In a recent planning session, a friend wanted to find out what my core values were. I’m embarrassed to say I couldn’t state them immediately. I had to think a little bit before I said something like truth and art and that sort of thing. My friend then asked what sort of scenarios or events or even people made me angry. And I knew the answer to that immediately. Injustice makes me angry, specifically when somebody is controlling and takes [...]

The last few times I’ve interacted with groups on an adventure, I’ve tried something new. Normally, when I meet new people, I act out my insecurities. What I mean is, I’ll drop names or try to control the situation or say things I think will return respect. This never works. While I enjoy the time, I usually feel like I talked too much and didn’t really let people get to know me. I feel more like I put on a [...]

My friend Pete recently let me in on a paradigm shift I found helpful. He was talking about a friend of his who, for some reason, was taking up a bit too much of his mental space. He was beginning to feel responsible for a friends bad decisions. Another friend of Pete’s said that Pete needed to be responsible TO his friend, not FOR his friend.

Pete explained this meant he was responsible to be kind to his friend, understanding, [...]

At midnight on Sunday the 30th, some friends from Texas and I will summit Mt. Hood and you can follow our adventures live on the internet. We have a GPS spotting unit that will mark our coordinates every ten minutes or so. You can follow our trek here. (Make sure to click on the Satellite view so you can actually see the mountain) It should take us about six or seven hours to summit, and about that long to [...]

If you’ve read A Million Miles in a Thousand Years and wanted to know more about starting a new story, or just making your existing story more meaningful, we’ve put together a Living a Better Story Seminar here in Portland at the end of September. It will be a relatively small, intimate and personal seminar in which we will go through the elements of a meaningful life. My hope is that attendees will leave having a clearly mapped out [...]

I’ll be out of pocket for the next seven days or so. I still intend to update the blog, though not as frequently. Several guys are showing up from Texas and we are hoping to climb Mt. Hood. I’ve been worried about the weather, because we have had nothing but rain here for weeks, but it looks like the weather is going to break Friday and stay semi-clear through Monday and that means we will attempt to Summit. It’s [...]

About every twentieth comment on this blog, somebody says something sharp or harsh. Often it’s insulting to me, personally. And I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me. I do go through all the comments and manually approve them. I do this about three or four times each day. I’d say I let 95% of the comments go through. The only comments I report to spam are comments that are mean spirited. When comments get mean spirited, people [...]

Several years ago I went to Toronto to see my friend Jason Hildebrand do a one-man play (that was terrific). Jason couldn’t pick me up from the airport, so he sent a friend. I came out by baggage claim and saw a man holding one of my books up like a sign, so I went over and introduced myself. He said his name was Ben, and he’d be driving me around for the next couple days. Ben and I had [...]

I’ve heard this little phrase in Christian circles that says “you can be the person God designed you to be.” The implications of the phrase are:

1. You are not the person God designed you to be and

2. The speaker or writer has some sort of formula that is going to help you become who God intended for you to be.

Now to be sure, every time I’ve heard this the intentions have been terrific. It’s always the nicest (and for that [...]