In the 1980s, anti-gay hysteria reached a fever pitch. By 1996, attitudes toward homosexuality had changed little, with only 27% of Americans in support of same-sex marriage. But by 2011, the majority of Americans favored same-sex marriage, with young people overwhelmingly supportive.

How does a culture transform at such an unprecedented rate?

Perhaps we hold the answer in the palm of our hands…

smart phones and same-sex marriage

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I grew up in a rural town in the heart of Illinois. Black people were an oddity, homosexuality was a locker room joke, and an immigrant was someone who moved in from one town over. Now, my sister is married to a Black man who is both a brother and a friend, and two of the most trustworthy and caring men in my life have been gay.

And in 2004, I met an immigration attorney.

I was completing my post-doc residency, a young psychologist eager to debate anything including immigration and foreign policy. Meanwhile, the small immigration law office down the street needed someone to provide psychological evaluations.

Someone cheap.

Like an unlicensed post-doc trying to feed a growing family.

Almost a decade later, I’ve completed over two hundred evaluations. And I don’t debate immigration anymore. Because immigration no longer exists for me as a concept to debate. Immigration is immigrants. Immigration is people. Immigration is a living, bleeding story.

Immigration is a man who came to our country legally. A man who works seventy hours a week to support a family in the U.S. and ailing parents back home. A man whose wife was brought to the country illegally when she was five years old. A man whose wife is now a legal resident but is being removed from the U.S. as a penalty for how she arrived. A man whose children will not be able to function without their mother. A man who is having panic attacks and lives his days powerless to hold his family together.

Immigration is no longer an issue I debate. Immigration is people I value.

And I think a generation of people is beginning to feel the same way about homosexuality and same-sex marriage.

Homosexuality Isn’t an Issue, It’s People

Technology has begun to connect us in previously unimaginable ways. In my once isolated rural hometown, you can stand in the middle of main street with a smartphone and video chat with almost anyone in the world. Across the globe, our lives are becoming deeply intertwined and the cast of characters in each of our stories is expanding exponentially.

And it’s changing everything.

For many of us, our stories have become inseparable from the stories of our gay relative, lesbian friend, or our questioning co-worker or barista or Facebook friend or blog subscriber or Twitter follower or son or daughter.

When we let people from other “groups” into our lives—and even more importantly into our hearts—politics begins to fade, and we experience humanity in a whole new way.

As one.

This sense of unity was described by astronaut Frank White as the overview effect:

“I was looking out the window, and as I was looking down at the planet, the thought came to me, ‘Anyone living…on the moon would always have an overview. They would see things that we know but don’t experience, which is that the earth is one system, we’re all a part of that system, and that there is a certain unity and coherence to it all.’ And I immediately called it ‘the overview effect’.”

But I don’t think we need to orbit the earth to experience the overview effect. We merely need to enter into the cosmos of another person’s heart.

A generation of people has launched itself into the hearts of others, and there is a growing sense of unity and coherence amongst people. And as a result, for many people, homosexuality is no longer an intellectual or theological concept to debate.

Homosexuality is people we know and love and cherish.

Trading in Our Egos for Unity

In the next month, the Supreme Court is likely to announce its decision regarding the definition of marriage. The debates will be, I’m afraid, increasingly vicious and dehumanizing, because violent debate is the only kind of debate that exists between egos.

Our egos tell us our worth exists in comparison to other people. So our egos have a huge stake in maintaining a sense of division. Our egos will cling to our differences and strip others of their dignity, in order to clutch on to a fabricated sense of superiority. Our egos will relish the bitter debate.

But I hope.

I hope a generation of people who have experienced a sense of connection and unity and coherence will give birth to an entirely different kind of conversation.

I hope a generation of people will zip the lips of their egos and speak with the tongue of their hearts.

I hope a generation of people will speak out from the calm, quiet place within where fear is wilting, egos are withering, and grace is blooming.

I hope a generation of people will reach out to each other with grace.

Because grace is always an invitation.

Grace pulls us together, instead of driving us apart. Grace transforms our dialogue from a battle into a homecoming. Grace turns our most contentious debates into subversive acts of love and belonging:

They become an opportunity to love,

to joyfully enter into the story of another,

to make peace,

to listen with patience,

to reach out in kindness,

to give create something good,

to be faithful in relationship,

to be gentle in our differences,

and to control ourselves instead of everyone else.

