​We are all two people.

We are who we are, and we are who we are pretending to be. Most of the pretending exists to hide the parts of us we fear others will find unlovable - which, if we’re honest, are often the parts we don’t yet love ourselves.

Some of us pretend less than others. Usually because, somewhere along the way, we encountered a person who felt safe enough for us to bring into our hidden rooms - the rooms where we keep our wounds, our struggles, our oldest secrets. And instead of turning away, they looked back at us with love.

Hiding is hurting. Hiding is slow destruction. But when someone walks into the place you’ve spent a lifetime avoiding and leaves it more accepting of you than you have ever been of yourself - that is healing.

Is there any greater love than the kind that says, I see you - all of you - and I count it as a gift? The very parts you’ve carried like a curse suddenly become the parts someone else cherishes.

Love.

I think of Christ. The Christ who came not simply to comfort us but to heal us. And His healing begins with a simple invitation: Bring me everything you want to hide. Bring me your burdens. Bring me your shame. Bring me the parts of you you’ve never trusted anyone with.

Give it to me.

All of it.

So that you may walk away loved - deeply loved - not in spite of what you shared, but because I love the one who shared it.

It’s hard to love the hider. Hard to love the hidden. They do not know who they are, and neither does anyone else.

Which is why love is as much about inviting as it is about showing up.

Inviting someone to speak.

To reveal.

To be honest.

To be known.

To be themselves.

Love is not what happens after healing.

Love is healing.

​If I look back over the decades of my life, it’s true that where I am today is largely a reflection of the people I’ve surrounded myself with along the way. And when I reflect on the seasons when I wasn’t living what I now call my “right” life, one thing becomes clear: I wasn’t surrounded by the right people.

What is a “right” life, you might ask?

I believe we are all born with a purpose - an inner compass pointing toward a path that allows us to uniquely contribute to the right direction of the world. I’ve also come to believe that much of my own angst, my struggles, my anxieties and depressions, were born from resisting that direction. Fighting it. Distracting myself from it.

And one of the easiest ways to fight that inner compass is to surround ourselves with people who have little interest in where it’s trying to take us. People who aren’t chasing direction at all.

We need friends who care as much about where we’re going as where we currently stand. Friends who are curious. Friends willing to look beneath the surface to find the hidden threads of who we’re becoming. Friends who see the potential we’re often too afraid or too wounded to see in ourselves.

Because the truth is, good friends are usually much better at imagining who we can be, while we are often experts at imagining all the reasons we can’t.

Life has changed drastically for me this past decade. I feel closer to my right life than ever before.

Is it a coincidence that the people in my life look drastically different than they did ten years ago?

I don’t think so.

When life feels like it’s not going right, it might be worth standing in the middle of your circle of friends and asking: Do they look like my right life?

Sometimes the best way to change direction is to change the circle. 

​What kind of man sends an open letter to a college football team that will never read it? The kind of man who’s less interested in telling them something and more interested in telling himself something.

Many of you know writing is my way of processing life. To include disappointment.

And - many of you know I am a diehard Notre Dame football fan. Have been dating back to the days of playing high school football for Knute Rockne's grandson. We weren't very good, but he was still Knute Rockne's grandson!

As such, I had many friends reach out yesterday asking my opinion about Notre Dame being left out of the college football playoff. I don't know, honestly - my son Elliott and I exchanged a lot of text messages yesterday after the announcement, and I'm sure I included some opinions in there, but with age I've become much more interested in the lessons available in conflicts and unpopular decisions than I am with opinions.

Which gets to the letter. Because more than anything, my heart hurt for the kids this decision impacted. I know fans assume no one is more impacted by sports decisions than fans - but that's a myth. The folks actually playing the games have a little bit more invested in the outcomes. Hard to believe, I know, but it's true.

And the young men on this Irish football team had every reason to believe that for the second year in a row, they were headed back to the college playoffs. And, like last year, when they made it to the championship game, they believed they could make a run at winning it.

When your mind gets to believing a plan and the plan is suddenly swept away, spirits can be swept away as well.

My heart for this team got caught up in that sweeping yesterday. I don't know a single one of them personally, but you get to know a team over the course of a season watching every second of every one of their games. Not REALLY knowing them - but enough so to wish away disappointment in their lives.

With almost perfect timing, I heard Steven Furtick say today, "God often sends a problem as an answer to a prayer." The idea being that sometimes our plans being swept away IS part of the plan.

God's plan, not ours.

I look back on my life and I can see it - more times than I can count - disappointment that my Plan A didn't work out being transformed to a Plan B - or C - that made disappointment suddenly feel more like a gift.

This team is lucky. They have a coach whose greatest gift might be helping young people see the path ahead when the path they're on seems washed away in a storm. They have a coach in Marcus Freeman who helps people - players and fans alike - see sunshine where there is none.

None present and none in the short-term forecast.

Only one team will win the college football playoff. And after they win, their lives will take on a direction influenced by that outcome.

