My good friend and mentor, Charlie Kelley, passed away last week. I wrote about him in my last post knowing it was only a matter of days until he would move to his eternal home. And now, I no longer have a classic mentor…one who is one generation ahead of me, one who has seen some things and been where I have not yet been. This is not to say I have no mentors. I do. I have a handful of co-mentors. Good friends and confidants who are roughly my age and are navigating life at a shared life stage....Read More

A few weeks ago, I received an unusual phone call from my dear friend and mentor, Charlie. Would I be willing to take over the mentoring of a young man he had befriended the past eight years? It was an extraordinary request, as I had never met the man. Blind date mentoring?  An arranged friendship? But I only hesitated for a second. “Yes, of course. I would be glad to.” How could I say no? Charlie is dying. Charlie has been my friend and confidant for 35 years. Roughly every month for more than three decades we’ve shared scones, coffee,...Read More

Luke had Obi-Wan, the Von Trapp kids had Sister Maria, Frodo had Gandalf and Harry Potter had Dumbledore. Who do you have? Who is your mentor? Who is walking with you through this season of change…this land between…this liminal space? Over the last month I’ve been thinking and writing about the lonely and confusing seasons in our journey. How do we not lose our courage or our minds as we travel through the fog?  I’ve suggested how crucial it is that we pay attention… “If ever there was a starting point for navigating the land between, it must be practicing...Read More

My sister was going through some old pictures recently and found one I had apparently sent her years ago. She texted me the photo and I laughed when I saw it. It was me in 1976, on stage with a boy band…er…male quartet …I travelled the country with. The longer I looked at the pic the more reflective I became. I had my mopped hair head down, arms folded and was clearly in deep thought. Likely I was just trying to remember the words to the next song, but it could have been more. As I looked at that young...Read More

“Some of us wander from place to place, and many others of us don’t. We have the Somewhere people, who are very much of a place and rooted there, and we have the Anywhere people, who have a faint sense of belonging wherever they are and if they ever had a place, they left it behind long ago.” Neil King Jr., American Ramble: a walk of memory and renewal. Are you a Somewhere person or an Anywhere person? When I read this section of King’s book I paused and considered my life. Yes, I determined, I was a Somewhere person...Read More

I was so scared of him that when I recognized his footfall coming down the stairs toward my office, I would lock the door, pull the shade, turn out the lights and hide. Did I mention I was a grown, 25-year-old man? It was my first full-time employment which, in many ways, I enjoyed. I dearly loved the young men and women I was tasked to care for. But with my boss I had a complicated and difficult relationship. It became so bad that it affected just about every part of my life, including my marriage. It wasn’t long after...Read More

“My life looks way better than it feels.” Darren Waller, 31, NFL player New York Giants In his recent public announcement of his retirement, Waller noted that in walking away from a 9-year football career he was leaving more than $30 million dollars on the table and would even owe back almost $1 million in bonus money. Why? His reasons are worth paying attention to… “I feel like I spent most of my life doing what I should be doing and measuring that in the eyes of what people would expect from me. I’ve been a people pleaser my whole...Read More

“I’ve come to believe that the quality of our lives, and the health of our society depends, to a large degree, on how well we treat each other in the minute interactions of daily life.” David Brooks, How to Really Know a Person That might explain some things. We are not treating each other very well, are we? Brooks’ book helped me take stock of just how well (or poorly) I have been treating the people in my life. Essentially, he asked this question: Are you a “Diminisher” or an “Illuminator” ? Here’s how he described both… Diminishers Diminishers make...Read More

This past weekend I had the joy of watching our oldest granddaughter, Isabella, graduate from high school. How could she be that old????…sigh… During the ceremony, a graduate of her school gave a brief but excellent commencement address. Here is some background on him from his website: Former MLB player turned artist, Micah Johnson, is the creator of Aku. After hearing a young boy ask his mom if astronauts could be black, Johnson was inspired to create “Aku” a 3D animated character depicting a boy with an oversized astronaut helmet. That same year, Johnson’s art piece: titled: ‘sä-v(ə-)rən-tē took Johnson...Read More

Humility is “the mother and mistress of all the virtues”, according to the early church father John Cassian. Makes me wonder…if humility is all that important, just how much of it do I possess? Humility is in short supply. “Hubris and babble permeate the very air we breathe today”, suggests Richard Foster in his new book Learning Humility: a Year of Searching for a Vanishing Virtue. He goes on to observe that we are “witnessing a shrinking moral vocabulary in public life.” It is this book that got me wondering how much this decline in moral knowledge and practice has...Read More