Regardless of what we believe about homosexuality and marriage, I hope we will trade in our egos for that kind of unity.

I hope.

———

Comments: You can share your thoughts or reactions at the bottom of this post.                

Audio: To listen to an audio version of this post, click on this link: How Smartphones Paved the Way for Same-Sex Marriage (Audio) [If you would like to save it to your device for later listening, right click the link and choose the option to save.]

Free eBook: My eBook, The Marriage Manifesto: Turning Your World Upside Down, is available free to new blog subscribers. If you are not yet a subscriber, you can click here to subscribe, and your confirmation e-mail will include a link to download the eBook. Or, the book is also now available for Kindle and Nook

Preview: Next Wednesday’s post is tentatively entitled, “Breaking News: Global Uprising, No Going Back.”

Disclaimer: This post is not professional advice. It should be read as you would read a “self-help” book. For professional and customized advice, you should seek the services of a counselor, who can become more intimately familiar with your specific situation. Counselors can be located through your insurance network or through your state psychological association.

For millennia, the world has been torn apart and patched together again. A month ago, it felt like something tugged hard at the world and the stitches began to pop. One after another. After another…

gratitude

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The Week the Stitches Popped

On a Sunday night, I read about Kermit Gosnell, a licensed physician in Philadelphia who is on trial for delivering live babies and then cutting their spinal cords with scissors.

On Monday afternoon, the Boston Marathon was bombed. Three people died. Legs were amputated.

On Wednesday morning, I was brought to a standstill on the highway. A massive accident shut down all six lanes of the interstate in front of me. For hours.

That evening, a fertilizer plant in west Texas exploded. On an ordinary night, it just blew up. Fourteen people were killed. Two hundred were injured.

Around the same time, the rains in Chicago began in earnest. When the sun rose on Thursday morning, Chicagoland was submerged in a historic flood. Our basement and garage were no exception.

Late Thursday night, gunfire broke out on MIT’s campus. One bombing suspect was dead. Another was injured and on the run.

Friday. Chicago remained a town-under-water while from Watertown, Massachusetts, the television broadcast surreal scenes of door-to-door searches. The second suspect was caught around dinnertime and we went to bed with a sigh of relief.

But Saturday morning we awoke to news of a 7.0 magnitude earthquake in China’s Sichuan province. Two hundred more people dead.

Just one week of a world tearing at it’s patched and mended seams. One stitch after another.

And those are just the stitches of which I’m aware. We all had stitches popping that week that will never make the CNN scroll.

What are we to do in the midst of such devastation and heartache? The psychologists and the theologians are both telling us we should be grateful.

Grateful?

What good is gratitude when the world is tearing apart?

Gratitude as a Balm?

For centuries, almost every faith tradition has emphasized the practice of gratitude. And around the turn of this century, in an ongoing effort to bolster human resilience, “positive psychologists” took notice of the ancient traditions and sought to harness the practice of gratitude for the benefit of psychological and emotional health.

In the last decade, psychological research has consistently shown individuals who experience higher levels of gratitude also report higher levels of “subjective well-being”— they are happier, less depressed, less stressed, and more satisfied with their life and relationships.

This is good news, and the news is getting out. Countless books have been written, scores of “gratitude apps” can be downloaded to phones and tablets, and everyone seems to be talking about how much better they feel since they started their gratitude journal.

But I think there is bad news lurking beneath all the enthusiasm, because I’m hearing questions like, “I want to feel good, so how do I practice gratitude?”

The bad news is we’re turning gratitude into a tool to get what we want—to feel good. It’s tempting to use gratitude like a metal detector to hone in on comfort and satisfaction—it’s tempting to make it about us.

And when we do so, we strip gratitude of its ultimate power.

Gratitude Like Knee High Boots in Slop

On a flooded Thursday, my wife and I were faced with saturated carpet and warped furniture. Our basement was flooded with water, but even worse, my heart was flooded with despair.

Too many stitches were popping and it felt like a free fall without a net.

Then, around mid-morning, a friend texted me and simply asked, “What time am I coming over to help?” By mid-afternoon, he was hoisting rolls of carpet padding over his shoulders as it rained down dirty rainwater upon him.

On a flooded Thursday, my friend gave me something far more powerful than manpower. He gave me gratitude.

