​It's that time of the year again. Thanksgiving is over and now, to use a baseball analogy, we round third and head for home.

Many of us with much velocity.

Thanksgiving is a reminder. A reminder to be grateful. And today I am wondering if maybe it is well positioned on the holiday calendar to be quite a LOUD reminder: the year is coming to an end, don't forget to tap the brakes or you'll once again miss it all.

I've thought about that a lot lately. Gratitude as a brake pedal. Because when it begins to feel like I'm being swept away in the currents of life - both the joyous and the challenging currents - gratitude is always the way I come back to the here and now.

Which is important, because the here and now - that will always be the only place where peace and stability is found. It's never found in reliving yesterday; it's never found in dreaming about tomorrow - it can only be found in the way we look at the here and now. By tapping the gratitude brake and taking a gratitude break.

How many times have I wondered it the past week or so - how did we get here so fast again?

I joked with Elliott the other day. I said it's that time of the year as I plugged the lights in on the Christmas tree that stood in the corner of my living room all year in absolute silence since unplugging the lights the day after Christmas last year.

The tree came instantly alive.

Like magic.

And the real magic was that even though the tree had been dark for 11 months, it felt like the lights had never gone out at all. How does a whole year go buy, EVERY year, in what feels like a day?

Maybe I don't tap the brakes enough.

The gratitude brakes.

Many of us wish we could slow down time. Maybe gratitude is the most effective way to do that.

When life starts dragging us backward into the past, or pulling us forward into the uncontrollable hustle of Black Friday, White Elephant parties, and all the haphazard (and maybe even drunken) momentum that carries us into Christmas - maybe gratitude is our way of pulling on the reins...

Whoa, life!

Life often leaves us feeling like time is our captor. Gratitude is our way of saying, I'm not a big fan of being held captive.

Yesterday, many of us paused and reflected on all that we are grateful for.

Might I suggest that we do that again today.

Might I suggest a gratitude brake.

​I remember receiving a phone call from a young man I worked with at Eckerd Youth Alternatives. Jimmy. He was 12 years old when he came into our care. I was his counselor. He was a kid with tons of struggles in life, and he handled none of them well.

The kid threatened to kill me daily and cussed at me more often than that. After spending a year with us, he graduated the program. Most kids did.

The adult staff and the 9 other boys he lived with at camp all stood up at this ceremony and shared fond memories of their time with Jimmy. I'm not sure where any of them came up with those memories. They wished him well, and stated how sure they were he was going to be a great success in life.

I'm sure I lied and said something along those lines as well. But in reality, I knew the only success Jimmy was going to have in life was the possibility of parole attached to the multiple life sentences he was sure to collect within minutes of departing our lying eyes.

Nearly 5 years later, I inexplicably answered a weekend phone call in the main office building - something I never did on the weekends. It was Jimmy. He told me he had been locked up in a detention center in Florida for the past year. But before I could think or say "I knew it", he told me this:

Chief Keith, (we were all called "Chief" at Eckerd), he said, I know you didn't think I'd make anything of my life when I left camp. And until now I really haven't. But I'm going to. I've spent the past year thinking about all the things you told me about life, and now I'm going to change. I just wanted to say thank you.

Then he hung up.

That thank you has haunted me. Not because of who said it or how little faith I had in that kid, but because it is the starkest reminder I have of how few people I have thanked for helping me along the way.

People who never gave up on me.

Several years later I was sitting in my office pondering how ill-prepared I was to become a father. And since I was less than a few months away from becoming a father for the first time, this depressed me.

Until that day, I had been able to convince myself that raising a child couldn't be any more difficult than tossing a ball or putting a worm on a hook. But the due date kept closing in, like a fire, and as it did, I could hear a baby crying and I had no idea how to stop it.

I began to see images of a boy who needed direction through a world I was far from figuring out myself. I began to wonder what I had gotten this innocent child into.

To distract myself I rifled through the day's mail. That's when I came across a letter from a young man I had worked with several years earlier. Tyler.

