "isolated embraces" of Damascus and Abingdon, has helped heal me when I've needed it most.

I have listened to a song on repeat this weekend, Still Waters by Leanna Crawford. These words, inspired by Psalm 23, have moved me:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want
He leads me by still waters ‘til my fears are gone
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
O I know You are with me
My father, my friend
Your goodness and mercy will follow me all of my days
I know by Your still waters I’m safe

These words speak of a calm that feels distant in the midst of disaster but is never truly gone. Even in the valley of death’s shadow, even in the floodwaters that cover Damascus.

In moments like these, we are reminded that still waters do not always appear as we expect them to. They are not always the quiet streams or calm rivers we walk beside on sunny days. Sometimes, stillness is found within the heart during the storm.

It is found in each other.

Stacy said about touring the streets of Damascus, "My heart broke house by house, block by block. But people were out in the streets beginning to clean up what could be salvaged which sparks hope and is a testament to the resiliency of our mountain town."

I am reminded that Jesus took a nap as his disciples panicked in the storm. What on earth is up with this guy, they surely wondered.

Jesus knew, that even in the storm, a still and steady father was holding him in his isolated embrace. Oh how I pray my friends who have suffered such great loss will get lost in that embrace.

Oh how I pray that still waters return with unimaginable beauty.

I am reminded that I wrote earlier this week about the lessons found in the opposites. I don't know what lessons will be found in gentle streams turned destructive torrents. I simply know that lessons are there. I know they start and end with knowing,

You are with me
My father, my friend

Love and prayers and all the isolated embraces I can offer to my friends in southwest VA. 

​Somewhere along the way my "I miss you" wires got short-circuited. Like, it was very easy for people to disappear from my life largely unnoticed.

And visa versa.

I never really considered that there might be some part of me that was broken. I guess I always just thought I was cold. Distant. Unattached. All of which sounds much healthier I suppose than broken, even if not completely healthy.

All of that changed, though, when my sons came along.

I was driving home Thursday afternoon in the pouring rain. It had been a long week. Home sounded inviting.

Refuge.

But what sounded most inviting was knowing Elliott would be coming over to watch Thursday night football. I had missed him since I was with both of them the previous weekend.

My weekend.

Divorce gives you plenty of options when it comes to grieving, but without question my greatest divorce grief has been missing my boys when I'm not with them. When it is not my weekend.

But what an unexpected gift in the grief. I miss them. I can say that. And feel it. And some feelings may be hard to feel but at the same time they are quite the gift to be able to feel. Because it turns out we don't miss people, their names or their roles in our lives or their titles, but rather we miss the kind of love we experienced in our connection to them that makes it very difficult to live without when it disappears.

That is a gift.

I didn't go into marriage wanting kids. Or divorce. I got both. It is quite often the unwanted things in my life I learn the most from. The things that become my greatest gifts.

I attribute that to God in my life. A God who longs for me to miss him so deeply that I will go searching for his presence even in the unwanted.

National Sons Day. I will never miss the chance to celebrate this day. For it is this day, really, that recognizes the chance I was given to miss anything at all.

Missing. It's a gift. 

​Life is a journey of opposites.

Joy and sorrow.

Strength and vulnerability.

Success and failure.

Light and dark.

Courage and fear.

Peace and chaos.

Giving and receiving.

You get the picture. We always seem to be swinging from one end of an opposite to the other. And if we're not careful, life can become all about getting to one end while doing everything we can to prevent falling into the other end.

It can become about finding joy while doing everything we can to deny sorry.

Some time ago, a friend reminded me when I was complaining about a 'dark' day that I would never appreciate and make the most out of my 'light' days if I never experienced the dark.

The lessons come, she reminded me, not in settling into one end of the scale, but in being open to learning what we can learn swinging from one end to the other.

Maybe the ultimate lesson learned is that life is not about settling in but about trusting that the lessons are leading me to a balance. To a place where I treasure the dark because I know it will make the light all the more light, and when I'm in that light I don't live afraid of the dark because I know that's where light is ultimately revealed.

I told a buddy it's been a long week of traveling and teaching and so I'm ready for a weekend of rest.

I would never want to live my life fully on the road teaching, and I'd never want to live my life fully lounging on the couch. Swinging from one end of that scale to the other has taught me it's the way they balance each other out that I need to treasure.

Life may feel extreme today. Maybe completely opposite from where you were last week or last month. And it may be hard to trust that balance is coming.

But it almost always does.

