Helping Others Archives

Meet Me Hiding in the Shadow

Events happen in our lives. Are you hiding in the shadow of them? Perhaps you need someone to bring some wisdom’d love into the dark. An event had happened in his life. He could tell you every detail. Well, his version of it, but it was as real to […]

Helping Others

The Bias to Retain Sin. Unforgiveness

We have a bias to hold on to things. To retain the hurts, but Jesus asks us to forgive. Perhaps we do this in little steps of vulnerability. Many years ago, I held a lot of unforgiveness toward someone. I retained it and it grew. Eventually, I had to choose […]

Helping Others Mental health

A Christmas Rejection – No Place For You

It wasnt so much a closed door, it was more a Christmas rejection. There is no place for you here. I watched him as he told me he wasn’t going to his family’s Christmas party. He had felt a lot of rejection from his family and now he couldn’t […]

Helping Others Mental health

The Beauty of an Empowering Question

I want to know, and because I want to know I will ask empowering questions. Ones that open up the treasure chest of the heart and mind. It felt more like an interrogation than an invitation. Questions poured out. Demanding, angry, harsh questions that sent me into a state of […]

Helping Others Relationships & Connection

When No One Understands You. 11 Reasons

When no one understands you, it can create a deep sense of loneliness. Perhaps there are reasons for the lack of being known. Forgive them anyway. They were carrying something precious. Their inner world. Thoughts, feelings, motivations, desires, pains, and joys. Everything that goes on within their life and sometimes […]

Getting Well Staying Well Helping Others

You’re not a Problem to be Fixed

Sometimes you can feel like you are a problem to be fixed, but you’re not that. You may have problems, but not a problem. You’re not a problem to be fixed. Neither are you a personality to be probed. You’re not a diagnosis, a number, or a category. You may […]

Helping Others Mental health

A Diet of Sighs and Groans

Sighs and groans can come with such ease, but inhaling is also necessary. So we take note of our diet of breath. ‘That was a deep sigh,’ he said to me. I hadn’t noticed it, but he was right. I had let out a long deep sigh into the safety […]

Helping Others Mental health

The Call to Endure

You wake up and see a new day, but you didn’t want to wake up. So it’s a call to endure and go deep with God. They want the pain to end. The struggle of the journey has become too much. That’s the underlying theme of many of the emails […]

Getting Well Staying Well Helping Others

The Tangible and Tactile way to better Mental Health

Are you out of balance? Perhaps what you need for your mental health are more activities that are tangible and tactile. In the 1980s, my father and I spent many months building new fences on the farm. We would clear the old post and wire fence away and make a […]

Helping Others Spiritual Formation

Sitting Shiva is to say ‘I am with you’

Grief is hard, but grieving alone can be a torment of anguish, so we sit with the broken; we are silent and Shiva to the tears. When my father cried loud and hard, I experienced a kind of solidarity in my grief. A child had died, and a funeral was […]