Unlike Jimmy, I always knew Tyler would be successful. I often wondered what he was even doing at camp. Most days I was sure my life was more screwed up and at-risk than his.

As I ran my fingers through the envelope to open the letter, it struck me that it was stamped in Samoa.

Tyler began the letter by telling me he was working at a surf shop in Samoa. I wasn't surprised. Then he told me he heard that I was going to be a father. He said that was a great thing - that I was going to be a wonderful dad.

He went on to tell me how I was always a great father figure to the guys in his group. And he said thank you.

I was floored - that from a far away place - he would think enough of my contribution to his life to send a letter. More than that, though, I wondered how many people in my life may have needed some timely reassurance that I could have provided with a simple thank you - and they never got it.

I don't know, but thanks to Tyler's thank you, I never worried about my ability to be a father again. Or at least, not with as much panic.

On December 18th, 2006, Elliott Cartwright arrived. In no simple fashion. In the words of Dr. Knelson, who delivered him, he was born with little more than a heartbeat. But Dr. Knelson pounded our baby's chest and shared breath with him for the next several hours like he was his own son. He saw life in a lifeless baby and willed our boy to see a world beyond that delivery room.

I watched that man, old and graying, steal our boy from the determined arms of death and hand him to us like it was just another day at the office. Elliott spent a couple of weeks in the NICU, but he came home with us.

Today he is a healthy college student.

A couple of days after he delivered Elliott, Dr. Knelson walked into Elliott's mom's hospital room. The timing of his visit was a little unexpected and sent me scrambling for the speech I had rehearsed over and over in my head since witnessing the miracle he had performed. The one that allowed me to be called a father.

My mouth got tired of waiting and without permission spit out the following words: Thank you.

From across the room, Dr. Knelson stared me straight in the eyes and said, "don't thank me, thank Him. I'm not good enough to do what happened in that delivery room."

With his response came two lessons:

One, I do not thank God nearly enough for the blessings in my life. Too often, because I don't think beyond the rush of emotion that comes from receiving an act of kindness, or a miracle, I fail to look for God's hand in the sometimes miraculous but often quite simple moments that construct this astonishing life I live.

Two, God knows what he is doing in my life. He uses each of us to do his His will in our intermingled lives. And although I don't believe He is ever more glorified than when we thank Him personally for our connectedness, he doesn't need it.

I imagine God feels like I feel when I watch one of our boys do something kind for the other that I have secretly directed. And the other, completely unaware that I've had a hand in the act, thanks his brother. I always feel the joy of that thanks as if it is directed at me.

I believe God celebrates each and every time we thank someone for the contributions they have made to our lives.

I remember sitting down at my desk and writing out a thank you note to an old high school football coach. It surprised me that I was doing so. Until I began taking a mental inventory of the people who had made contributions to my life that influenced who I was to that day, I hadn't thought much about him. That's because life had lulled me into some sense of belief that it was me and only me responsible for any good in my life.

I thanked coach for the day he piled the entire team into the backs of a herd of pick up trucks and drove us out the country roads that surrounded our school until we were 10 miles or so from where we left. He then told us to get out and run home. This was troubling. I didn't know how to get home, and I knew there was no way I was keeping up with my teammates who were sprinting away like they were the only ones who did.

I made it home. I ran sprints after practice for a month or so because I didn't make it as fast as coach wanted me to, but I made it.

Many years later I would embark on a career working with at-risk youth. Many times these kids would get upset with me because I was asking them to do things they felt were impossible to achieve. I grew fond of telling them that it's not the people who are asking you to do the impossible you need to be upset with, but the people who aren't asking you to do anything at all - because that's exactly what those people believe you're capable of.

When I finished the note to coach, I began to search the internet for his address. I hadn't talked to him in years so I had no idea where I'd find him, but I was determined to get him this note. I suppose that's what hurt the most when my search turned up that he had died of cancer several years earlier.

