The disciples came up and asked, “Why do you tell stories?” (Matthew 13:10 MSG)

Jesus told stories as his primary way of teaching. Some were simple, others baffling. When the disciples pressed him on why he taught this way, he explained that stories awaken us. It takes a story to see with new eyes. Facts rarely stir our blood. Stories open us. Tell me I am made for a love story, and I nod with intellect. But show me a love story, and something in me unlocks tears, laughter, ache, and hope.

A good story is a key; when it turns, it grants access to deeper places in us.

Stories create interest, then readiness, and ultimately presence. Often I’m glad to go where they take me. When our girls were young, we read the Harry Potter series together. For seven books, we lived just as much at Hogwarts as in Nashville. The adventure eventually put us on a plane to further immerse ourselves at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. We wanted to live in that story.

But I don’t always want a story to take me away. Sometimes stories take us even further than miles on a plane. And sometimes, as we see in Luke 22, stories take us to even more dangerous places.

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On the night before his death, Jesus gathered his disciples for Passover. We know the story, but have you ever looked at it through the lens of the stories we tell ourselves? What happens becomes tragic irony: friends spinning false narratives abandon the Master Storyteller. The very men who listened, followed, and learned from and through story allow fear, insecurity, and pride to write stories that take them away.

Judas. Luke says Satan entered him. We don’t know the exact story Judas told himself, but perhaps it went like this: Jesus isn’t the Messiah I hoped for. He won’t lead us to rebellion. He’s weak. I was wrong for following him. Judas acted on that story, and it took him away from reality and from presence with Jesus. No wonder Jesus sensed the loss long before Judas took the money.

The disciples. At dinner, Jesus announced, “One of you will betray me.” Immediately, they spun defensive stories. It can’t be me—so who is it? Maybe him? Suspicion spread. Their stories quickly escalated into a ridiculous debate about who was greatest. What began as fear of betrayal turned into a scramble for gold stars. They scripted stories out of insecurity, and presence collapsed into self-preservation. Jesus, left in spirit by all who argued, tried to pull them back with a word about service.

Peter. Then came Peter’s vow: I’ll never turn from you. I’ll follow to the end. A story of bravado. Within hours, it unraveled in the courtyard with the crowing rooster. Luke says, “The Lord turned and looked straight at Peter.” Yet another lonely moment for Jesus.

Where our stories go, so goes our presence. Judas’ story took him to betrayal. The disciples’ stories fed competition. Peter’s story collapsed into denial. Their storytelling took them away from reality, away from themselves, and finally away from Jesus. Think about that for a moment. Where they went—betrayal, competition, and denial—stole each from presence with Jesus. The very men who committed to his story misused their storytelling ability and abandoned their friend.

So Jesus faced persecution and death by himself.

Alone.

From a human perspective, we should be astounded that Jesus stays true. We said earlier that some of the falsest stories get spun when we are lonely and disconnected from others. Yet Jesus, abandoned by his friends, stays with the story all the way to the cross.

No doubt he is the Master Storyteller—not only as a teacher, but as the one who shows us how to use story to move toward reality.

Where our stories go, so goes our presence. Jesus, even to the point of declining wine mixed with myrrh to dull his senses, faced his fate fully present. He was there. The stories he told himself about what happened grounded him in truth and kept him in reality: The Father is with me. I know who I AM. I know my role. I know how the story ends.

For those who follow the Master Storyteller, this model becomes our calling as well. Yes, to tell good stories. Of course, to tell the Story. And finally, to tell ourselves stories that lead us back to truth, presence, and God.

More on this next time.

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Fall is coming. So they say.

School is back in session, which means cross country, volleyball, golf, and football have begun. All the high school fall sports. But fall? Fall is anything but in the air. There is a heat advisory right now. The high is 96 today. 97 tomorrow. 100 over the weekend.

Here, living the Tennessee calendar, we have arrived at the season some call Hell’s Front Porch. We’ll make it through. Plenty of water and electrolytes and staying inside. The weather will soften in a week, and we might get one pocket of cool if the air breezes just right. But then Second Summer will hit us. A few more weeks in the mid-90’s to crawl through.

Fall is a long way off.

Still, there are signs. My favorite clothing brand just dropped its fall collection with new shades of green and red. QB1 competitions highlight the otherwise dead sporting news. A voice I did not approve begins to whisper: A new shirt and a 5-star quarterback will provide salvific hope from this front porch as fall comes riding on its white horse, or perhaps orange pumpkin.

And I am tempted to put my hope in it. And them.

Wherever I put my hope, I anticipate joy. And where I anticipate joy, I put my hope. Trust it. Believe it will come through for me. And sometimes it turns out a mess.

One story sticks out from childhood.

