It’s hard to write about something so big—something so cosmic. But what I’m trying to tackle today, while immense, is full of everyday significance.

It helps that what I refer to begins in a story, that it is grounded in events that one can recount and tell. So this thing happened—back then, but also, I’m discovering, helps us see how we have with us and within us more than we expected. It helps, too, that the stakes are high, the promise tantalizing: a story of how a dark day opened onto a breathtaking future.

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For a few years Jill and I hosted an annual Valentine’s dinner party in our home—an elegant (at least by our standards) affair. We invited folks from different settings and walks of life. Our guest list would mix coworkers, neighbors, parents from our kids’ school, church members—most of whom had never met before.

After the meal we’d convene to the living room where we led a parlor game, a way for us to get to know one another better. We found one icebreaker particularly revealing: “Three truths and a lie.”

Here’s the idea: You think up four things about yourself: three true, one false. There’s a bit of a strategy, too: You dig deep into your life for the most bonkers or bizarre experience. The factual thing should be as hard-to-believe as possible, even outlandish, while you make the lie pretty prosaic or normal—just not true. You want a challenging game of guessing.

Once I said, for example, that the house I grew up in California was a block down from Jane Fonda.

True—or not?

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I turned in my book manuscript to my publishing house a couple of weeks ago. The book’s title communicates something I’ve been discovering and care deeply about: That I am, that all God’s children are, Fully Beloved. And because I know such an affirmation can seem glib or disengaged from real life, I wanted the subtitle to stress how that conviction lives right in the thick of our broken and sometimes scary world. So my editor and I came up with this: Meeting God in Our Heartaches and Our Hopes. What those lines of title and subtitle communicate seem all the more important and dramatic during these current few days, called by many Christians Holy Week.

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Loneliness hurts. We all know that. But I’m not sure most of us think of it as deadly. 

Yet the U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, called our social isolation a “public health crisis.” A lack of belonging can harm your physical health, inflicting the same damage as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, leading to strokes and other debilitating illness. 

Lonesome is more, then, than a trivial, uncomfortable feeling. It’s more than the pangs of the partners separated by long distances. (Not that that’s a picnic, as I can look back on and attest.) Loneliness springs from more than the packed schedules that crowd out time for friendships. It’s more than feeling awkward at a party when you scan the room for a conversation partner.

A feeling of emotional distance is a universal part of being human.

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This Christmas I’m thinking of what my pastor, Josh Condon, calls the “outlandishness of what God did for us in Christ.” What a phrase! Josh meant the depths of God’s gritty love that led God to make himself one of us, walking the dusty roads and detours of creaturely life. I’m thinking, too, of the lavishness, the extravagance. God didn’t have to become a human person, vulnerable to the horrors and hurts of human life, but God did it anyway, did it out of a persistent mercy, an obstinate love.

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I was trying not to panic.

The thought racing through my mind was, Where is she? Where’s my mom?

I was little. It was the first or second day of kindergarten. Class had just been dismissed. And I came out through the door that opened to the canopied walk that led to the parking lot and eventually to home.

My mom would be there to pick me up and walk me home, like we planned. I looked up and down the sidewalk both ways, and I still couldn’t see my mother.

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I’ve just signed with Thomas Nelson Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, for my next book! I’ve been working on this for years and couldn’t be more excited. Working title: This Question of Love.

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Years ago, I was summoned out of a board meeting for an emergency phone call. Before the age of cell phones, a hospital in Santa Monica had called my wife with urgent news that my dad had been admitted.

He had had another attack, and this time it looked as if he might not survive longer than a few hours.

I hopped on a plane in Chicago and headed for L.A. I hoped Dad would survive until I got there. We had talked on the phone since his heart attack, but I wanted to see him.

“Please, Lord,” I wrote in my journal not long before my plane landed, “keep Dad alive until I come.”

So logical. So easy for God.