And the power of gratitude is this: it is the way we look outward instead of inward. It is the act by which we remember the world and forget ourselves. It puts our ego to sleep and awakens our sense of connection to everything and everyone else.

On a flooded Thursday, I didn’t feel warm and fuzzy—my toes were ice cubes and my fingers were shriveled prunes.

But on a flooded Thursday, I realized gratitude is like a pair of knee-high rain boots for the heart—when we put it on, we can wade right into the flood waters of sorrow and devastation this life and this world rain down upon us.

Gratitude Doesn’t Just Enjoy, It Joins

The storms-of-life are coming, aren’t they?

Or for some of us, they’ve already arrived and the waters are rising.

I don’t have any magic solutions for drying up the mess. But I do think, when we give ourselves over to a life of gratitude, we will be prepared to wade into the pain and suffering of our lives.

Yet I don’t think a life of authentic gratitude ends in self-preservation. Because when gratitude takes ahold of us, we begin to forget about ourselves altogether, and we start to remember a world that is tearing apart and in need of re-stitching.

You see, to a grateful heart:

The laughter of children is pure joy, and also a reminder of powerless women being taken advantage of by a corrupt doctor in Philadelphia.

A pair of running shoes and an open road is ecstasy, and also a reminder of bombs on a Monday afternoon and legs that will never run again.

Safe travels are a relief, and also a reminder that not everyone made it safely on a Wednesday morning.

A green lawn tipped with dew is suburban satisfaction, and also a reminder of a Wednesday night in a fiery fertilizer plant.

A clear dawn and the rays of a warm summer sun are a caress, and a reminder of a quaking earth in China held by the same Big Light.

I think gratitude might be the place where pain and peace meet. Because when our gratitude propels us into a torn-suffering world, we will be immersed in something other than ourselves.

And that, I think, is the definition of peace.

———

Comments: You can share your thoughts or reactions at the bottom of this post.                

Audio: To listen to an audio version of this post, click on this post title: What Good is Gratitude When the World is Tearing Apart [If you would like to save it to your device for later listening, right click the link and choose the option to save.]

Free eBook: My eBook, The Marriage Manifesto: Turning Your World Upside Down, is available free to new blog subscribers. If you are not yet a subscriber, you can click here to subscribe, and your confirmation e-mail will include a link to download the eBook. Or, the book is also now available for Kindle and Nook

Preview: Next Wednesday’s post is tentatively entitled, “How My Smartphone Paved the Way for Same-Sex Marriage.”

Disclaimer: This post is not professional advice. It should be read as you would read a “self-help” book. For professional and customized advice, you should seek the services of a counselor, who can become more intimately familiar with your specific situation. Counselors can be located through your insurance network or through your state psychological association.

“How many times is the truth that you take to be true, just truth falling apart at the same speed as you, until it all comes away in a million degrees, and you’re just a few pieces of falling debris?” —Josh Ritter, “Hopeful”

What if I told you certainty was a prison, and we lock our beliefs and our selves and our lives inside of it? What if I told you our one chance for redemption is rotting away within the prison cell of our certainty? Would you rattle the bars and clamor for a jailbreak?

certainty and belief

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When I was a beginning therapist at Penn State University—back when I had as much cocky self-assurance as I had hair—I had all sorts of misconceptions about psychotherapy and people. Early on, I was handed a diagnostic manual and the assumption that everyone who comes to therapy is fragile, uncertain, and full of doubt.

That assumption is gone (along with my hair).

Over the years, I’ve discovered many of us end up in therapy because we don’t doubt anything.  Over the years, I’ve realized certainty can be awfully dysfunctional. Safe, yes. Secure, yes. But it can tear up a life—and a world—one dogmatic belief at a time.

The Need for Uncertainty

To be human is to hold belief. We all hold beliefs about ourselves, about others, about the world, about the universe and God and every wondrous and horrible thing.

But we also tend to organize our lives around avoiding conflict and danger and discomfort. And existing within unquestionable beliefs makes everything feel quite safe, orderly, and stable: I know who I am, I know who you are, I know how this world works, and I understand what existence is all about.

Certainty feels so good.

Until it doesn’t.

Until our beliefs stop resonating with the reality we encounter. Until they leave us unprepared for the vicissitudes of life. Until they begin to crumble and the panic sets in or the depression swallows us. Until we realize our certainty has left us isolated and alone. Until we realize certainty is about not budging an inch, but life is about growth and transformation and redemption.

