In 2021 Susan Porter said, “When you know and understand how completely you are loved as a child of God, it changes everything. It changes the way you feel about yourself when you make mistakes. It changes how you feel when difficult things happen. It changes your view of God’s commandments. It changes your view of others and of your capacity to make a difference.” This is true of me. Understanding God’s love changed everything because it changed my mind.
Feeling loved all the time sounds great, but what does it look like in the frame of real lived experience? I work a job. I pay bills. I help my diabetic children count carbs and calculate units. Outwardly I look like an average member of my social class. But I have an invisible source of peace and satisfaction. All the small things that make life good have extra flavor because I interpret them as microsigns from a deity who prepared all of this as an opportunity for me. Every blooming tree and every snowy mountain are a gesture of God’s love.
I have a fear of being forsaken. I’m told we all do. I usually hear it explained from an evolutionary biology perspective. Our species survived by banding together in social groups and to lose that group is a death sentence. This is a plausible explanation for why the constant love of a tireless God would be so attractive. God offers the ultimate social group. You and your loved ones have guaranteed survival and are even guaranteed to thrive so long as you don’t leave God’s tribe. “The Father hath not left me alone,” Jesus said, “He that sent me is with me.”
This is a book I started about faith and thinking right. Do you love it? Hate it? I want to hear from you. My email is in the footer.
]]>I think there are lots of ingredients, and color is one of them. Compelling details. Imagination-inducing immersion. My back yard, for example, is a pitiful yard. We wanted to take care of it once, but we didn’t have the time or the know-how. It’s 60% patchy grass, 10% garden boxes (which don’t like bad), 10% weeds, 10% disorderly woodpile , 8% things-that-would-be-beautiful-if-they-weren’t-slowly-decaying-or-dying, and 2% dog poops. All atop a thin, well-drained layer of sand and small rocks. There’s a crabgrass corner. A sand-n-weeds corner. A disorderly woodpile corner. And an odd mound comprised entirely of dead sod - let’s call it Frankenhill. It’s not long for a Frankenstein to be buried there, but if Frankenstein were to magically transform into a mound of dead sod, that’s about what he’d look like. Also, a couple of water barrels which have been laying on their sides near the fence for months.
Enough about color, it’s time to move on to voice. Jake introduced me to this concept. It’s the tone and the emotion and the formality of the words. The meaning that’s added by how you said what you said. The style of your expression.
Lastly (this is not an exhaustive list), there’s the novelty. The creativity of your expression. The metaphor and the improv and the originality of your language. I think it’s gotta be fresh.
But I’m no expert on the subject. What do you think makes good writing?
]]>I have, but maybe I’m past it now.
My last (or is it just the most recent?) grapple with self-worth centered around a job application. I was a mess. Angry. Defensive. But it was unfounded. I suppose it’s because of an earlier experience. There was this job that I wanted. And I think I was a good fit. But they turned me away without an in-person interview, and I felt mad because I felt like I’d done well in the preliminaries. I was probably also a little frustrated because I felt trapped in the job I had at the time. I had attached some pretty significant meanings to the outcome of that job application, but really I was just drawing wild conclusions.
But what about you? Do you ever feel like you’re not good enough? Why? Is there evidence that could prove it?
Maybe Cognitive Behavioral Therapy could help you. It’s supposed to help with wrongthink - the incorrect and unfounded stories that we tell ourselves. Stories that can easily be controverted by objective facts.
In my experience the truth is powerful. Especially the truth about yourself.
Question your assumptions. Examine your interpretations. Evaluate the facts. It’s possible you should feel better about yourself than you do.
]]>“You’re good, bro.” That’s what he said as he floated past.
That’s all he said, and I didn’t see his face, and he didn’t know me, but I felt like he understood me. I felt proud because I was good. Not good good, but learning-and-improving good. I was getting this. I was getting better at turning on my toes. And another snowboarder on the ski lift had noticed and recognized me.
I was still thinking about our encounter an hour later during lunch. I still think about it now - more than a year later. I was touched by a tiny bit of recognition given by a stranger at exactly the right moment. I’ve been watching for a chance to do the same for someone else, but I don’t know if I’ve managed it yet. Maybe there’s no way of knowing when the time is right. No way of knowing that what you say will touch someone’s heart. Maybe you just have to give sincere praise whenever you can. Even when it might not be that meaningful to the other person. On the off chance that you’ll create some significant memory. Maybe the snowboarder on the ski lift knew exactly what he was doing. But I had just fallen over trying to turn, and I didn’t acknowledge him. I never saw him. Maybe he doesn’t know.
