“Divine Transcendence” is a fancy vocabulary for, “God will use this moment.” I spent the afternoon with a woman who practices “being present.” This means that her world is not focused on her. Her world is about whoever is across the table from her. She practices listening as a simple way to love. God has […]

“Do you trust me to love and care for you?” “Nnnnno.” It felt so wrong to say. No? How could that possibly be the right answer? I don’t admire anyone more than the woman who asked me. If I was saying “no” to her, I would have said “no” to anyone. Did I really not […]

And therein lies the problem: how can we help our children (and our spouses, friends and co-workers) achieve their goals without undermining their sense of personal accountability and motivation to achieve them? The answer, research suggests, is that our help has to be responsive to the recipient’s circumstances: it must balance their need for support […]

Bored, I thumbed through the inflight magazine and settled on the article accompanying a picture of a man my age, wearing a shirt that read, “because I said I would.” He had started a non-profit company of the same name that focuses on the virtue of keeping promises. Interesting. I read on. This company prints […]

We live in dual reality. There is the reality of this place, this person across the table from me. How they feel is real and so is how I feel about them, but this is not where I am a soldier. I am at war against what I cannot see–with what is going on in […]

I suppose this story starts with my gamer friend. Having no fascination of my own for video games, I was intrigued by his sleepless devotion. He talked about games like a protagonist narrates a great adventure story. When he did sleep, he would have fabulous dreams of being a hero, always narrowly avoiding death, always […]