“I beg your pardon. I never promised you a rose garden. Along with the sunshine, There’s gotta be a little rain sometime.” – Lynn Anderson, 1970 I have looked up the weather forecast for your area, for all of 2023. Here it is – there’s gotta be a little rain sometime. Rain gets a bad…
God has given us three kinds of sight; we need all three. Let’s talk about that last one – hindsight. Sometimes our past is our best teacher. During his commencement address at Stanford University, Steve Jobs said, “You can only connect the dots by looking backward.” The Bible encourages us, “Remember the days of old,…
Are you a problem solver? While that can be a good thing, it comes with a downside. Reflecting on his work as a psychiatrist, Carl Jung discovered a fascinating truth about seemingly insurmountable problems. They can’t be solved. They can only be outgrown. We all have problems that cannot be solved. For me that includes…
I’m not a student of Albert Einstein, nor do I have evidence that he battled addictions. But he said something that every addict should embrace. It is one of the most important principles in recovery from any addiction or destructive habit. “A problem cannot be solved,” said Einstein, “from the same level of consciousness that…
In 2009, a dendrologist named Dr. Martin Gossner was researching the resilience of tree bark. When he cut back a piece of bark on an old tree in the Bavarian Forest National Park, he was stunned by his discovery of the living organisms behind that piece of bark: The tree, Dr. Gossner concluded, had become…
Happy New Year! This is the best day of the year to plan 365 days of sobriety. And there is no better place to start than in God’s Word. So as you set your vision for the long game, let me give you a Bible verse that can define your success in 2023. Spoiler alert…
David Letterman said, “Halloween is the beginning of the holiday shopping season. That’s for women. The beginning of the shopping season for men is Christmas Eve.” Here’s the bigger lesson. Men and women are different. In fact, I’ll go even further. Ready for this? Men and men are different. Women and women are different. You…
A pastor opened his mail one day. Inside one envelope was a sheet of paper with just one word written on it – “FOOL.” The next Sunday, the pastor took that sheet into the pulpit. He announced, “I have received a few letters over the years, in which the writer forgot to sign his name.”…
On September 2, 1892, a boxer named Gentleman Jim Corbett stepped into the ring with arguably the greatest boxer who would ever live, John L. Sullivan. Sullivan was the last heavyweight champion of the bare-knuckle era and the first champion who wore gloves. In fifty fights, he had never lost. This night would be different.…
When I was a kid, I rode my bicycle everywhere. You could do that back then. It was safe to ride through the neighborhood, down any street, and along the bayous. No one asked where I was going; it never occurred to us that riding a bike was unsafe. There is really just one skill…