And our beloved Notre Dame players. They are not included in the playoff. That will influence life direction as well. I don't have an opinion about that, really. There is too much wrong with the world for me to be too opinionated about what is wrong with college football.

But I do have a prayer for the players on this year's team. That they will one day walk a path on which they can look back at this moment, and even if not find beauty in it, they will at least come to know that disappointment is far more often a building block than it is destruction.

Plan A is nice when life goes according to Plan A.

Life rarely does, though.

Which makes embracing the Plan Bs in life - or Cs - one of the keys to embracing a fulfilling life.

When it comes to Notre Dame football, Plan A for me is still living long enough to see the team win another National Championship.

Plan B has given me something a championship alone never could - countless Saturdays with my boys, watching young men chase something bigger than themselves.

For that, I’m deeply grateful.

So, to the Irish players and coaches, thank you. May your plan B work out as beautiful as mine, even if today it is hard to see.

And forever, #GoIrish🍀

​I stood on the overlook and looked out at the mountaintop covered with overnight snow. Then, I let my eyes follow the clearly drawn line that ran for miles down the ridge, defining where temperatures allowed for snow and where they insisted there would be none.

I thought, this is life. There is often such a sharp edge between one season and the next. Life can feel a way one day, and then feel completely unrecognizable the next.

And like the mountain, we can often have such little say in that shift.

I couldn't help but notice just how accepting the mountain seemed to be with this. As if that is the character of the mountain, to know that its life will be made up of many sudden shifts. And that the mountains role isn't to control that, but to make beauty of it in any way it can.

Such sharp contrast I was looking at. Seasons at war in a way. And yet, it looked like such peace.

As I stared at the line, I realized this wasn’t a picture of seasons in conflict - it was a picture of seasons held together. Both the frost and the thaw were resting in the same hands. Both were part of a story far bigger than the moment I was looking at.

And maybe that’s why it felt like peace.

Because God doesn’t ask the seasons to agree with each other, only to trust Him enough to let Him use them both.

​A friend once told me, “I think we’ve lost the art of friendship - and that’s truly devastating.”

The saddest part was that she sounded devastated. She said she, and she believes many of us, are craving relationships that fill our souls as much as we try to fill the souls of others.

That sat heavy with me.

This morning, I found myself reading in the book of Job. Maybe you’re familiar with the story: Job is faithful, strong, blessed… and then suddenly stripped of everything - his wealth, his health, even his ten children. It is heartbreak layered on heartbreak. A season that would make many dark seasons seem like a party.

But here’s the part that has me reflecting this morning:

Job 2:11-13:

Three of Job’s friends heard of all the trouble that had fallen on him. Each traveled from his own country - Eliphaz from Teman, Bildad from Shuhah, Zophar from Naamath - and went together to Job to keep him company and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they hardly recognized him. They cried, ripped their robes, and threw dirt on their heads. Then they sat with him on the ground for seven days and seven nights. Not a word was spoken, because they saw how great his suffering was.

Before they ever said a word, these three men did something almost unimaginable:

They heard their friend was hurting… and they dropped everything. Jobs. Families. Responsibilities. They coordinated a trip across borders just to be with him.

And when they arrived?

They sat in the dirt with him for seven straight days.

Not one pep talk. Not one solution. Not one “have-you-tried-this?”

Just presence.

Just sorrow.

Just listening - the kind that happens without a single word.

The most interesting part of this story, and maybe why God decided to weave this tale of friendship into a message on suffering, is that as the story goes on, these 3 friends became far less helpful once they actually started talking to Job. When they started offering their opinions about why he's suffering. When they started giving him advice about how to get his life back on track.

The moment they started talking is the exact moment they stopped helping. Once they shifted from presence to opinion, the friendship began to unravel. They were so determined to be useful, to be the fixers, that they forgot the most healing thing they had already done:

They showed up. And they stayed.

We underestimate that. We underestimate the soul-feeding power of someone who simply sees how rotten we feel and chooses to sit in the dirt with us anyway.

I’ve been blessed lately with friends like that. Friends who didn’t try to rescue me from anything - they just refused to leave me alone in it. It made me feel less rotten. It made me feel grateful.

And it made me more mindful of the people in my life who might be waiting for someone to sit with them.

I think there’s a reason God included this piece of Job’s story, a reason the friendship was strongest when the friends were silent, and a reason it started to crumble when they felt a need to do more than show up.

Because I think that’s what we all want. We want relationships and intimacy with people who will show up, sit down, and stay.

And maybe that’s all God ever wanted from us too.

Maybe God craves what we crave - not constant talking, but quiet presence. Not answers, but availability. Someone willing to stop in the middle of their busy life, sit down in the dirt, and simply be there.

Sometimes the most spiritual thing we can do is the thing Job’s friends accidentally got right:

Be still.

Be present.

And listen.

(re-written from an article I wrote in 2020)