“Love is the giving and receiving of pleasure.” Dan Allender “God not only loves you, but likes you.” Brennan Manning Our marriage counselor once gave my wife and me an assignment I thought was really dumb. She asked us to…
Sam Jolman
The Gift of Getting Caught
“We’re in the presence of a good story when the flaw that shatters shalom is also the doorway to redemption.” Dan Allender “Come on, let’s go back to God. He hurt us, but he’ll heal us. He hit us hard,…
Owning Your Awesome
“And if our hope in Christ is only for this life, we are to be pitied more than anyone in the world.” 1 Corinthians 15:19 “We’re born to shimmer. We’re born to shine. We’re born to radiate.” Shawn Mullins I…
The Voice of Inevitability
“You hear that Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability. It is the sound of your death. Goodbye, Mr. Anderson.” Agent Smith, The Matrix “Life has killed the dream in me.” Fontaine, Les Miserables I am writing this at…
The Virtue of Follow Through
“Potential is good when you’re 15 years old. After that, you need to start doing something.” Chris Guillebeau “A longing fulfilled is a tree of life.” Proverbs 13:12 Some moments change you forever. My senior year of college I sat…
How To Become Passionate About Anything
“A dream without suffering is little more than a fantasy. Risk involves bleeding.” Dan Allender Here is how I became passionate about counseling: I rented an office in downtown Colorado Springs for $290 a month. It was a quaint little…
What Addicts Teach Us About Love
“People sometimes bond to objects incapable of reciprocating… If a person’s brain targets an emotionally inert would-be partner, attachment needs can propel him to connect with that which cannot satisfy him, like a moth battering its wings against a street…
How To Cry Like A Man
“Vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage.” Brene Brown “Paul D would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut.” Toni Morrison…
Why Facts Never Tell The Real Story
“Things are not all so comprehensible and utterable as people would mostly have us believe; most events are unutterable, consummating themselves in a sphere where word has never trod.” Rilke “If we don’t know how or what to pray, it…
Why Men Masturbate
“Masturbation is an attempt to make ritual contact with the penis… to connect with the lost maleness.” Joseph Nicolosi “Notice that the struggle with pornography or masturbation is most difficult when you are lonely, beat up, or longing for comfort…
How Do You Make Others Feel?
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Maya Angelou “We actually respond to one another’s energy more than to people’s exact words…
How to Become More Masculine
“Son’s don’t want their father’s ‘balls’; they want their hearts.” Terrance Real At 18 weeks pregnant, Amanda and I sat in the doctor’s office, hardly handling the hope that this might be the week we find out the gender of…