He would never receive my thanks. He would never hear me admit that what I once called the dumbest thing I had ever heard a coach ask his players to do clung to me long enough to become a valuable life lesson for others. A legacy of sorts, I suppose.

I think people deserve to know their legacy.

I think they deserve to know it before they unknowingly part from our lives forever.

Maybe that is one of the things a thank you does best. It writes legacies.

It's never too late to say thank you, until it is.....

(re-written from a 2012 article I wrote)

​It's Thanksgiving week. A great week to be grateful for all that we have. But as a reminder, it's also a great week to be grateful for all that we are about to have.

I've spent more of my life than I am proud of NOT being grateful. And that's because I spent a lot of my life negotiating gratitude with God.

"Hey God, if you'll get me through this, I will be the most grateful child of God you've ever created."

And many times, sometimes when I heard it and sometimes when I didn't, God would say, "Have you ever thought that being grateful might actually be your path to getting through this?"

Have you ever thought that the time for being grateful isn't when you finally beat the addiction, but when you know you're going to beat it?

Have you ever thought that the time for being grateful for the relationship isn't when the relationship is just right, but when you know you have all you need to make it right?

Have you ever thought that the time to be grateful for the job isn't when the right job comes along, but when you acknowledge all the right things you can make of the job you have right now?

Waiting on circumstances to be grateful for isn't gratitude, it's often negotiation. But real gratitude, the most powerful kind of gratitude, is finding the beauty in circumstances that don't feel so beautiful, a beauty often found in seeing where you're going and not being stuck where you are.

I can look back on a life I would have a hard time describing as anything other than messy. And yet, God was always in the mess saying here we go, Keith.

Sometimes that felt like invitation, and sometimes it felt like God dragging me kicking and screaming out of my mess. But mess was never the plan, it was always the path.

So I sit here this Thanksgiving week. Reflecting back on the mess. Back on all the times that looked and felt like there wasn't a thing to be grateful for, and in the words of Seph Schlueter 🎵:

God, I'm still counting my blessings
All that You've done in my life
The more that I look in the details
The more of Your goodness I find
Father, on this side of Heaven
I know that I'll run out of time
But I will keep counting my blessings
Knowing I can't count that high

It's a powerful reminder - Thanksgiving.

It's a powerful reminder - looking back at the messy details of your life and counting all the beauty that came from what once felt like irredeemable messes.

It's a powerful reminder - be grateful for all you have, for sure, but maybe even more, be grateful for where you're going. Be grateful that mess is usually more opportunity than roadblock.

So be grateful for the opportunity, and seize it.

​While traveling this week, I heard Elon Musk say in an interview that in ten to twenty years, work will be optional. AI will do everything.

My first reaction was, well isn't that just great. At the end of my work life, we're going to create a world where no one has to work.

But then something else hit me, something more troubling than the excitement of imagining a life of leisure.

Almost every job I’ve ever had has added meaning to my life. Not because of the title or the paycheck, but because of what happened in the work. The relationships. The sense of contributing something good. The moments when someone’s life crossed paths with mine and left me changed.

Work hasn’t just been employment for me. Work has been identity. Work has been healing. Work has been connection.

So when Musk said work will be optional, a question came to me that felt larger than all the technological predictions: If work becomes optional, where will people find meaning?

I worry we aren’t ready for that question. Because whether we admit it or not, work has become the place most of us go to feel like we matter. We feel useful because something in the world needs us to show up.

What happens when that disappears?

I don’t think the biggest consequence of voluntary work will be unemployment. I think it will be un-purposeness. And I honestly believe that a society without purpose is far more dangerous than a society without jobs.

Maybe humans can survive without employment, but can humans survive without meaning?

If AI ends up doing everything, the real crisis may look more internal than economic. It may look like people waking up with nothing to give themselves to. Nothing to struggle for. Nothing to build. Nothing to contribute that feels uniquely human.

And that scares me more than any robot ever could.