]]>I recently took a new job, and I left my old job right before my old company paid out their annual bonuses. I say “right before”, but I didn’t know exactly when bonuses would be paid. Still don’t. I asked a couple of people that I knew, and the closest I got to a concrete prognostication was a friend who told me “Either the first or the fifteenth (of March)”.
If I had known the exact day bonuses would be paid, I would have declared that as my last day at my old company. But I didn’t know the exact day. In hindsight, I should have asked, “What day should I choose for my last day if I want a 50% or greater chance of getting my bonus?”
While interviewing for my new job I thought it would look better if I said I could start right away. But interviews aside, I was ready to move on and wanted to start this new job as soon as possible. I had outgrown my old job a while ago, and when they asked if I wanted to start on March 4th, I said yes.
But I wasn’t locked into the 4th. I could change it - push it back a few weeks no question asked, and push it back a month if I had a good reason. I asked my wife what she thought. I told her I could start later if she wanted to ensure we got the bonus from my old company. She said she would be happy either way and told me that she knew I’d been waiting to do something new for a long time. That was our first conversation.
After that first conversation with my wife I started asking friends at work if they knew when bonuses would be paid. I wanted to give my wife another chance at choosing the bonus, knowing the exact day it would be paid. But as we’ve established, nobody I know knew the exact day. I asked her again about changing my date of departure, and again she told me she didn’t need the bonus and would be happy with whatever I chose.
I decided to stick with March 4th as my start date, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Because it would be rational to stay until bonus time. I made a good living at my old job, and was going to be making even more at my new job, so I didn’t need the $10,000 bonus. But even if you don’t need $10,000 it’s hard to convince yourself that you don’t need $10,000. And a voice in your head will remind you that your peers will criticise you for leaving $10,000 on the table.
I thought over my decision multiple times, but I always ended in the same spot. I wanted to move on immediately, and I didn’t want to wait in uncertainty. So I gave up $10,000 to start a new job a little sooner.
]]>Good news! Now that we live in the future we can opt out of having ads in our blogs and websites.
There’s more than one solution. The one that I’m using for this site is called Jekyll. It’s pretty simple to get started. If you want to try it out just read on!
You can find the quickstart here. As part of the quickstart you’ll be installing Ruby on your computer. Don’t worry, it’s simple. Also, you’ll be running some simple commands in a command prompt of your choice. Unfamiliar with command prompts? Not to worry! The Internet has got your back. Or ask a friend. Someone you know can teach you how. And it’s a skill you can use for the rest of your life.
First, edit the _config.yml file. Just follow the instructions contained in the file. Change some things and see what happens - it’s very easy. Once you are satisfied with your _config.yml, edit about.md. There are instructions and examples in there. Try some stuff. See what happens. The next step after that is to follow the instructions and edit the contents of the files in the _posts folder.
This is probably the most challenging step, but still not hard. Git is widely popular. If you get stuck or lost, ask someone you know to teach you. You don’t have to know a whole lot about git to get your website off the ground.
You can sign up for a github account here.
And you can learn about github pages here.
That’s it. Nothing else to it. Jekyll can do a lot more than what we’ve covered thus far, but if you’re like me then you can be perfectly content with what you’ve got at this point.
]]>I was looking for something to do. I tried to find something substantive on Youtube, and I kind of succeeded. I watched a couple of Ted Talks but finished in 20 minutes, and then I was back where I started. So I searched for books on Amazon and on the Kindle App. I found one I was really interested in, but it wasn’t available in eBook format. And then my search ran dry. I ended up filling the time by dismantling junk in our back yard.
We collect junk. It doesn’t look like junk when we first acquire it, but shortly after it takes up residence in our yard we lose interest in it and it becomes junk. And some of it’s too big to put straight into the trash can, so I decomposed a couple of these junk things and threw some of the pieces away.
In a perfect world I wouldn’t have a back yard where junk multiplied. But back yards and junk and decreased freedom just come naturally when you’re raising small children. I love my children. And I don’t have to feel trapped when I need to stay home with them. But sometimes it’s hard not to feel trapped. Sometimes I feel trapped.
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