Comes the Dawn

“For every human problem we can face and name, there is a solution that is understandable, simple, reasonable, orderly, neat, … and dead wrong.”

-- H.L. Mencken

"It is characteristic of all deep human problems that they are not to be approached without some humor and some bewilderment. After this, acting on faith becomes possible, and not before."

-- Freeman John Dyson

“Ask God for help, and very often He will use people, and surprisingly often it will be people we wouldn’t expect it from. Ask people for help, and, if they’re wise, they'll use and rely totally on God (and, very sadly, this is often overlooked or forgotten). Otherwise, they'll be ‘set up’ either to fail you or to be made way too important.”

-- Yours Truly

“Religious leaders, priests, ministers, rabbis, and imams can be admired and revered but also hated and despised. We expect that our spiritual leaders and guides will bring us closer to God through their prayers and teachings and their life experiences and wise words. Therefore, we listen to them and watch their behavior very carefully and often very critically. But precisely because we expect them, often without fully realizing it, to be superhuman and beyond reproach, we are easily disappointed or even feel betrayed when they prove to be just as human as we are. Thus, our unmitigated admiration quickly turns into deep resentment and sometimes unrestrained anger. Let's try to love our leaders, forgive them their faults, and see them simply as courageous brothers and sisters. Let’s stop setting them up to fail us by elevating them above us. Then, after we’ve taken them off the pedestals we put them on, we will enable them, in their equal human brokenness, to lead us closer to the heart of God, which is what we all most desperately need and want.”

-- Henri Nouwen Society, in “Loving Our Spiritual Leaders”


Comes the Dawn

After awhile you learn the subtle difference
Between holding a hand and chaining a soul.
And you learn that love doesn't mean leaning
And company doesn't mean false security.
And you begin to understand that kisses aren't contracts
And presents aren't promises,
And you begin to accept your defeats
With your head held high and your eyes wide open.
With the grace of a wise, seeing adult, not the blind grief of a child.
You learn to build your roads
On today, right under your feet, because tomorrow's ground
Is too uncertain for busy plans, and futures have
A way of falling down in midflight.
After awhile you learn that even sunshine
Burns if you get too much.
So you plant your own garden and decorate
Your own soul, instead of painfully waiting
For someone to bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can not only endure, but thrive,
That you really are strong, beautiful, and enough.
And you really do have tremendous worth.
And you learn and learn ... and you learn,
With every goodbye you learn.

(Veronica A. Shoffstall)
(from Courage to Change: One Day At a Time in Al-Anon, page 63.)


Yes, people are wonderful and beautiful, and yet people can never be enough, ever, and they will leave, and that will hurt you, just as you must leave, and it will certainly hurt others, someday. And these are not callous words of tragedy, but of truth. We must love and honor and help each other, and yet we can never really be enough for each other. This can feel horrible before deeper understanding comes. It is important and life-giving to love and to hurt and to learn, and yet it is just as important not to deify or exalt your lover or your teacher, except, of course, for the only One who is Perfect at both. Experience and growing wisdom about these things delivers joy and peace, right in the midst of our feeble attempts at helping and loving.

The greatest gift

“Our most painful suffering often comes from those who we expect to love us and those we supposedly love. The relationships between husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters, teachers and students, pastors and parishioners - these are where our deepest wounds occur. Even late in life, yes, even after those who wounded us have long since died, we might still need help to sort out what really happened in these relationships. The great temptation is to keep blaming those who were closest to us for our present condition saying: ‘You made me who I am now, and I hate who I am.’ The greatest challenge is to acknowledge our hurts and claim our true selves as being more than the result of what other people did for or to us. Only when we can claim our God-made selves as the true source of our being will we be free to forgive those who have wounded us and to feel truly forgiven.”

-- Henri Nouwen Society

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing, and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares."

-- Henri Nouwen, in The Road to Daybreak; A Spiritual Journey

“To love at all is to be totally vulnerable. Truly love anyone, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket -- safe, dark, motionless, airless -- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

-- C.S. Lewis

"Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family."

-- Henri Nouwen

“When we live at each other's mercy, we had better learn to be merciful. … The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.”

-- William Sloane Coffin, Jr.

“The only thing that redeems a gift is the genuine love of the giver.”

