Empathy for the Overwhelmed
When we are facing momentous and challenging times, we don’t sense the strength and comfort we’d gain from the counsel and support of empathetic others.
When we are facing momentous and challenging times, we don’t sense the strength and comfort we’d gain from the counsel and support of empathetic others.
Stress does something to us, and over the longer term, it changes us.
The only way we can be kind over the long haul is by nurturing kindness within.
Addiction is such an understandable response to pain because as human beings we need to escape it.
This is not a message for the masses, but it could be one for you if you’re about to throw in the towel.
There is a time for depth and intimate sharing, just as there is a time for superficiality and distance.
When life is given away for the purposes of love, a force within us grows and overflows.
Suffering often leads us to a pathway right to the door of God’s presence.
Judgmental attitudes and punishing behaviors don’t come from a calm, serene core—it comes from a place within that is deeply insecure.
We need to hold back rash action that will cast the fragments of our dreams.
Healthy relationships are rewarding but they can be harder to maintain.
Resilience is required just as much for when chips are increasing as much as when the chips are down.
At just the time you surrender control, you gain control.
Most of all, service is a string line to life.
Believing in a person’s resilience to bounce back after failure is inherent in their spiritual survival.
Indeed, we cannot manipulate our family and think that good things will come.
There comes a point where that material blessing has our spiritual blessing ebbing away.
The Christian way of looking at death is paradoxical.
We’re to have the same zeal for poise in the ‘triumph’ of adulation as we are during the ‘disaster’ of condemnation.
The blessing of facing our pain, our hardships, our truth that can’t be denied, is freedom.
What if the good part and the dark part are one and the same?
It is the disordered place, the place where life makes little or no sense, the place of death and of grief.
The entitlement mindset wins neither friend nor favor, yet there are many who insist on having everything their own way.
Suffice to say, the pain of child loss reaches the realms of the inexplicable, and I’m comforted that as a pastor, the Bible speaks of such pain the same confounding way.
We’re laying up for ourselves spoil that can never be spoiled.
If pain or loss or disappointment cannot get us down, if we refuse to give up when we don’t get our own way, when we can smile in our lonely being, nothing can defeat us.
While much of advocacy might consist of words written and spoken in direct context for the support of a person or group, it’s not an advocacy to espouse the theory and not support people in practice.