I am a Facebook creator. I’m not entirely sure what that even means, but it gives me access to analytics. Analytics I don’t look at often, because honestly, my showing up here is far more about sharing than anything that can be analyzed.

With that said, I checked my analytics yesterday. And as you can see, they were all bad news.

Or at least, Facebook wanted me to feel them as bad news.

Why the red numbers? Red means danger. Bleeding. Error. Threat.

Does Facebook want me to see that I’ve lost 16 followers this past month and experience that as danger? As a threat? I think so, because for a brief moment, that’s exactly what I felt.

For some people, their bodies have a hard time distinguishing between someone walking away from you and someone disappearing from a screen. For many, both register as less connection than before. And for people whose stories include silence, absence, or being left, that signal can land even harder.

I find it interesting that Facebook, and many other platforms (I pick on Facebook because it’s my go-to), was built two decades ago on bringing people together. Yet now, it seems sustained by making people fear others will walk away.

Does it build by appealing to our shared longing to be seen and known, and then keep us hooked by preying on our shared fear of rejection?

But don’t worry. If you find yourself in the red zone, Facebook will offer strategies to fix it. Topics to write about. Ways to become more appealing. More acceptable. Maybe even some AI to help you along.

To what end? Lots of green numbers?

Green numbers that encourage me to meet the world where it is instead of sharing with the world who I am.

That’s where I eventually settled after the initial jolt of those red numbers.

I settled on a question. Or two.

Do you want to go back to chasing popularity at the expense of being known? Have you not run this experiment before - responding to red warnings in life by offering more of what you think will please others, while feeling more and more displeased with yourself?

Those 16 followers I lost? I have no idea who they are. I will likely never know who they are. How can people you can’t even identify as gone make you feel, even for a moment, like something meaningful has disappeared from your life?

I don’t know. I think red numbers play a role. Red numbers that stir memories of past rejection, or fear of it, far more than anything actually happening in the world of social media analytics.

And this is not lost on social media platforms. Understanding the science of all this is surely in their strategic plans. Hence, the red numbers.

So, for social media 'creators' like myself, I want to encourage you to look instead to the green numbers in your life. The people who are with you when life is red, or green, or black and blue.

Maybe that number is one. Maybe it’s a dozen.

Look to the people who are not up arrows or down arrows. They are simply lines in the sand, walking beside you. Parallel. Processing the stories of your life with you, not deciding whether they are worthy of a red or a green grade.

As for social media, if you want followers, write for followers. But if you want connection, write yourself. Your true, unafraid-of-red-numbers self.

​Last week, Dr. Mehmet Oz - Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services - responded to the federal government removing long standing guidance encouraging Americans to limit alcohol use:

Dr. Oz called alcohol a "social lubricant" - and said, "There’s probably nothing healthier than having fun with friends in a safe way.”

In fairness to Oz, he did go on to say, “In the best case scenario, I don’t think that you should drink alcohol.”

I think his remarks give us some things to think about. One, I am grateful for any doctor who will suggest there is nothing healthier than human connection. If more doctors would prescribe more relationships than pills, we'd be a healthier society.

The thing is, I think almost everyone knowingly or unknowingly craves relationship, but have a difficult time entering them. We used to be a culture that was built on relationships; we are now a culture trying to compensate without them. Relationship skills are not among our country's greatest competencies.

Alcohol, enter stage left. Alcohol can indeed make it easier for us to get out of our own way and into the way of human connection.

But some further questions need asking.

Alcohol may help us enter a relationship, but is it equally good at holding it together? If two people bond over drinks, will drinking be an equally good partner in solving the problems that arise when the bond encounters inevitable difficulties?

And another great question: once the bond gets going, does alcohol bring problems into the bond that would not exist without the alcohol?

Research suggests that anywhere from a third to a half of all divorces involve alcohol misuse. Research suggests a much larger percentage of inter-partner violence involves alcohol misuse.

But here's the thing, enough Americans have seen alcohol use in their families and in their relationships to know if alcohol is more lubricant than glue. We are our own research. I know I have personally met with many young people AND adults over the years who have wished people in their lives would drink less. I've yet to meet anyone who wished someone in their lives would drink more.

I have a personal story of romantic relationships ignited by alcohol. I have a personal story of alcohol playing a large part in blowing every one of them up.

Maybe alcohol is a social lubricant. But it's my experience that we need things to bring us together that are equally good at holding us together. I've just never seen alcohol be good at being one of those things.

I am glad we are having open conversations about social lubricant. I hope it invites us into more conversations about social glue.

​I am putting the finishing touches on my memoir. As such, I have spent a lot of time the last year writing about relationships. After all, at the center of almost all memoirs is relationships - the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The plots of our lives are ultimately shaped through the stories of our relationships. There are no meaningful stories without them.