-- William Sloane Coffin, Jr.


We are all way too different, and we hurt way too much in way too many ways and for way too many reasons, to ever expect ourselves or each other to “get it right” when it comes to expressing our deepest love. For example, I have discovered in my life experience that the greatest gift ever given to me was a deep and abiding “belief” in me, that I could do it, that I could transcend my own pain and problems with God’s guidance and help, without the interference or intervention of others, to learn to fully be myself and to thrive in that. I have since discovered that what I consider great love and generosity and true blessing from a friend in the form of belief, might be perceived as meaningless by someone who wants me to get involved and solve their problem more actively and/or concretely. And I will not be able to get this right, ever. Actively solving another’s problem is not always the right idea. And believing while doing nothing is not always the right idea. There is no way to always get this right, folks. There will be many missed opportunities, mistakes, oversteps, and under-delivers. All there is, ever, is to be and do what feels right to you in the spirit of love, knowing it will not be enough or will be way too much, and that the spirit of it is more important than the delivery mechanism or quality of performance. Anything, even if the absolute wrong thing, when done in genuine love, is the right thing. And conversely, anything, even if the exact right thing, when done in arrogance or judgment or purely duty or resentment, will be the wrong thing. Loving, and forgiving yourself for your not understanding love enough, and forgiving others for missing your mark, is the key aspect to the human exchange of our greatest gift. “Performing love right” (in your self-righteous assessment) and “expecting it performed right” (in your blind arrogance) in return, is pure folly, producing only mayhem and misunderstanding.

You gotta want it, and really mean it!

Many people call me every day in some sort of desperate confusion, frustration, loneliness, or sheer terror, but only a very few call with the sincere, passionate, and relentless desire for that which they will often claim to seek. Only a very few are truly committed to discovering and walking in the way of life; most just want short-term pain relief.

I don’t judge people in response to their agonizing pain, and I am there for them completely and for the long-haul, regardless of their motivation or sincerity, for these are my instructions and chosen path, but I know what it takes to acquire, have, and live in the only real Solution to life’s overwhelming conflicts, contradictions, and dilemmas, and it can be daunting, exasperating, and downright intimidating to accept and embrace, before it becomes totally and wondrously liberating and refreshing. It seems we must be close to drowning, desperate to breathe, lungs on fire, and in our last gasp, before we are ready. And that has a perfection to it, like the gasping of a first breath in birth.

“Heartfelt prayer fastens the soul to God.”

-- Julian of Norwich

"The whole point of and the way to come to life is in and through the amazing love letter He has written to us. We have the opportunity to truly live inside this love letter in the midst of a war, if our hearts desire it enough."

-- John Eldredge, in The Sacred Romance

“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will lead me or where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the sincere desire to please You does in fact please You. And I hope I have that passionate desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that deep desire. And I know that if I do this You will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust You always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. Faithfully, I will not fear, for You are ever with me, and You will never leave me to face my perils alone.”

-- Thomas Merton, in Thoughts in Solitude

“There is a wonderful story of a young man who sought out a wise, old philosopher. The young man wanted to learn from the sage, so when he found the old man sitting by a lake, he asked, ‘Sir, I would like to sit at your feet, be your disciple, and learn wisdom from you.’ The sage did not reply. Instead, he stood up, approached the young man, and shoved him bodily into the water. Then he jumped in on top of the boy and held his head under water. Taking in water, the lad was surprised and confused. Thoughts swirled in his head. This must be a joke! He will surely let me up in a minute. But as the air escaped in bubbles to the surface and his lungs screamed for oxygen, he suddenly realized this was not a joke! He would soon drown if he did not fight for his life. Arms flaying, he was able to throw the old man off and surface for a gulp of air. But suddenly he was pushed under again. Fear and anger swept over him, and he once again was able to throw off the old man. Screaming, the young man exploded, ‘You are crazy! I came to learn from you, wanting to be your disciple, and you try to kill me!’ Then the sage replied in a soft, but firm voice, ‘Young man, when you want to learn from me as much as you wanted to stay alive and get out of the water, only then will you be really ready to learn anything.’