Over the years, as a therapist, you realize sometimes we don’t need more answers—sometimes we need to be asking more questions:

Like, maybe my family wasn’t as perfect as I was always led to believe—or, maybe my family isn’t as bad as I’ve always made them out to be?

Maybe I’m not as broken as I thought—or, maybe I’m more broken than I thought?

Maybe I shouldn’t trust everyone—or, maybe I have to trust someone?

Maybe I need to forgive more quickly—or, maybe I need to set some boundaries and quit giving my worth away to everyone with instant reconciliation?

Over the years, you discover definitely is a place of safety and suffocation, while maybe is the place of possibility and redemption and connection.

Why Belief is Like a Bird

On a recent rainy spring morning, my son and I were looking out the window and marveling at the ability of birds to fly through rain-riddled air. I wondered aloud, “How do birds stay afloat?”

It turns out I’m not smarter than a third grader.

He told me a bird’s bones are adapted for flight—lightweight and hollow with air sacs to increase buoyancy. The bones are fragile and can withstand the stress of taking off, flying, and landing, but little else.  

Therefore, to hold a Dove for instance, you must hold it incredibly gently and with great care. You must hold it tightly enough to keep it grounded. But if you try to hold it too tightly, you will crush it and destroy it. Because it was never intended to be held. A Dove exists to fly.

I think our beliefs are like a Dove.

Gentle Beliefs and Gentle People

We must hold our beliefs gently.

We must believe. And we must embrace uncertainty. All at the same time.

Because although we hold beliefs, they were not designed to be held.

We were designed for the ground but, like birds, our beliefs were designed for the air—to flit from treetop to treetop as we chase them from below.

The most beautiful beliefs are rarely caught and grasped, constantly chased, and in the chasing they draw us into new and better places we never would have discovered while clutching them tightly in the safety of our homes.

I think this might be what many of us call faith—the chasing of beliefs through the treetops, eyes raised, looking up into a big-unfettered sky. Stumbling and tumbling into a bigger and more beautiful world than we ever imagined was possible. Tripping and falling and skinning our knees and getting back up again, because the chasing is even more important than the catching.

A people with belief like this—a people holding it gently and releasing it again into the wild—becomes a gentle people.

Because when we can hold our beliefs gently, we can hold ourselves and other people gently, as well.

A people like this become a people breathlessly chasing belief together.

Over the years, I guess I’ve decided the work of psychotherapy is complete when a client has traded in their unshakeable beliefs for a chasing-faith. When certainty about existence has given way to a chasing-faith in themselves, faith in other people, and faith in a world and a universe that is broken and beautiful and bigger than they ever could have imagined.

———

Comments: You can share your thoughts or reactions at the bottom of this post.                

Audio: To listen to an audio version, click this post title—The Safety and Danger of Certainty [If you would like to save the audio to your device for later listening, right click on the title and choose 'save.']

Free eBook: My eBook, The Marriage Manifesto: Turning Your World Upside Down, is available free to new blog subscribers. If you are not yet a subscriber, you can click here to subscribe, and your confirmation e-mail will include a link to download the eBook. Or, the book is also now available for Kindle and Nook

Preview: Next Wednesday’s post is tentatively entitled, “What Good is Gratitude When the World is Tearing Apart?”

Disclaimer: This post is not professional advice. It should be read as you would read a “self-help” book. For professional and customized advice, you should seek the services of a counselor, who can become more intimately familiar with your specific situation. Counselors can be located through your insurance network or through your state psychological association.

We may fall in love with any kind of person, but the person we choose to marry ourselves to must embody one particular quality: they must be committed to constant change and transformation.

We should not choose someone who is perfect.

We should choose someone who is perfectly aware they aren’t perfect, and who wants to get better with every rising sun

choosing a partner

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For most couples, my psychotherapy office is a last resort. It takes the deepest courage to make that first phone call to a therapist, and couples often wait until they feel almost hopeless. And I am truly blessed to walk through the valleys with such courageous people.

Yet, I must admit, I take a special delight in couples who call earlier. On a rare occasion, I will get a call from a young couple who is planning to marry and would like premarital counseling.

They come into the office and they usually sit next to each other and hold hands and gaze into each other’s eyes and sometimes I feel a little awkward—like I’ve stumbled into their date and should give them some privacy. And quite often, they will say things like “There’s nothing wrong with him; he’s amazing.” Or, “She’s absolutely perfect.” Or, “We get along all the time—we never fight.”