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Those of you who have read my books or heard me teach or lead retreats know I feel called to help people find new joy in prayer.

I am excited about the online prayer class I'm offering starting next week. Start date is Tuesday, September 3, 6 pm Central Time. Please feel free to tell your friends who might be interested!

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We love our house near Nashville, near our expectant daughter. We are grateful for this new home. But we’ve faced some, um, challenges.

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What Taylor Swift and Her Popularity Tell Us about Our Own Hopes and Longings

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One really early morning, I couldn’t go back to sleep.

It happens sometimes: I awaken at 2 or 3 am and lay in bed wide awake for an hour, my mind too alert. I work over the day’s high points or low points. Sometimes I find myself anxious, sometimes just keyed up. Eventually I go back to sleep. But sometimes I do some significant reflecting or praying.

This is what happened during a recent time of restive wakefulness. On this particular morning I found myself thinking about Easter.

And not just thinking, but puzzling.

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It’s Holy Saturday, an often-overlooked part of Holy Week. But it’s so important to recognize this quiet day, I’m discovering, as we look back on Good Friday’s somberness and peer ahead to tomorrow’s Easter joy. This day, when Jesus rests in his tomb, helps us become more aware of all God has done for us, meeting the aches of the human heart with his companionship, even in moments of darkness. There’s a tender, touching meaning in the scene.

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For all we say, I wonder if we want what this season offers, this Holy Week so focused on the Cross of Christ. There’s glory in the message we tell on Good Friday, but also a bit of the gory: An innocent man put through a horrible death. The Cross, when we look hard, was dramatic: a trauma, even. It feels gritty, like sand in the mouth when you’re at the beach, gravelly instead of the smoothness of water or silk.

My new friend Margery Kennelly told a story in a recent sermon that made me think of how gripping and possibly off-putting the crucifixion of Christ can seem.

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A few days ago I took a tumble down the stairs of our back deck. 

It was windy and I was carrying an empty flattened packing box in one hand, and a house fixture I’d just painted in the other, taking it all to the garage, when a gust caught the cardboard like a sail, threw me off balance, and I went down headfirst. (I know: Really dumb.)

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A cartoonist, noticing how Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day sometimes (if rarely, like today) fall on the same day, imagined how greeting card companies might kill two birds with one stone.

Like a saying on a card that goes,

Roses are red / Violets are blue

Lent is beginning / No chocolates for you

 Or he thought of another card’s greeting, recalling the Episcopal prayer book’s language for our human condition:

Won’t you be my valentine…

you miserable offender?

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I have a passed-down photograph taken of me when just an infant. While my parents are now both deceased, for decades the gold-plated frame holding the almost sepia-toned image graced their bedroom dresser.

There was more behind the picture, as the saying goes, than the wall.

I’m chubby cheeked in the shot, two locks of my hair curled and pasted down on my forehead. I’m pushing myself up from my tummy on my baby-fat-laden forearms; someone off-camera—my mom? my dad?—had caught my attention. I’m delighting in the fuss, it seems, liking getting my picture taken.

And to look at me then you’d say I greeted my first weeks and months with wide smiles, with a child’s wide inquisitive open eyes.

And I see that I arrived, as I believe we all do when born into this wonder-filled and fallen world, with a longing to be loved and liked, along with occasional fears that I would not. I smiled for the photographer, but I must also have known in some moments a rattled need for security.

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A link to my Christian Century interview with the revered preacher and author Fleming Rutledge is found here. …

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I admit it: I have mixed feelings about the urge lots of us have this season. Yes, the threshold of a new year often rouses in me a normal desire to better myself. I too am prone to get more serious about tweaking a habit I have or circumstance I wrestle with.

But sometimes not. As to this year, I’m not sure yet about resolutions.

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I remember one Christmas morning when I was eleven, and I couldn’t stand the suspense. At dawn I sneaked out to our living room, long before anyone else was awake. I had one keen hope.

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