Deuteronomy 4:29 states, ‘if you seek God, you'll be able to find Him if you're serious, looking for Him with your whole heart and soul.’ God tells us in Micah 6:8 the manner in which we are to walk with Him: He's already made it plain how to live, what to do, what God is looking for in men and women. It's quite simple: Do what is fair and just to your neighbor, be compassionate and loyal in your love, and don't take yourself too seriously – instead, take God seriously.’ God is ready to teach us, to invite us into Him to be with Him and grow, learn, and prosper, to be a true and faithful companion, if we will wholeheartedly desire and seek out such a relationship with everything we are.”

-- Glen Martin, in Drawing Closer


Wake up, Loved One,
Still soaked in the spices of your
three-day sleep.

Stretch into yourself, Firstfruit of a New Eden,
Shaking death from off the budding tendrils
of your fingertips.

Familiar Stranger haunting life’s backroads,
You quicken souls on their way to Emmaus,
And lay an ambush outside Damascus
to rename murderers,
making them holy.

Let your Son-rise breach
The embattled defenses of our hearts,
So that we may witness your awakening—
the miracle of your love
stirring to life within us.

Easter Benediction: Resurrection
by Jayme Yeo of Ecclesia Church
(a prayer for the quickening of our souls
… and to be ambushed by His Spirit)

Life as Poetry

“The whole journey is my home.”

“Exchange of experiences is creation of life.”

“Breathe-in experiences, breathe-out poetry and music.”
-- remember this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlI8YsRthG4

“The sources of poetry are in the spirit seeking completeness.”

“The universe is made up of stories and conversations, not of atoms.”

“If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented on that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger for soul-expression.”

“Nourish new beginnings, let us all nourish our beginnings. Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest. The blessing is actually in the seed. It must break open and die to be born.”

-- all from Muriel Rukeyser

(Known mainly for her political protest poems of the 1930s, Muriel Rukeyser was attacked and criticized throughout her career: by the Left for not being Left enough, and by the Right for being too leftist, by New Critics for writing poems that referred to the social context, by the House Un-American Activities Committee for being a "concealed communist," by Marxists for not believing the party line. She just could not win, it seemed. Man, can I relate! When you put yourself out there openly and unabashedly, you must expect to ruffle some feathers and experience some rejection, or else your heart’ll be totally broken. Your heart will be broken regardless - how much depends on how much you conceal it.)


Here is an example of “life as poetry,” from my own life experience, in the form of a poem that showed up unannounced and unexpected on an all-too-frequent business trip back in 1993, insisting on full expression.

It was a first awareness of the mysterious nature of my journey down the rabbit hole, and I see how sharing it brings me and others life; it is the seed of my earliest conscious co-creation of my life - beautiful and strangely complete in its utter simplicity. This strikes me now, upon retrospection, as the nature of the hole that Alice fell down while chasing the white rabbit, and the mirror that liquefied and dropped down into Neo in the beginning of “The Matrix.”

The Hole in My Heart

The hole in my heart,
Once carefully concealed,
Has burst open,
And I have fallen in. (This was written years before I saw “The Matrix” – 1998 – or “Alice in Wonderland” – 2010.)

The fall leaves me breathless
And frozen in fear -
Not the fear of hitting ground,
But that the fall will never end.

Hands outstretched to help me
I have pushed away.
Don’t rescue me;
I need this.

They say, in dreams of falling,
That if you hit the ground you’re dead.
I’ve been dead.
I must hit the ground to live.

-- Yours Truly, in 1993,
at the first glimpse of awareness of the notion of true freedom:



“… if your first concern is to look after yourself, you'll never find yourself. But if you forget about yourself (being willing to die) and look to me (being willing to truly live), you'll find both yourself and me.”

-- from Matthew 10:39 (The Message)



And, speaking of poetry and of trees, and one’s growing awareness, here’s the poetry and the “tree” that is Jake.


I love being part of this amazing tree that is awakening to discover itself. It is a hard and fascinating discovery, and a fantastic journey, filled with hilarity and horror at every turn, and I am in for the whole ride with him – no editing. Life is delivered as is and needs no artificial “prettying up” by us to protect the little ones. In truth, they are more our protection than we are theirs. If you want to see what I mean, try watching the DVD of “The Road” when it comes out in May. It shows our nonsense and lives pretty accurately. It shows God’s love pretty accurately, too, but only if you’re really looking for it and able to see.