And my alarm bells go off.

Because when I’m looking for the building blocks of a lifelong partnership, I’m not looking for two perfect people. (Mainly because two perfect people don’t exist—we’re all a glorious mess of one kind or another.)

No, I’m looking for two people who know their brokenness, who know they fall short of the best ways to love, and who want to get better at it—one day at a time, year after year, decade upon decade.

When Everyone Got Divorced

In 1970, everyone got divorced.

Okay, not everyone got divorced, but the divorce rate skyrocketed in a startling way. In response, psychologists developed Behavioral Marital Therapy, which included a “caring activities contract.”

It was a bit of a disaster.

Essentially, spouses listed the ways they wanted their partner to change, signed a contract committing the other to doing so, and then each spouse kept a running tally of how often they were holding up their end of the bargain.

The caring activities contract often led to greater conflict, and therapists no longer use it. Because the truth is, as spouses, we are ultimately and utterly powerless over our partners. If our partner truly does not want to change, there is fundamentally nothing we can do to make them change. In fact, our very efforts to coerce change will further entrench our loved ones in their existing behaviors.

In marriage—and in life—you control you. No one else.

Which means the person you choose to spend the rest of your life with had better be eternally interested in taking a look at their own issues, increasingly willing to be vulnerable about their own brokenness, and absolutely determined to figure out what it means to love more deeply and purely.

How I Got Lucky

I remember the night my wife told me her story.

We had known each other for only three weeks, and through the quiet hours of the night she told me about her journey—it was marked by resilience and tenacity and determination. She had plenty of reasons to be angry, but instead she was investing her energy into learning how to love.

And by the time the sun rose, something new had risen in me—I didn’t know what it was then, but I did know I wasn’t going to let this woman go. Only recently have I realized what rose up in me that night:

I’m attracted to people who like to fight—not with other people, but with themselves.

I’ve admitted here on the blog I can be a bit of a mess at times. So, I’ve often wondered how I didn’t screw up my choice of a lifelong companion.

And I’m thinking the answer is this: for all my mess, somehow I must have one thing going right within me—I want people in my life who know they are broken and have decided every day is another opportunity to redeem it. People who fight with themselves first—not in a shaming, self-destructive way, but in a resilient, grace-filled effort to be transformed into a more loving person.

And I guess I lucked out when my wife had the courage to let me see her brokenness and her love.

Choosing Broken, Resilient Hearts

I think the most important question we must ask ourselves—both when contemplating the decision to marry ourselves to one person, and when deciding how much of ourselves to invest in healing a relationship that has gone awry—is, “Do I trust the heart of the person I love?”

“Are they aware of their brokenness? Can they give grace to themselves and to others in the middle of their mess? Are they able acknowledge their mistakes and apologize when necessary? And do they have a deep desire to redeem it all?”

Or is the heart of the person I love organized around ego and self-preservation and power and competition and self-righteousness?

Every relationship hinges upon the answers to these questions.

May we all be asking the right questions.

May each of us be patient, as we wait for that one quiet night when that one person reveals to us a heart of brokenness, and a heart of grace and sacrifice and love.

———

Comments: You can share your thoughts or reactions at the bottom of this post

Audio: To listen to an audio version of this post, click on this post title: The Most Important Thing to Look for in a Life Partner [If you would like to save it to your device for later listening, right click the link and choose the option to save.].                

Free eBook: My eBook, The Marriage Manifesto: Turning Your World Upside Down, is available free to new blog subscribers. If you are not yet a subscriber, you can click here to subscribe, and your confirmation e-mail will include a link to download the eBook. Or, the book is also now available for Kindle and Nook

Preview: Next Wednesday’s post is tentatively entitled, “Belief is Fragile (Hold It Gently).”

Disclaimer: This post is not professional advice. It should be read as you would read a “self-help” book. For professional and customized advice, you should seek the services of a counselor, who can become more intimately familiar with your specific situation. Counselors can be located through your insurance network or through your state psychological association.

The difference between shame and guilt may be the difference between never really living and using this one life to draw beautiful, redemptive pictures of love and belonging…

guilt versus shame

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On a Friday morning, my three-year-old daughter was drawing me a picture with a colored pencil. Her face was screwed up with concentration, nose crinkled, dimples lopsided. She let out a big-dramatic sigh and said, “I made a mistake; I need to erase it.”

