marriage

Finding Real Intimacy

March 26, 2024

If you are not truly listening to another and tuning into the reality and depth of their inner experience, you will become abusive. Then the other person is merely an object to you, simply there to meet whatever you express as your needs. They are no longer human – someone you can be discovering and learning to love. That is why knowing self – discovering the universe inside yourself – is so important. Carefully examining your own interiority with grace, you will undoubtedly find things worth exploring and redeeming. The same must be true about all the other flesh sacks walking around. We all contain multitudes. Read More

Grace is Pervasive

March 27, 2021

When I said I was deeply Christian, I wasn’t just saying that. Grace is the number one reason. Most of my life, I have been captivated by the phenomenon of grace in the Christian story. Maybe it’s because I was a guilty child, but maybe it’s because grace is a revolution in thinking for all of us. Maybe we are just built to be big containers for grace. When you drink from that well, a big reservoir opens up inside you and grace is the only thing. Read More

The Difficulty of Intimacy

December 31, 2015

To truly be in relationship is a difficult thing. Our greatest desire is to be connected and intimate with someone and so, consequently, our greatest fear is that will not happen. This fear plays out in the many ways we throw up defenses that prevent intimacy from occurring. Why do we do that? Because we are afraid of rejection, abandonment, not getting the relationship we desire. Even when we have what seems like opportunity for intimacy, we protect ourselves from it to avoid risk. The risk is requisite to trust. Even in what we would call close relationships with trusted people, we activate defenses which prevent us from connecting. Read More

Grieving

November 11, 2014

In order to love and accept our life and those around us as they are, we must learn to grieve what we thought they would be. Without doing that, we will always love our ideals more than we love the actual thing. This does not mean we have to stop wishing for things, for hope is a good thing. In fact, if we do not do this sort of grieving, we will not be able to hope. We will only have depression – the kind that follows when we do not get what we thought we should have. Everyone goes through this kind of disillusionment – mostly in our adulthood (there is a normal developmental idealism that carries us through our youth). Our marriages, our careers and our lives in general undergo this disillusionment and it is totally normal! Maturity is the consistent “surrendering” of our ideals to attempt to love what is, rather than what we hoped would be. Again, the hope is good. Our demands for what we hope are what are dangerous. Read More