On a vacation, my family went out to eat, and I found myself enamored with those little packets of butter. Butter pats, the internet calls them. I was supposed to put them on the warm rolls sitting in the middle of the table. And maybe I did. But I could not help saving a few. I slipped a couple into my pocket.

Thirty minutes later, I walked into my grandparents’ home ready to share my joy. I can still hear the creak of the screen door and the click as it shut behind me. I made it seven boyish steps into their home, calling for my grandmother.

She must have been in the kitchen, because just past the dining room table I reached into my pocket.

“Grandma, look what I got at the restaurant!”

But the butter was gone.

Instead my hand met grease and a slippery piece of foil. I withdrew my hand, slimy and gooey.

What childishness.

I thought I could pocket joy. Preserve it forever.

I wish I’d learned my lesson, but it turns out I’m still trying to pocket joy. These days it’s with more valuable things than butter. Like my kids, their present lives and future choices. My ability to run up and down the court. Moments sitting by a lake with my wife that I wish I could keep.

I still want to secure joy in my pocket, safe from all that could threaten what I have found.

And I will feel the same when fall arrives. Those cool breezes of deliverance. Blazing red trees. Pumpkins on front porches. Nights cool enough to stack wood, gather kindling, and light a match.

The cynic in my mind’s attic reminds me that fall lasts about seventeen days. How quickly cold rain will usher in stick season, a time of year not even Noah Kahan can make me feel good about.

Robert Frost warned us. Nothing gold can stay. Funny thing. He wrote about springtime. Nature’s first green is gold, and all that. But if Robert had grown up in the South, if he had known the pageantry of college football, the jubilation of finally getting to sit on the porch in the evenings, and an afternoon drive on the Natchez Trace Parkway during peak foliage, I know he would have used his four couplets to tell of and grieve the death of fall.

I joke, of course. But it leads me to think more about joy. Frost grieved the death of the new life spring births. I grieve the complete end of the beauty that fall offers. What brings us joy may be relative. But the grief of losing it is not. We know this. We fear this. We gain something we love, and then we realize we cannot keep it.

I see it with my clients who gain sobriety, connection, or peace and then begin to fear relapse or regression. I hear it in the way we pray. God, give me. God, protect me. Not wrong prayers. But prayers that reveal hearts that know how fragile joy can be.

And because we know this in the deepest ways, we try so hard to make joy stay. Vacationers take pictures of sunsets at the beach. Sculptors freeze the human body in prime form. Sentimentalists fill drawers with keepsakes. We try to hold on to what gives us life. If we could lock joy up safely, we would.

But joy is not ours to control.

My melted butter pats never asked me to take them from the restaurant. They only invited me to enjoy them with warm rolls. I saw only the chance to preserve perfection. So I pocketed them and by doing so, missed the chance to enjoy them. Pocketing joy can sure make a mess.

All of this brings to the work of joy and what it means to receive it. Is it possible to receive joy without demanding that it stay? To sit by the lake with my wife and not ask the moment to become permanent. To watch my kids become who they are becoming without trying to keep them where they are. To run up and down the court while my legs still let me.

To enjoy fall when it finally comes without asking it to last.

Fall will be here soon.

And I will love it for its hour.

Then it will leave.

When the cool wind blows in for its moment, and I want to hold onto it, I’ll try to remember: I don’t have to pocket joy to prove that it was mine.

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In the process of seeking truth underneath the stories we tell ourselves, I’ve noticed a recurring pattern:

When we look outward, we write stories of fantasy. When we look inward, we write stories of sabotage.

It starts early.

A boy sees a girl and believes that holding her hand would solve every worry. But later as he passes the cool kids’ table, he imagines himself eating with them and his doubts about his worth beat him back down. He lowers his head and shuffles past them.

A sophomore girl dreams a senior boy will ask her to prom. Hours later, staring in the mirror, she convinces herself she’s the kind of girl no boy would choose.

Decades pass and life gets more complicated, but the pattern remains.

A 50 year old single man retires and then spends months traveling the world: Hawaii, Patagonia, Greece, and Paris. He returns home to an empty house, empty inbox, and empty calendar. As he sits in the quiet, he thinks about his former colleagues, still sweating it out but seemingly living with some purpose. “Maybe I made a mistake,” he thinks. The doorbell rings, and a UPS man appears holding a box with a new iPhone. As the retired man watches the delivery guy run back to his truck, his heart stirs with a thought he tries to push away, “At least he has something to do that matters. People need him.” 

A woman pulls her suitcase through the airport after a week of international meetings. She earns more than most men she knows, yet passing a group of bridesmaids in matching shirts she thinks, I’d give it all up to be one of them, laughing and carefree. For a quick moment, her mind tempts her to ask them if she can come along for the weekend. With a half-hearted smile, she shakes the thought and focuses on what she knows: Her next trip awaits her at home, courtesy of psilocybin. That trip will help her escape her own self-contempt as a wife and mother.