Work has been a steadying force in my life. Even in my darkest moments, work anchored me. Training people. Telling stories. Sitting in rooms full of folks trying to heal their communities. The work itself didn’t fix me, but showing up for others reminded me I wasn’t alone.

The irony is that the job I have now - helping people understand trauma and connection - ended up revealing just how much healing I needed myself.

Work has been part of my redemption story. And I know I’m not alone in that.

For many people, work is the only predictable place where they are needed. It’s the only arena where someone is glad they showed up that day. It’s the only community they trust. The only identity they understand. The only challenge that still makes them feel alive.

Take that away, and you don’t get a peaceful society. You get an anxious one. You get a drifting one. You get people who have leisure but no purpose, and leisure without purpose becomes isolation, addiction, and despair.

But here’s the part that gives me hope: If work becomes optional, meaning will have to become intentional.

We’ll have to build it on purpose instead of inheriting it from the workplace.

We’ll have to find identity that isn’t tied to productivity.

We’ll have to create connection that isn’t tied to shared office walls.

We’ll have to learn that contribution doesn’t come from job descriptions - it comes from showing up for one another.

In a world where AI does everything, humans will have to do the things AI can’t: love, heal, notice, listen, create hope, build belonging.

Maybe work becoming optional forces us to reconsider what our real work has always been. Maybe it invites us back to the basics - to connection, compassion, and community. Maybe it leads us to rediscover what matters when productivity stops being the greatest measure of our worth.

I don’t know if AI will make work obsolete. But I do know this: If the day comes when work is optional, meaning can’t be.

And if we are wise, we’ll use that moment not trying to escape meaning, but to redefine it. Not to relax our way into emptiness, but to connect our way into a deeper humanity - one built not on what we accomplish, but on who we become and how we love.

​I have shared this story before, but several years ago I had a scary dad moment. I was sitting in my chair doing something on my laptop when my 6 year old son Elliott came in and told me a story about something that happened at school that day. He finished the story and began walking away, turning around as he walked off. I looked up just in time to see a face, sad and dejected, that upended me.

The face of a child who knew an important story in his life wasn't Important enough to draw his dad away from his work. Or more likely, away from some social media or a sports website.

I made a commitment in that moment of shame and embarrassment - when I hear one of my kid's voices I will look up and listen. I'm sure I haven't been perfectly faithful to that commitment, but the awareness I gained in that moment has helped me be a part of conversations I'm sure I would have totally missed in the years since.

And that goes beyond my son.

I am a part of a training this week: CHATS (Connecting Humans and Telling Stories). I've been a part of several of these. But one thing about these experiences that never stops amazing me is just how important it is for people to feel listened to.

It's always rewarding, and yet, at the same time sad, seeing subtle looks of disbelief on people's faces as other people embrace their stories. As if they have spent most of their lives telling stories to people who refused to look up from their laptops.

I told the group yesterday that it is always fulfilling for me to see beauty come alive in a diverse group of people sharing stories with one another and not one story is too diverse to be heard and treasured by the collective diversity. But, I also told them, it breaks my heart for the giant world of people outside our little room carrying stories they long to share with people who have no longing whatsoever to hear them.

Being unheard. It may be one of the quietest forms of torture.

Being heard. It may be one of the sweetest kinds of relief. A relief that is so ever pervasive in these CHATS experiences.

On the way to my CHATS experience, I stopped at Virginia Tech and took my now college freshman, Elliott, to lunch. Sitting at lunch, I had no laptop or phone open, and I asked him, "What's been the hardest part of transitioning from high school to college several hours away from home?"

We had a nice talk. And it wasn't lost on me just how different the look on his face was in that moment than it was on the face of that dejected 6 year-old walking away unheard.

It's never too late to be curious.

It's never too late to ask questions.

So many people base their worth on the willingness of others to hear their stories.

Please, ask someone to hear their story today.

Let someone know today that they are worthy of shutting the laptop, putting down the phone.

We need to know, that as we scroll through the stories on our devices, we are missing the most important stories of all.