In my writing and reading, I came across an article on the mental health challenges of marriage. The article outlined the 7 signs of a silent divorce. I want to share them with you here:

1. You stop talking about anything real. Conversations become transactional - about kids, bills, or chores, but never about emotions.

2. You feel lonelier with them than when you're alone. The emotional connection has vanished, leaving quiet emptiness between you.

3. There's peace - but it's cold. No arguments, no passion, just emotional distance disguised as calm.

4. You stop caring to fix things. The effort, hope, and fight to make it work slowly fade.

5. Affection feels awkward or forced. Hugs, kisses, and small touches start feeling like obligations, not intimacy.

6. You fantasize about being free - not in love. You daydream more about peace without them than life together.

7. You live separate lives under one roof. Different schedules, rooms and emotional worlds - you coexist but don't connect.

Why am I sharing this with you? A couple of reasons.

One, when my 22 year marriage ended in divorce, many people asked me - with good intentions (mostly) - what happened? As if some event - some unpredictable explosion - destroyed a union that had previously been held together by 22 years of bonding.

What kind of event, they had to be wondering, could destroy such a bond?

The reality is, when I read those 7 signs above, I related to every single one of them. And not loosely, but in direct alignment. All 7, every moment of every day, for at least the last decade of my marriage. And in the midst of all 7 of those signs, I came to accept they were just part of what needed to happen to hold my marriage together.

Yes, my unwritten strategy for holding my marriage together was actually 7 signs of a silent divorce.

Many will ask, how on earth could you have believed that. Felt that. And my only answer would be that I was in a dark place. But I am sharing this because I have come to know I am not the only one who has or will experience that dark place.

Living inside divorce under the illusion that you are living inside a marriage can be exhausting. It can indeed take a toll on one's mental health.

I am also sharing this because I didn't understand any of what I am sharing here until many years after my divorce. Obviously, had I understood much of this while inside the marriage, and if I - and we, because those signs require two people - had been in a healthier place and in earlier stages of those signs, they could have been seven things to work on to grow a marriage, and not the path to blowing one up.

They may have helped put a stop to the erosion that was cutting a path through a marriage on the way to the explosion. Because in many cases, divorce is far more erosion than explosion.

Maybe someone will read this and see subtle hints of one or some or all of these signs in your marriage. Maybe they will be an avenue to sit down, review with a partner, have a discussion. A discussion that might feel like an explosion, but actually might serve to prevent one.

And maybe one day one of my boys will announce they are getting married. Maybe these signs will be an opportunity for me to counsel them - to guide them - to hand to them to use as daily guardrails, a daily taking of the marriage temperature.

Fevers can often be more manageable than the disease that follows.

Divorce rarely pops up as "it's over" - it more often spends years laying the fuse that will one day make a slow fade look like a bomb just went off.

Fuses can be undone.

More often than not, exploding bombs can not.

​Some of our greatest unhappiness lives in the gap between who we are and who we pretend to be.

When how we act looks like how the world wants us to act, the world tends to applaud. It gives us likes, promotions, invitations, belonging.

It says, “Yes, that’s it. That’s how you’re supposed to be.”

But applause and peace are not the same thing.

Most of us learn early how to read the room. We learn what gets smiles. What gets approval. What keeps us safe. So we become fluent in performance long before we become fluent in ourselves.

But there is a price to be paid when our performance becomes more of a show for the world than a show of ourselves.

For a while, it works. People think we’re doing well. We look functional. Responsible. Put together. We are being what the world needs from us. But slowly something else begins to ache. Because there is a quiet cost to living as a version of yourself that was built for everyone else.

I’ve had many sleepless nights in my life, lying awake, wrestling in the dark with the man I dragged home from the light of day.

It's exhaustion. It's a nighttime of the body and soul screaming "This isn't me. This is who I learned to be."

But when the man in the dark gets committed to looking like the man in the light, something different happens.

Relief. Alignment. A sense of peace and contentment and joy that no amount of approval ever gave us.

Our nervous systems thrives under the cloud of truth. As does our heart and soul and spirit. From the moment we stop asking, "How should I be?" and start asking, "Who am I when I'm not afraid to be who I am?" life changes.

The world might be happier when you look the way it wants you to, but chances are YOU will be happier when you finally look like you. The question then becomes, whose happiness are you most committed to serving?

And I should say, I am not a big believer in chasing happiness, but when happiness becomes a natural consequence of living in your truth, it starts to feel like happiness has been chasing you.

And that is a chase I can fully embrace.

In the light AND in the dark....

​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.

​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.

​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.

​In a recent podcast interview, Steve Bartlett asked Brené Brown, “Have you ever overcome anything?”

She answered, “Yes, I have overcome the belief that I will ever overcome anything.”

Those were timely and powerful words.

I am in the process of writing the final words of my book - the ending. And to be honest with you, I thought this would be the easiest part to write. After this long and often arduous process of digging up and writing the story of my life, I imagined that the words on the other side of all that digging would come easily.