Think about yourself. When you look outward, how often do you believe others have it better? When you look inward, how quickly do accusations of unworthy or unwanted rise up?

We write just as many stories looking inward as we do outward. Both matter. Both must be caught. Because fantasies and sabotage do the same thing: they pull us out of reality and away from presence. They become portals to worlds other than the one we live in. 

The grass might be greener. It might not be. But as long as I stare at my neighbor’s lawn—or scan for brown spots in my own—I wander from reality.

And reality is the setting for the only story we are meant to live.

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The stories we make up bring feelings we don’t want to feel. Yet within those unwanted feelings lies truth about who we are and how we are made. As the saying goes, there is truth in every lie. Our t…

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My mother-in-law keeps squirrel traps in her yard, trying to relocate the little guys who steal her birdseed. The squirrels wander in because they believe a lie: Easy food, no danger.

We’re not so dif…

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At orientation the summer before my freshman year of college, students had to pick a major. I got in line at the table for journalism. While I would not stay in that line for various reasons, the lure of writing a good story initially drew me.

Journalists possess the magical ability to capture a story. While I did not know it standing in line years ago, this art is meant for all of us, even if we never put it to paper or publish it as news. To live well emotionally and spiritually, we must learn from those who study stories, interpret them, and retell them accurately.

Last post (When Stories Turn Against Us) we talked about how falsely told stories move us away from our identity and presence. Living in the reality of ourselves and the people around us requires we take a page from the journalist: chase the story, put words to the tales you tell yourself, and learn to study the stories themselves. In the wake of the costs we explored last time, one of the best defenses is simple: own the stories you write.

But this doesn’t start with the stories. It starts with the storyteller.

Own the Storyteller Before Owning the Stories

Accountability starts with identity. All of us must get to know ourselves as a storytellers. You may not work for Time or post viral threads, but you probably tell more consequential stories than many professionals do. The books I read and the articles I skim rarely shape my life as much as the narratives I tell myself.

I am a powerful storyteller, just like you. And when I know my inclination to make sense of life with story, I can begin to notice when my mind starts to craft a tale.

One morning I made breakfast in the kitchen as one of my daughters walked downstairs. It was Saturday, and since she’s a teenager I usually don’t see her until 9 AM or later. But it was 6:25 AM. I thought: She must have woken up from a bad dream.

Then she said, “Dad, we have to leave in fifteen minutes.”

Right - she had work.

There I went again. Before even a bagel or coffee, I was writing stories in an attempt to make sense of the world. Catching that story early saved me from behaving on autopilot the rest of the day. And knowing I’m a storyteller gives me a pause button throughout any day.

Before we can see or engage the stories we write, we must first own our identity as storytellers.

As storytellers, we also must develop story-saving language.

Story-Saving Language

Somewhere in grad school I heard the phrase: “The story I am telling myself is…” Later a friend said it differently: “I make up that…” At first it sounded strange. Who talks like that? But eventually I tried it. The more I practiced, the more I realized the power of simple language to keep me tethered to reality.

That’s the invitation: pick a phrase you’ll actually use. When emotions rise, say it aloud or write it down. You might try:

• “The story I’m telling myself is…”

• “Right now I’m making up that…”

• “My narrative at the moment is…”

• “I notice this story: …”

• “Possibly true but possibly made-up story:”

Then name the story in a single sentence.

For me, that morning, it would have sounded like: The story I’m telling myself is that my daughter woke up early from a bad dream.

That captured the story and positioned me to engage her with curiosity instead of assumption.

What Happens When You Capture a Story

As you practice this, you’ll start to recognize “story mode” like a sixth sense. It feels like your mind is running a ticker tape across the sky, banner-plane style. Once the story is outside of you, on the horizon, visible, you can analyze it. You are no longer under its spell.

Here’s what happens when you capture stories like this:

• You remember you’re a storyteller. We forget. But catching a story helps us remember that we’re constantly writing scripts to make sense of life.

• You find humility. Storytelling is a gift for making judgments, but our judgments are often inaccurate or incomplete. Capturing the story keeps us honest about our limits.

• You create a boundary. Saying “I make up that…” draws a clear line between what’s happening inside you and what might be happening in someone else. Boundaries protect both sides.

• You pause. These phrases buy you a breath and a moment for thought. Decisions improve when we breathe and think.

• You see your reactivity. Most self-made stories center on me: my fears, my needs, my reputation. Naming the story helps expose that bias and gives you the chance to choose differently.

The act of capturing a story turns a narrative into an object you can examine, not a truth you must obey. Name the story. Examine it. Decide whether or how to act.

When Capturing Isn’t Enough

Sometimes, even after naming a story, you’ll find yourself still stuck inside it. In those moments, capturing isn’t enough. We also need to learn how to escape.

