I’m enjoying the direction the new blog is going. Forcing myself to tackle an issue or share some bit of life each day has been a terrific exercise in both writing and thinking. And I’ve enjoyed our dialogue, as well. I try to chime in once or twice per blog, but I read every comment. Thanks for your interest. Here is what’s coming up this week:
Monday: The Problem with Black and White Thinking
On Monday I’ll look at the problem [...]
Years ago I read a little psychology book by Don Riso and Russ Hudson about personality types, a topic I geek out on, to be honest. The book talked about the character faults of different personalities, and as I read my own, I became a bit dismayed. I wondered how I could change negative characteristics that seemed to be interwoven in my DNA. How would I change who I seemed to be in my core?
When novelists sit down to write a narrative, there is a question they ask themselves in order to create exciting and meaningful stories, and that same question can also create a more exciting and meaningful life. That question is: What if?
J.R.R. Tolkien once asked the question What if there existed a place called Middle Earth, and What if Middle Earth were under threat? Every good story begins with some form of this question, and so does every life.
Whenever a novel [...]
I used to play golf but I wasn’t very good. I rented a DVD, though, that taught me a better way to swing, and after watching it a few times and spending an hour or so practicing, I knocked ten strokes off my game. I can’t believe how much time I wasted when a simple DVD saved me years of frustration. I’d say something similar is true in my writing career. If you read these books, your writing will [...]
If I’ve a primal sin, it’s cynicism. I don’t normally make fun of people (I got too much of that in elementary school and am sensitive to it) but man do I roll my eyes a lot. I roll my eyes when things get mushy. Every girlfriend I’ve ever had has, at one time or another, become frustrated when I started making jokes as the conversation became too intimate. I’m only thankful the jokes were actually funny (if you [...]
Yesterday I fired off an e-mail to a friend, only in the e-mail I referred to him by another name. I’d been e-mailing a few guys at the same time and slipped up. My friend e-mailed me back, joking with me, and in a subsequent e-mail, he called me Dan. And even though I’d been the one to first make the mistake, and even though my friend knows and loves me, seeing my name misspelled still stung a little [...]
Since Million Miles came out about six months ago, It’s been an honor to hear the many stories of what people have done with their lives after reading the book. I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve heard. But there is another kind of story I find equally as inspiring, and it’s the story of people who’ve encountered hardships and yet have found beauty in the midst of their pain. I first read Kelle and Brett Hampton’s [...]
Every morning, when it isn’t cloudy, I’ve got a pretty good view of sunrise out my windows. I don’t pull down the shades, so the light wakes me up. It all happens so slow, so effortless and it reminds me that very little that I’m worried about actually matters. I love that God stops our progress, makes our physical bodies go into a temporary coma, then wakes us up again so we can get a little more work done. [...]
Perhaps one of the hardest things to do is to love your enemies, to love the people who attack you. And yet, when you look at the civil rights movement, or Ghandi’s non-violent uprising in India, it’s power is obvious. Recently, a talk-show host named Glenn Beck (I’ve never seen his show, so I am unfamilliar) began attacking churches that speak of justice, telling Christians to leave churches that are helping the poor under what Beck calls a Marxist [...]
Interjecting from my post yesterday about rituals and commercialism, I wanted to expand on the idea of rituals as they relate to faith.
I do not believe there is specific, magical power in communion or church attendance, but I do believe communion is a way to interact with God (just as sharing a meal is a way to interact with friends) and that there is power in the meditative aspect of the act. That is, there is power in the [...]