They have not.

Why?

Because I’ve felt pressure - an internal pressure - to find some beautiful way to say look at all I’ve overcome while knowing, deep inside, that in many ways, I’ve overcome nothing.

I’ve wanted so badly to tell the readers who may find themselves in my story, readers who carry demons much like mine, here is how you overcome them.

Yet as I write this ending, here they sit. My demons. As present as they have ever been.

But as Brené Brown seemed to suggest, the story - our story - isn’t about exiling demons as much as it is about getting to know them.

Brown went on to say:

“I have overcome the belief that I will ever arrive. I am grateful for the skills that I have that keep me more aligned with the person, the mom, the partner, the leader I want to be. But I try to stay very mindful that I am scary when I’m scared. That I catastrophize very easily, and that’s painful for everyone around me. And that I don’t need to be liked—because now, the person I’m going to betray last is me. Now the person I’m going to betray last is me.”

And it hit me, what’s the point of writing the most honest version of your life you’ve ever written, only to finish it by hiding again? Why introduce the world to your ugliest and most haunting demons, only to end by giving birth to a few more?

We live in a world that wants every story to have a happy ending.
But does it? Should it?

What if life has nothing to do with arriving and everything to do with learning on the way to never arriving?

What if healing isn’t about getting rid of our demons, but about getting to know them - about becoming, somehow, more human to our demons than they are to us?

And what if the greatest pain a demon can bring is not in haunting us, but in pressuring us to pretend they’re not there, to keep betraying ourselves?

I really have overcome the belief that I will ever overcome anything. That no longer feels like defeat. Because the more I think and write about it, the more I realize - there is no happier ending to a story.

"Now the person I'm going to betray last is me."

​John Mark Comer says, "The dark underside of radical individualism is loneliness."

And what is radical individualism?

Radical individualism is the belief that the highest good in life is personal autonomy - the idea that freedom, identity, and meaning come from being completely self-determined and independent of others.

Sociologists often classify the U.S. as a "highly individualistic society" on the cultural spectrum. The U.S. consistently ranks at or near the most individualistic extreme in global studies, meaning American socialization, policies, and even marketing language tend to reinforce "I" over "we."

So yes - we are radically individualized. And while that’s given us remarkable freedom - not always a bad thing - it’s also left us relationally impoverished. We’ve become experts at building lives, but beginners at belonging.

And that has a cost.

I talk with people often about connection and loneliness. So I believe the following stats when I hear:

- 54% of Americans say no one knows them well.

- 36% report they feel lonely frequently or almost all of the time - and that number goes up to 61% when we're talking about young adults.

I have written often about the ache of loneliness, the longing to be seen and known and held. Well, that ache isn't a flaw, it's the soul's memory calling us home. It's not punishment for being too sensitive or needy, that ache is evidence of God's divine architecture for our lives.

God created us with connection in our bones. In our hearts and souls and minds. Our earliest childhood development wires us to NEED connection, not have it as a lifelong bonus.

Radical individualism tells us to numb the ache - to prove we don’t need anyone. But when we deny that longing, we don’t become free; we become broken. The loneliness doesn’t disappear, it just hides beneath busyness, success, and self-reliance.

The truth is, loneliness isn’t a sign of something wrong with us; it’s something right within us trying to get our attention. It’s the soul whispering what God said from the beginning: It is not good for man to be alone.

But are we hearing the whisper?

I fear not.

The shouts of what's in it for me seem to grow louder by the day. The willingness to push others aside in the chase to have what's in it for me have become all the more forceful. And we seem to be blind to the reality that in actually getting what's in it for me, we are losing what is most critical to you and me.

Each other.

Connection.

Radical togetherness.

It always was and always will be our human design. Without it, the ache will only grow more hurtful and destructive.

​Storms.

It's so easy to see storms as thieves arriving in the middle of the night, intent on robbing us of hope.

But is it possible - maybe - that they arrive DELIVERING hope?

I know. That seems so backwards.

But how much time do we spend searching for hope in the good times, in the peaceful weather? The times that can feel like hope is just magically dancing all around us.

A gift given and not one sought.

If we're not careful, we can begin to focus on the dance and not the dancer. It is tranquil times that can lead us to believe that hope is found in our circumstances, in our situations, and not in the One who lives in us, unfazed by circumstances and situations, an endless and unwavering stream of hope.

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you believe in Him (Romans 15:13).

Paul reminds us here that hope is linked to joy, peace, and faith. It transcends our circumstances because it is placed in God’s unwavering nature.

Maybe storms come as a reminder of that. A reminder that the nature of hope has little to do with the nature of our lives, and everything to do with the nature of God.

Life can feel like an endless roller coaster of hope - up and down. But that is not life, that is us.

That is us wavering, not hope.

Not God.