An unfortunate part of our society is that those focused on balancing budgets end up deflating imagination, robbing us of community and narrowing our values to being primarily economic in nature. We are seeing the…
Empathy is a way of seeing the world and the people in it. Empathy I think is a way that our hearts are bent in order to better be people of love. It’s a way…
Darryl Silvestri wrote this to me a few months ago in an attempt to explain vulnerability in a relationship. I want you to imagine you are playing the egg toss game. This is love. You…
Why do pastors so often treat congregations with the impatience and violence of developers building a shopping mall instead of the patient devotion of a farmer cultivating a field? The shopping mall will be abandoned in…
I am not much of an artist in the traditional sense. I can’t draw, paint, sing, play or perform. I lean to the analytical side of the spectrum and spend a good amount of time…
A poem I wrote the night before she died. Below is a prayer and eulogy I wrote for the funeral today. Here is the MP3 file for the entire funeral. Sadness strikes the heart of…
Naivety allows one to face into fate Each day comes and goes Why accept what you know to be true? Might as well believe in something else Peace comes through ignorance Each day comes and…
Dave, a friend of mine, responded to me about my post on Men’s Vulnerability Group and I thought it was worth re-posting some of it. I have begun to realize and set aside all forms…
Based on a few conversations with some great counselor friends, we at theStory have started a group which we call Men’s Vulnerability Group. The idea for the group started because of the realization that community…
Why do we hate to be rejected? Why does it hurt? Rejection is nothing more than a cognitive disposition towards someone. It’s just how someone thinks about you. In order for rejection to be effective,…
I am an external processor. This means that I think out loud. This blog is a great example of how my personality works. When I have an idea, the very act of writing it down…
When someone gets angry we should never take it at face value. I’ve learned this a number of ways. I learned it first in experiencing people’s anger with my blog posts. I’ll say something like…
A little while ago I was asking if maybe violence was necessary sometimes. For myself, I still take a perspective of non-violence is a discipline and direction that I want to live my life, but…
Potlucks is the oldest and most consistent tradition that we have at theStory. From our very first meeting as a community, we met in each other’s homes and ate together. The importance of such a…
This excerpt is from Sapiens: Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in peoples…
Guilt and empathy are not two things that you would normally think would go together. But I’ve been thinking lately of their connection on two different levels. The first is that empathetic people generally are…
One of the aims of November was to ask ourselves the question of “now what” in regards to some of the current issues around us. The one’s I suggested to the lead team were the…
Humans have this need to summarize and simplify our belief system. When you ask people what they believe in, at the core of their being, you get very concise answers. You hear things like God,…
Faith by it’s very nature is a choice to hold to something that cannot be proven. It is a choice of hope despite the lack of evidence that any exists or does not exist. Those…
One of the things I’ve grown passionate about with our church is to really spell out and communicate our church practices. As it is these types of practices form us into certain kinds of people….