​Yesterday, I heard a presenter say, "If you're listening to someone but hearing your own voice, you're doing it wrong."

I instinctually wondered, is there anything we do more wrong? And, is there anything that would bridge our many divides more than getting that right?

Listening.

Too often, when someone else is talking, we aren't listening. We're reloading. We're preparing. Preparing a response, or a defense, a personal story, or a way to fix.

Listening is hard because it requires us to let someone else's story take priority over our internal narrative. Really listening is quite an unselfish act if you think about it.

Have you ever noticed someone who is feeling truly listened to - truly heard? They soften. They open up. They share without trying to figure out what's the right thing to say. They just simply say.

People don't need your voice as much as they need your presence. Listening is one of the strongest ways we have to say "you're safe here" without saying a word.

But too often our way of listening makes people feel more hijacked than safe. We hijack someone's words by inserting our own. Our own assumptions, past experiences, interpretations, and projections.

Listening well is really all about stepping out of the spotlight so that someone else can step in. Listening well means surrendering the need to relate everything back to ourselves. It’s choosing curiosity over commentary.

Have we become a society that believes we already know everything that needs to be known about one another, so we in turn skip curiosity?

And have we come to believe that everyone but us needs fixed, so it's a waste of time to hear what someone else has to say because what they really need is to hear us tell them what they need to do?

A lot of people turn to places and groups they wouldn't ordinarily turn to simply because they know someone will listen to them there. From the moment we come into the world as little babies, we are craving someone to simply hear our voice. And when that craving isn't met, a lot can go wrong.

As babies.

And beyond.

I think if we'd just work harder at getting listening right, a lot of good would follow.

​I have found my path. It's a gift to be able to say that. It's also a gift to remember that rarely does a path start as a path. More often than not, if we're being honest, our current paths started as our previous messes.

It's easy to forget in moments of saying, "man this feels good" - that we were once standing in a similar place in our lives saying, "man this sucks."

This sucks to this feels good - it is such a frequent order in my life.

It's easy to forget when you're out talking to a group about the power of meaningful relationships that your life has been filled with a pattern of broken relationships.

It's easy to forget when you're out talking to a group about the ease with which we can turn to unhealthy habits to ease the pain of unhealthy circumstances that we have spent a lifetime turning to unhealthy habits to deal with our unhealthy circumstances.

It's easy to sit and write as if writing is your calling, to forget how frequently you once refused to write when you felt called to write.

It's easy to promote healing and forget just how much broken you've had to navigate to even begin to know that healing is a thing.

It's easy to forget - but we must not.

Because the day is coming, maybe even today, when life will once again feel like a mess. And when that day comes, oh what a gift it is to know you are not standing in a mess, but at the beginning of a new path.

I have come to believe that God is not big on creating our paths, but he is especially big on showing up in our messes pointing us to them like an angel pointing to heaven.

Maybe we miss the angels when we get overwhelmed by our mess.

Maybe we miss them because we can't begin to believe a mess is the beginning and not the end.

Take stock of the good in your life today. My guess is - somewhere along the way, that good once looked like a mess. And so, my guess is - your next mess will one day look like a path.

From mess to path - it just seems to be the direction of my life.

​4 years ago today, I ran my last marathon. The memory of the pain I was experiencing in that finish line moment has long subsided, but the lesson - the much needed lesson - has carried on.

I ran the marathon with my friend Tiffany. It was her first marathon. She'd committed to running marathons before this one in 2021, but it just never happened. This one, though - she was determined to let nothing stand in her way of becoming forever a marathoner.

Throughout the training leading up to this, she would frequently say, "Whatever it takes."

And I dare say, that day, we did whatever it took.

For many reasons, most meaningful metaphor for life has become the marathon.

Maybe that’s because the marathon mirrors the way life exposes us.
It reveals every weakness, every fear, every corner of ourselves we’d rather not confront. There’s nowhere to hide at mile 22. Whatever is in you - good or bad - comes out. Trust me!