So learn what you can where you are while you can learn it. It will ultimately point to balance as the best place of all to settle.

​If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, did that falling tree make a sound?

For the longest time I would have answered, of course it did!

But actually, the truth is, it did not.

When the tree fell it created vibrations in the air. For those vibrations to be sound, someone needed to be within reach of those waves to trigger mechanisms in the ear and then the brain that would have identified those waves as a familiar sound.

Otherwise, there were simply waves in the air.

Additionally, someone would have to receive those waves who has actually experienced a tree falling in the woods to have some sort of memory stored that would make sense of those waves as the sound of a falling tree.

According to Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, making sense of the world is always a combination of something happening out there AND some experience in our head that helps us make sense of that something. Without something inside our head to make sense of that something out there - a memory of a past experience that looks or sounds or smells or tastes or feels like that something - Dr. Barrett says we suffer from experiential blindness.

It has me reflecting this morning on just how much 'experiential blindness' impacts our relationships with one another. How much it impacts our opportunities to bring healing and support to one another.

I am working with a group this week to equip them to prevent the abuse and misuse of alcohol and drugs in their communities. And one of the most helpful things I think I bring to that conversation is helping them understand we will never be fully helpful in preventing or healing behavioral patterns if we don't fully understand the experiences people have beneath them.

Many folks working in my field have no blindness to the health risks of using various substances. But many of us are completely blind to the experiences people have had that contributed to them using those substances.

Without our eyes wide open to what people have been through, we will always be blind to many of the chances we have to help them.

I'm afraid we often want to remain experientially blind to others' experiences. It's much easier to judge people than it is to get familiar with them and understand them and actually have some empathy and compassion for choices or lifestyles we find offensive or even deplorable.

Judgment, if you think about it, really takes very little time and energy.

Understanding, however, can often require intense curiosity and exploration. It requires an open-mindedness that considers the possibility that knowing what one has experienced might not change my mind about one's choices, but it might open my heart to being more loving of them in spite of those choices.

It might also open the door to learning that before I can reshape someone's choices, I need to show them my heart feels for the things they've experienced and have shaped their life.

Some blindness is difficult to cure.

Some impossible.

But experiential blindness, that is absolutely curable. At least when it comes to the blindness we have to each others' experiences. It simply requires us to care to know. Care to know what others have experienced before they became this person we know today.

Because the reality is, without experiential awareness, we really don't know anyone at all.

And sadly, without experiential awareness, people are often left feeling like a tree that fell in the woods that made no sound.

Everyone deserves to make a sound.

​During a break in our training yesterday, I asked a young lady how she'd landed in her new job. She told me she'd recently had brain surgery, and to aid in her recovery, she moved closer to family in the area and took on a new job.

Well I didn't see that answer coming.

I went on to discover that she's a single mom raising three kids, tackling a new job, all while dealing with some of the health challenges that are a part of the recovery from having a large tumor removed from her brain.

Yet there she was. Smiling. Participating. Learning. Standing up and tackling the world.

And there I was, glad I had asked.

Last night, I watched Damar Hamlin intercept a pass for the Buffalo Bills on Monday Night Football. Less than two years ago, many of us watched Hamlin die on a football field on Monday Night Football.

There he was, racing down the sideline, his first career interception, the crowd going crazy. But they weren't going crazy because he was racing down the sideline with an intercepted football, they were going crazy because they knew how he'd gotten to that sideline.

They knew he'd taken a hit to the chest, that his heart had stopped, that he'd been brought back to life, that he recovered and joined the team shortly after, and that now, nearly two years later, he's playing the best football of his career.

They went crazy because we all love a story of someone rising again.

Being knocked down is a story we can all relate to. Maybe it's not dying on a field or brain surgery, but we all get knocked down. And because we all know it is sometimes hard to get back up, we applaud those who do.

We find encouragement in it.

Hope.

I often think about what I'd like written on my tombstone. Not in a morbid sort of way, but when you summarize how you'd like to be remembered it challenges you to live in a way that honors that remembrance.

And today, as I'm writing this, I think I'd like it written: "He fell often, he rose every time."

Maybe you're feeling knocked down. I want you to know that people are watching, they are waiting to cheer, they are longing to see you rise again.

Rise again, so that one day when someone asks you how you go to where you are, you can tell them the story of how you rose. And you never know, when you're telling them, they may be unknowingly looking for a reminder that they too can rise.

They too may be longing for their sideline moment.

Fall often.

That's okay.

Rise every time.