Freedom or slavery - choose

“Most men don’t want true liberty; they just want a just master.”

-- Martin Buber

“Life without the courage to risk death in order to truly live is a form of slavery.”

-- Seneca

“The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. Freedom and slavery are mental states.”

-- Mahatma Gandhi

“Often we think of discipline and freedom as opposite things, but this is not the case. There is no freedom without discipline or, to put it another way, there is no freedom without faith and constant practice at being free. To play the violin freely, to paint freely, to write freely, to live freely… all these take discipline and relentless practice.”

-- Will Beckingham

“What we make of other people, and what we see in the mirror when we look at ourselves, depends on what we know of the world, what we believe to be possible, what memories we have, and whether are loyalties are to the past, to the present, or the future. Nothing influences our ability to cope with the difficulties of existence so much as the context in which we view them; the more contexts we can see and choose from the less do the difficulties appear to be inevitable and insurmountable. The fact that the world has become fuller than ever of complexity of every kind may suggest at first that it is harder to find a way out of our personal dilemmas, but in reality the more complexities, the more crevices through which we can crawl.”

-- Theodore Zeldin, in An Intimate History of Humanity

Red: [narrating] In 1966, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank prison. All they found of him was a muddy set of prison clothes, a bar of soap, and an old rock hammer, damn near worn down to the nub. I remember thinking it would take a man six hundred years to tunnel through the wall with it. Old Andy did it in less than twenty. Oh, Andy loved geology. I imagine it appealed to his meticulous nature. An ice age here, million years of mountain building there. Geology is the study of pressure and time. That's all it takes really, pressure, and time. That, and a big goddamn poster. Like I said, in prison a man will do most anything to keep his mind occupied. Turns out Andy's favorite hobby was totin' his wall out into the exercise yard, a handful at a time. I guess after Tommy was killed, Andy decided he'd been here just about long enough. Andy did like he was told, buffed those shoes to a high mirror shine. The guards simply didn't notice. Neither did I... I mean, seriously, how often do you really look at a man’s shoes? Andy crawled to freedom through five hundred yards of shit smelling foulness I can't even imagine, or maybe I just don't want to. Five hundred yards... that's the length of five football fields, just shy of half a mile.”

-- from a scene in the movie, “The Shawshank Redemption”


Freedom is an inner state and is not based on our external circumstances. Slavery is a rigid dance of stuck-ness with both the slave and slave-owner equally stuck, equally enslaved, based on fear and the unwillingness to risk death in order to really live. Freedom requires more discipline and practice, more love of and trust in God, and more responsibility (including self-responsibility) than most are willing to commit to, leaving both slave and slave-owner equally committed to their stuck-ness, and with convenient someone’s to blame for it. What a waste of life.


Life is too short to be wastin’ complainin’ about one’s predicament.

It’s time to either get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’.

God’s gift is too precious to waste.

Genuine happiness is in the roots and trenches of life.

“Trees that grow healthy and tall have deep roots. Great height without great depth is dangerous and short-lived. The greatest spiritual leaders throughout history were all people who could live with public notoriety, influence, and power in a humble way because of their deep spiritual rootedness. Without deep roots we easily let others determine who we are and what we say and do. But as we cling to our popularity, we may lose our true sense of self. Our clinging to the opinion of others reveals how superficial we are. We have little to stand on. We have to be kept alive by adulation and praise. Those who are deeply rooted in the love of God can be genuinely happy in their lives and their work and can both enjoy human praise without being attached to it, as well as be with human criticism without being changed or made miserable by it.”

-- Henri Nouwen Society

“For almost forty years I relied most heavily upon my sense of deductive reasoning and logic, also significantly influenced by the popular appeal of my conclusions. Thankfully, I chose to shift my approach to life and gradually learned to be guided more by my deep-rooted intuitive nature. Today, I consciously operate within 'The Flow' of life. I avoid analyzing and dissecting and then word-smithing to get it right for the masses, at least most of the time, which brings me more happiness and peace than I've ever known.”