I tried not to laugh as I looked at the random loops and swirls of abstract toddlerhood and wondered to myself, “Honey, how can chaos contain mistakes?”

But I fetched an eraser anyway, and she started to rub. However, colored pencil doesn’t erase—it smudges. So she rubbed harder. And the “mistake” got worse and worse.

And worse.

She flung down her pencil and began to tear the paper to shreds.

I don’t think my daughter was feeling ashamed about her drawing—I think she was being a three-year-old. Yet, on a Friday morning, I think she gave me an image of the way shame destroys us:

Shame is like the crummy pencil eraser of life—it mires us in an endless, hopeless effort to erase our mistakes. And it tears up our lives in the process.

Destructive Shame…

Shame is the “you’re not good enough” lie seductively whispering at the edge of our fragile souls. It convinces us our mistakes and shortcomings and failures and faults are who we are. It convinces us we need to erase our mistakes and our mess if we are to be worthy of love and belonging.

So we spend our life mired in depressive regrets about words and actions and days and years we wish we could take back. Or we spend our nights in anxious rumination about how everyone reacted when we said this or did that. We quietly beat ourselves up and wish for a do-over.

But the truth is, our mistakes are written in the colored pencil of time—time can’t be reversed and our mistakes can’t be erased.

There are no do-overs.

Yet shame keeps us stuck in this endless cycle of hopeless attempts to erase or hide our history and ourselves. It immobilizes us. It shuts us down. And in doing so, it can destroy a life—one paralyzed day at a time.

But there is another way.

…Creative Guilt

The way out of our shame is not to erase our mistakes. The way out of our shame is to feel guilty about them.

Guilt is shame redeemed by grace.

Shame tells us we are lousy. Guilt tells us we did something lousy.

Shame whispers, “Your mistakes define you.” But guilt proclaims, “We are defined by redemption, not by transgressions.”

Whereas shame seeks to hide the past, guilt claims the past.

Shame says you are corrupt and rotten and weak and powerless and you should hide because anything you do will be another failure. But guilt says, “Yes, I messed up. I’m guilty as charged. But my mess doesn’t define me. And because it doesn’t define me, I can do something different now.”

Shame looks backward interminably. Guilt glances backward and then moves forward.

Shame coerces us into passivity. Guilt propels us into action.

Shame buries our mistakes. Guilt apologizes for them.

Shame disconnects us from people. Guilt propels us into the arms of people.

Shame is a lie we swallow. Guilt is the truth we tell.

Shame is the death of us. Guilt is the beginning of a resurrection.

The Blank Page

As my daughter began to sink to the floor on the verge of a meltdown, I suggested, “Instead of erasing that picture, how about you draw me another one?”

She stopped mid-tantrum, crumpled paper in hand, and a smile evened out her dimples a bit.

I pointed at her big stack of blank papers and said, “You can draw me a bunch of new ones.”

I wonder if redemptive guilt is really just the voice of grace, whispering quietly to us, “Hush, little one. Quit trying so hard to erase and hide the past. You’re learning and growing and every time you mess up and try again, let’s rejoice. So put that eraser away, own your mistakes, and let’s try again, even if it’s a glorious mess.”

My daughter looked at me, bounced to her feet, and attacked a new blank page with abandon.

Drawing Redemptive Pictures With Our Lives

In life, we can listen to our shame—we can focus on all of our mistakes and we can get hopelessly bogged down in trying to analyze them, erase them, justify them, or hide them.

Or we can approach every day like a new sheet of paper. The size of the stack is different for each of us, of course—our remaining days are all differently numbered.

But if we have only a single page on our stack—only one day remaining to live—we have one blank page on which to draw a new, redemptive picture of our lives.

We can draw pictures of courage and vulnerability.

We can draw pictures of apology and forgiveness.

We can draw picture of love and sacrifice.

Today is a new day. Today is our blank page. Today is pregnant with the possibility of a new picture, a redemptive event, a beautiful love.

What will we do with today’s blank page?

———

Comments: You can share your thoughts or reactions at the bottom of this post

Audio: To listen to an audio version of this post, click on this post title: Why Shame is Destructive but Guilt is Creative [If you would like to save it to your device for later listening, right click the link and choose the option to save.].   