​Recently, a dear friend told me about a 'blessing in disguise' in her life. It got me wondering, where did that notion ever come from, this idea of blessings wearing disguises.

Turns out it can be traced back to the English poet James Hervey who in 1746 wrote Reflections on a Flower-Garden. In the piece, he wrote, "A seeming evil, but a real good; a blessing in disguise."

A blessing in disguise is this idea that what feels like evil or a hardship in this moment is actually going to end up serving some goodness in our life.

It's a blessing in disguise.

I've been pondering lately, what if we just got good at seeing the blessing before the disguise is removed? Is the secret to a content life seeing all blessings and no disguises?

That sounds challenging. But the reality is I can look back on every hardship in my life, every single one of them, and connect it to some current good in my life.

Good doesn't always FEEL good, so maybe sometimes it's hard to imagine the good in a hard moment. Maybe it's hard to look back and find it.

But growth is good. Resilience is good. Becoming more empathetic and compassionate and loving is good. Becoming more emotionally available is good. All goods that often come from things that didn't feel so good.

Sometimes we miss blessings because they don't necessarily feel like blessings. But what if hardships - what if life in general - isn't about getting to a place where life always feels good. What if it's about getting to a place of believing that everything we experience is pointing us to an ultimate good?

Sometimes the disguise on a blessing is 'this sucks' or 'I wouldn't choose this moment for my life.'

But sometimes 'this sucks' is preparation. What sucks the life out of you now is often a source of future life.

Sometimes 'I wouldn't choose this moment for my life' is preparation for a moment you aren't in this moment wise enough to choose for your life.

But you will be.

Maybe this week don't imagine the blessing in disguise. Just see the blessing.

Maybe this week don't imagine what feels hard as something preparing you for a blessing. Go ahead and claim it as a blessing now, long before the disguise is ever removed.

​There are some who have suggested that the sport of running wasn't my friend. That it misdirected my priorities. That I became so obsessed with running that I lost sight of everything else.

I will always know otherwise.

Running opened my eyes and introduced me to something I had never known or seen before: me. And my experiences at the Georgia Jewel were instrumental in that.

Whether I am physically there or not, on this day my heart will always be in Georgia. This day, the annual running of the Georgia Jewel.

I wrote the following article a couple of years ago. It seems appropriate to share today.

***

Back in 2018, I attempted to run the 35-mile Georgia Jewel. I quit about halfway through the race.

I'd spent six months playing up how important the race was to me, how prepared I was for it, and how God was going to help me move every mountain that tried to stop me.

And yet, the mountains were too mountainous that day.

Coming up short on race day ended up being the least of my worries - at least when it came to running. For months, I beat myself up for not finishing that race. I felt like I'd let myself down. I felt like I disappointed a lot of people who'd supported me.

The result, for the longest time, having a bad run in Georgia made it impossible for me to have a good run anywhere else.

I've been figuring out lately that running is not the only place I've done that. In fact, it's running, and maybe even that Georgia Jewel race, that's helped me see it.

For the longest time after that Georgia Jewel race, when I tried to run, no matter where I was trying to pull off that run, no matter how many weeks and months had passed since that race, I was still in Georgia.

I couldn't move forward with what was next in running because I had a death grip on quitting that Georgia Jewel.

Maybe you're not a runner, but it's still entirely possible you have a death grip on some other 'what was' in your life.

I think we all want to be ready to tackle what's next; we're at our best when we're ready for it. Sometimes we'll even stand in the doorway and shout at what's next: "here I come."

But as we shout, one hand - maybe even both hands - have a death grip on the door knob.

We WANT to walk out that door to what's next. We SAY we will. But we just can't let go. We have a death grip on what was.

We have death grips on our childhoods.

We have death grips on failed relationships.

We have death grips on failed business opportunities.

We have death grips on habits or addictions.

You know, the natural rhythm of life is 'next'. The earth keeps revolving, the clock keeps spinning, the calendar keeps flipping forward, the next season keeps coming. Life is constantly marching toward next. Maybe our most toxic fight in life is our fight against that natural rhythm.

The flow of life is downstream. Too many times I find myself clinging to a branch in the middle of that stream - the 'what was' branch - I find myself clinging with a death grip.

If you find yourself there today, picture it. Picture your death grip on that branch. Feel how tightly you are clinging to it. And then, THEN - picture yourself letting go of it. Feel the freedom as you flow downstream into what's next.

Last fall, three years after I quit that first Georgia Jewel race, I finished that race. Crossing that finish line felt like letting go of that branch.