In many ways, life is the same. We don’t get to skip the hard miles; we just learn to show up for ourselves there.

Maybe it’s because the marathon forces honesty. There’s no pretending your way to 26.2 miles. No shortcut. No façade. Life, especially these last several years, has demanded that same honesty from me - to face my truth instead of pretending I'm strong.

The marathon helped teach me that pretending doesn’t get you to the finish line; truth does.

Maybe it’s because the marathon is a slow becoming, not a single moment. No one accidentally runs a marathon. You become a marathoner long before race day. You become one in the lonely early-morning miles, in the discipline of lacing up when no one is watching, in the quiet promises you keep to yourself.

For me, healing has been that same slow becoming - a thousand small, unseen steps that eventually add up to something that looks like progress.

Maybe it’s because the marathon is where I learned what “capacity” really means. Not capacity as in talent or physical ability, but capacity as in what we can endure, adapt to, and rise from. My first marathon and each after showed me I had more in me than I believed.

Life has shown me the opposite too - that sometimes we have far less than we pretend.

Both truths matter.

Both shape us.

Maybe it’s because the marathon is impossible to run alone.
Even if your feet are the only ones hitting the pavement, you’re carried by the people who trained with you, believed in you, prayed for you, and waited for you. Tiffany’s “whatever it takes” didn’t just get her across the finish line, it got me across too.

I’ve come to realize that's true for most of us - most of our finish lines come the same way: on the strength of the people who stay close when the miles get dark.

Whatever it takes.

Or you know, maybe it’s simply this:

In the marathon, as in life, the goal isn’t to feel good - it’s to keep going. And sometimes “whatever it takes” isn’t about finishing strong. It’s just about not quitting.

I am proud of this 4 year-old memory popping up this morning. Proud of Tiffany and proud of me.

But more than that, I am reminded:

Whatever it takes..... 

​Who they say you are isn’t nearly as important as who you know you are.

Because the truth is, there will always be voices. Voices from your past. Voices from your failures. Voices that sound an awful lot like your fears. And sometimes those voices can sound convincing. Why wouldn't they - they’ve been rehearsed in your head for years.

But what matters most isn’t what you hear. It’s what you agree with.

The moment you agree with the wrong voice, you begin to live out a story that isn’t yours. You start making choices to defend an identity that was never yours in the first place.

How do you defend yourself against that, defend yourself against the noise?

Know who you are.

Because when you know who you are - like REALLY know it - the noise can no longer sway you. No one can apply a mask to a face that refuses to wear one.

Maybe it's our greatest superpower - being sure of who we are. The noise of the world will always be loud, but it only becomes deafening - defeating - when we start to listen to and believe noise that isn't ours to listen to and believe.

It's self-defense.

Defense against ever giving another voice the power to believe they know who you are better than you do.

They don't.

​Nothing lasts forever in this world. That is hard to accept. So hard, in fact, that it's easy to become so focused on the things that have left us that we deprive ourselves of the chance to embrace all that is still to come.

We fixate on all that has left and not on all that is left.

Yes, I'm talking about people and relationships. But it goes beyond that.

How many of us focus on the youthful appearance we once had but has now left us?

How many of us focus on the great job we once had but now has left us?

How many of us focus on the simplicity of the hometown we grew up in but we no longer live in?

How many focus on the financial security we once had that now looks more like paycheck to paycheck?

How many of us are so deeply mourning the loss of what was that we live incapable of seeing - let alone embracing - the possibilities that can be found in all that we have left.

How many of us have heads looking behind, faces painted in loss - and not forward, faces overcome with belief and hope?

And expectation.

Do we expect that life is over because of all that has left?

Or do we expect unexpected beauty coming at us from all that we have left?

Which we expect is a choice:

All that has left.

Or.

All that we have left.

The weekend has left you. I truly hope it was a great one.

But today is the day to begin focusing on all the days you have left.

And from them - create and anticipate beauty.