Google Video Hangout: I’m beginning to prepare the first focus group about shame, grace, relationships, and life. The first meeting will focus on clarifying the differences between shame, guilt, embarrassment, and humiliation. Remember, it’s not a therapeutic group—you are going to be teaching me about these important topics! If you are interested in participating, you can click here to email me your name and email address, and I will include you in future updates.

Free eBook: My eBook, The Marriage Manifesto: Turning Your World Upside Down, is available free to new blog subscribers. If you are not yet a subscriber, you can click here to subscribe, and your confirmation e-mail will include a link to download the eBook. Or, the book is also now available for Kindle and Nook

Preview: This week’s planned post about marriage and relationships was unfinished when the flooding hit Chicago last week. Assuming no more natural disasters, it will be the next post on Wednesday, May 1, and is tentatively entitled, “The Most Important Thing to Look for in a Life Partner.”

Disclaimer: This post is not professional advice. It should be read as you would read a “self-help” book. For professional and customized advice, you should seek the services of a counselor, who can become more intimately familiar with your specific situation. Counselors can be located through your insurance network or through your state psychological association.

Boston Bombings

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My wife runs marathons, and she finishes them in about four hours. Last October, I stood at the finish line four hours and nine minutes into the Chicago marathon. I know the joy of friends and family cheering on their loved ones.

On Monday afternoon, in Boston, that moment of joy and those people of joy were shattered by violence and lots of hatred and a couple of relatively small bombs.

On Monday afternoon, I guess I felt a little shattered, too.

Shattered, yet grateful my devastation was one of empathy, rather than flesh and bone.

I arrived home late on Monday night. My children were still awake but fading quickly in their beds. I kissed their foreheads and murmured prayers and after their eyes finally closed, I stood looking into the dark of their rooms and I felt grateful for breathing children and legs that work and the momentary safety of home.

As I watched them, I felt a depth of love for my children and my wife that doesn’t happen on a typical Monday night.

You may know the depth of love I’m talking about. I hope you do. It’s Love with a capital “L” and it cracks you open and it connects you to everyone and everything. In the depths of that Love there are no grievances too big for forgiveness, no brokenness too ugly for grace, there are no strangers and no enemies. It’s a love tenderized by pain and it’s a Love with the power to bring us all together.

I think we can honor the victims of this tragedy by giving ourselves over to this deep-love. And by clinging to it. But, over time, we won’t. I won’t.

I will dishonor the victims of Boston.

I will dishonor the victims by swimming up from the depths of that love and living once again in the shallows of my ego and self-interest and humanness.

I will dishonor them when my awareness fades.

I will dishonor them when my gratitude evaporates.

I will dishonor them in a hundred little ways: when I once again take my legs for granted, when the new scratch on the kitchen table is once again more important than the joy that put it there, when the stranger on the street no longer feels like the stranger that might die with me tomorrow, when all the petty endeavors of life become, once again, bigger than my love.

Indeed, I will dishonor them when my love swells and crests and finally recedes.

I will dishonor the victims of Boston because I’m human and because humans forget. But this time I’m resolving to remember a little bit longer than I usually do—a little bit longer than I remembered Sandy Hook.

I’m going to remember with prayer.

I’m not going to pray because it erases the past. And I’m not going to pray because I believe it guarantees healing or restoration for the physically and emotionally wounded. And I’m not going to pray for justice because I think it will ensure the guilty are captured.

I’m going to pray for the victims, because prayer keeps me aware. And as long as I’m aware, I’m loving. And as long as I’m loving, then terror loses.

You see, you can bring criminals to justice with law enforcement, but you can only bring terror to justice with love.

When terror looks upon Boston and sees a city drawn together, terror loses and love wins.

When terror beholds strangers coming to the aid of one another, terror loses and love wins.

When terror sows connection and a sense of belonging rather than fear and division, terror loses and love wins.

When terror plants the seeds of gratitude and gentleness in the heart of a father, terror loses and love wins.

I think the best way to honor the victims in Boston is to bring terror to justice, one loving moment at a time, one prayer at a time.

For as long as I can remember.

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Disclaimer: This post is not professional advice. It should be read as you would read a “self-help” book. For professional and customized advice, you should seek the services of a counselor, who can become more intimately familiar with your specific situation. Counselors can be located through your insurance network or through your state psychological association.