I find myself doing that more and more lately - letting go of branches. I feel more in rhythm with life. I feel more excited than ever about what's next....

Excitement I never had the chance to feel when I had a death grip on what was.

​After a presentation yesterday, a man gave me some feedback. He was a large man with a deep voice, which made his feedback all the more challenging to hear.

He said, "you know, when you get to talking about all that brain stuff, you lose me. It goes right over my head. And to be honest, I don't care. I don't want to know it."

There was a day when I would have become pretty defensive in that moment. There was a day when I would have been insistent on everyone understanding that your 'not getting it' and your 'not caring' is a you problem and not a me problem.

But the man wasn't done talking, so I didn't interrupt to defend me and instead continued to listen to him.

He went on to tell me that he has an office at the school where he works and students know they can come there to blow off steam. If you are angry, he lets them know, come here. Don't lash out somewhere else. You can yell here or cuss here or punch this punching bag here. But please, be angry here.

When he was done talking he told me, politely, I don't mean any disrespect. I'm just being honest with you.

I looked at him and said, my guess is after those kids let out their anger in your office they talk to you about what they were angry about.

He said yes.

I said, well, without knowing the brain you do indeed know a lot about the brain. Because what I teach most about the brain, and I totally get that it can get lost in some of the science-speak, is that the brain will always require us to feel safe and seen and connected before we can ever help someone learn a new behavior pattern or skill. Your office provides what the brain requires, I told him, and you provide the connection those students' brains crave.

So I'm not offended, I told him. In beautiful ways you're already doing what I beg people to do once they know how the brain develops and processes. You skipped the learning and got right to the doing. You're good by me.

I wonder how many beautiful stories I've missed in my life because I cut people off the moment I heard something that sounded like an attack on me?

I wonder how many times I've missed the chance to lift people up because I felt in a moment like they were trying to tear me down?

I wonder how many times I've assumed people weren't doing good just because they weren't doing my kind of good?

As often as possible, I think it's best to let the conversation play out. As often as possible, I think it's best to get to know who people are before jumping to a conclusion they're criticizing who you are.

Most of us know a lot, but we don't know everything. And the beauty is, people really don't need to know and care about what we know and care about to do some really loving things in this world.

It's taken me a long time to figure that out, but my world gets richer the more I do. 

​As the story goes, Kobe Bryant was a rookie for the Los Angeles Lakers. It was a playoff game. A close one. Kobe had three shots at the end of the game to win it for his team.

Kobe Bryant missed all three.

Post-game, the commentators observed and talked about Bryant sitting on the bench, his head buried in his hands, surely distraught, they supposed.

When Kobe finally rose from the bench, one of the commentators caught up with him for a brief interview. Watching you on the bench, the interviewer said, it's clear you feel awful.

Kobe didn't miss a beat and said, what do feelings have to do with it? I was replaying all of those shots in my head to figure out what I did wrong. And now I know. I won't miss those shots the next time, he said.

I've come to know that events that are setbacks in our lives are not the actual setbacks. It's the emotions that come with them. And what we choose to do with them. That's what often sets us back.

Kobe's emotions could have turned to feelings of disappointment. Of regret. Of questioning his abilities. And those feelings could have lingered a long time and turned a few missed shots into longer term destruction.

If it sounds like I know all about that, I do.

I have had some setbacks in my life. But what held me back, what held me back for months and in many cases decades, wasn't what happened in those setbacks. It was the emotions that I let turn into feelings that turned into quiet hostage-takers of my life.

One day's event can linger as decades of bitterness. As decades of shame and guilt. As decades of self-hatred. It is so hard to find the joy in a new day when you carry feelings into that day that are intent on reminding you of the turmoil of some previous day.

Kobe clearly understood that.

When he sat on that bench processing his setback, he was essentially leaving all of the emotions and feelings associated with it sitting on the bench he got up from. So, when the interviewer asked him how the event made him feel, there were no feelings to talk about.

They were back on the bench.

I am better at that these days. I'm not perfect, but much better. And it's been a great thing to get better at, because no matter how hard I try, I'm not avoiding setbacks in this life. But what I can avoid is letting those setbacks turn to forever hold me backs.

I encourage you to think about that when you face your next inevitable setback. We all need a moment or a period of time to put our heads in our hands. To process what just happened. To feel all the emotions and feelings. Take that time.

But when you get up, when you move on, leave all of that on the bench.

Life is hard enough moving on to the next play sometimes. Don't try dragging the bench of your past with you.