-- Chelle Thompson, Editor of Inspiration Line

“I think I began learning long ago that those who are happiest are those who do the most for others, and those who do the most for others always seem most secure in themselves. Caring for others, while understanding (vs. worrying about) ourselves, is the process through which we are most enlivened, fed, and nourished.”

-- Booker T. Washington

“All unhappiness in life comes from the tendency to blame someone else for something bad that’s happening. Happiness comes from encouraging and lifting others up, helping them see and appreciate the good that’s happening.”

-- Brian Tracy

“Happiness consists not in having, but of being, not in acquiring and possessing, but of enjoying and sharing. It is the warm glow of a heart at peace with itself, therefore unconcerned for itself as it serves others.”

-- Norman Vincent Peale

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

-- Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor (121-180)

“The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it’s too low and we reach it.”

-- Michelangelo, Italian Painter, Sculptor, Architect and Poet (1475-1564)

Happiness and pleasure/popularity are not the same thing at all. It is very possible to be happy and not pleased and popular or even smiling, just as it is all-too-common to be very popular and so-called successful and not be happy. Happiness is more an expression of the deep knowledge and fulfillment of one’s purpose - being fully engaged in “the reason I’m here,” right in the midst of the agony and ecstasy of it, and the roots and trenches of it, peaceful and content with the journey in whatever state it’s in at the moment, even if and when its most tumultuous - than it is a momentary response to any particular external circumstance or human/societal reaction. People and the world are like the wind, blowing in out of nowhere one minute, inexplicably gone the next . As the tree you are, your roots better be pretty deep and strong, and your branches flexible and light, to be able to “stay you” in the winds of life, planted firmly in your unique place and station, giving what you’re here to give, always and freely and joyfully.







(Here is the tree that is Jake, created in a 3-rd grade "family tree" project.)

New Life

A New Life

“Our firm decision is to work from this focused center: One man died for everyone. That puts everyone in the same boat. He included everyone in his death so that everyone could also be included in his life, a resurrection life, a far better life than people ever lived on their own. Because of this decision we don't evaluate people by what they have or how they look. We looked at the Messiah that way once and got it all wrong, as you know. We certainly don't look at him that way anymore. Now we look inside, and what we see is that anyone united with him gets a fresh start for the choosing, is re-created, brand new. The old life is gone; a new life burgeons! Look at it! All this comes from the God who settled the relationship between us and Him, and then called us to settle our relationships with each other. God put the world square with Himself through His son, giving the world a fresh start by offering forgiveness of sins. God has given us the task of telling everyone what He is doing. We're Christ's representatives. God uses us to invite men and women to drop their differences and enter into God's work of making things right between them. We're speaking for Christ himself now: Become friends with God; He's already a friend with you. How? you ask. In Christ. God put the wrong on him who never did anything wrong, so we could be put right with God.”

-- 2 Corinthians 5:14-21 (The Message)


“To live clean and clear every day, each day seizing a new opportunity, even with the conscious knowledge of the shadow of uncertainty, with the knowledge that disaster or tragedy could strike at any time; to be afraid and to know and acknowledge your fear, and still to live creatively and with unstinting love: that is to live with grace.”

-- Peter Henry Abrahams

“Nobody can go back and start again with a brand new beginning (not in a physical sense, at least), but anyone can start today and create a whole new ending (with His ‘new beginning’).”

-- Maria Robinson

“What you leave behind is not what is captured in print or engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.”

-- Pericles

What we possess or have been awarded doesn’t really matter; how neatly arranged, organized, and presented our stuff and trophies are doesn’t really matter; how many people feel good about us and our grand achievements or skills or status doesn’t really matter. All that really matters is how much TRUE LIFE springs forth through us and takes root in others, nourishing future generations, and this is only possible through the wellspring of all new life.


Proverbs 16:16-22 (New International Version)

16 How much better to get wisdom than gold,
to choose understanding rather than silver!
17 The highway of the upright avoids evil;
he who guards his way guards his life.
18 Pride goes before destruction,
a haughty spirit before a fall.
19 Better to be lowly in spirit and among the oppressed
than to share plunder with the proud.
20 Whoever gives heed to instruction prospers,
and blessed is he who trusts in the LORD.
21 The wise in heart are called discerning,
and pleasant words promote instruction.
22 Understanding is a fountain of life to those who have it,
but folly brings punishment to fools.