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How to Love Your Enemies: No Faking Allowed
One of the biggest surprises that adult life has brought me is the fact that I have enemies. I’m not talking about the devil or even people who find me annoying. I am talking about bona fide enemies who actively wish me harm or who for reasons of their own, hate me. Another surprise that adult life brought my way is how easy it is to hate them back. Hatred is a bleak desert of an emotion. And it pretty much always leads to despair. After all, no life springs forth from the kind of hatred one feels towards someone similarly inclined towards oneself. And because we know that we…
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Five Lies that Undermine Your Sense of Belonging
C.S. Lewis once commented that belonging to a group is the strongest emotional drive a human possesses. I suppose social media is just the latest arena, though I think most people have some pretty visceral memories of the popular crowd in middle school. I haven’t thought about being popular in decades but it ranked among my top concerns throughout adolescence. I have since discovered that many never grow out of this phase. And for good reason. A sense of belonging is crucial to physical and mental health. Isolation is so stressful that it has now become a fully recognized mental illness all on its own in the latest iteration of…
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Revelation: How to Open the Eyes of Your Heart
Revelation is a curious occurrence. The word itself means a disclosure of information by a supernatural source in most dictionaries. As I played with the word, I broke it into two parts, ‘revel’ and ‘elation’ because they describe how I feel when the Lord shows me something I did not know before. I’m aware that the word’s root is about revealing but I don’t believe that all word constructions are accidental. I revel in the revelatory. Though God has opened up scriptures or whispered pieces of wisdom to my spirit, a particular revelation comes to mind when I go through my catalog of spiritual happenings. I attended a conference at…
Healing Through Art & Words