That’s where we’re headed next: The Escape Game.

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We took our girls to Disney World for the first time when they were six. By then they had seen all the classics. Cinderella, Tangled, Sleeping Beauty, and The Little Mermaid. After waiting sixty minutes in line to meet the princesses, I watched their expectant faces. They were about to meet the real ones.

And why wouldn’t they think so? There was the castle. Cinderella stood there in her gown. Smiling. Waving. Talking. What my daughters didn’t know was that every six hours, another young woman rotated into the costume. Cinderella didn’t drive off in a pumpkin carriage. She clocked out, walked to a car in a staff lot, and went home to a much smaller castle. My girls didn’t know that, and they didn’t care. They saw the dress, the smile, the setting. They believed the story: Cinderella was real, and she lived in Orlando.

Great storytelling allows us to enter life with a full and present heart. And for six year olds, I was happy my girls believed Cinderella lived in her castle in Orlando, Florida. I knew the power of the story served a great purpose, one that invited them into a reality deeper than fairy tales. Standing before the princesses, my girls entered a world that invited their hearts to dream about a story large enough for their young hearts to blossom. They knew beauty and adventure awaited them. They knew their worth and light would be revealed through the grace and power of love. And they knew in the end, good wins over evil.

Great stories have this effect on us. They help us see truths we already know but have somehow forgotten. They awaken us to realities deeper than the ones we often live from.

But stories can turn on us, too. Just as good storytelling carries the power of life, flawed stories, starting with the ones we tell ourselves, cost us dearly. Last time (Storytellers) I shared how I made up a story while rowing at the gym when I lost myself for a few minutes. In more costly cases, defective storytelling unravels us piece by piece.

Here are some of the most common costs.

Anxiety

Anxiety is both a spark and a fallout of poor storytelling. Consider the ways we make up stories about the future. How often does anxiety get us worrying about the unknown, the pitch-black space that is tomorrow and the days or months or years to come? The nothingness of not-happened-yet becomes a canvas for our anxiety to paint. 

A single woman told me about a wedding she dreaded. “No one will talk to me,” she stressed. She knew only the bride but had not seen her since childhood. Her mind spun lonely stories two weeks before attending. Nothing had yet happened, but in her mind, she already sat alone at a table in the far-off corner.

Anxiety writes flawed stories, and these stories feed us more anxiety in return. We spend our energy preparing for unwanted futures that exist only in our imaginations.

Lost Identity

Anxiety is usually the first domino to fall, but not the last. The next is identity.

Have you ever considered that humans are the only species to wrestle with identity? My dog never sits on the couch, paw-to-chin, wondering who he is. A deer enters the yard, and he barks. He walks by a tree and lifts his leg. He just acts like a dog. But me? I wonder about my identity all the time. In good moments and hard ones. And in the space between, I create narratives to both reassure and dismiss myself. I sit in meetings, assuming everyone else has the answers and I have nothing to offer. The story I tell myself rarely matches reality around me.

What a storyteller I am. In those moments, people miss out on me, and I miss out on myself.

I love a good story, except when the story does not love me back. Not only can we lose ourselves in a story, we can lose ourselves in a story. The former is often beautiful. The latter can be devastating. The flawed stories we tell take us out. Disconnected from our identity, we then lose our presence.

Lost Presence

False stories take us out of the present. When I rowed at the YMCA, I wasn’t there. I was elsewhere, lost in a script I made up. If a friend had tapped me on the shoulder, I would have struggled to place his name - not because I didn’t know it, but because I’d been shaken from another realm. How can we know someone else’s name while we do not know our own?

The bigger the false story, the further it pulls us from our own lives. Ask a recovering addict. Years are often spent in a haze, disconnected from self and others. One AA slogan captures it: S.O.B.E.R.—Son of a B#*@$ Everything’s Real. Sobriety is terrifying because reality comes rushing back. If we aren’t present to ourselves, we can’t be present to anyone else.

Lost Connection

And when presence falls, connection goes with it. 

Relationships make life worth living. Yet the stories we tell most often revolve around them: what others think of us, what we think of them, and what we think of ourselves as we interact with others. And too often, those stories sabotage the very connection we long for.

A mechanic once told me he and his girlfriend would never marry or have children. Curious, I asked why. As he replaced my radiator, he told me about an unfixable childhood: an alcoholic father, an absent mother, siblings left to fend for themselves. “Why would I bring a child into a world like that?” he asked.

His ability to imagine family had been hijacked by his past. 

How deeply we need help narrating our stories of pain. Flawed stories become poison to our capacity for connection.

• How many lose faith because they come to believe God is unloving?

• How many marriages collapse because spouses write horror stories about each other?

• How many lives end because someone believes they are unwanted?

The false stories we write diminish our ability to connect. Then the less connected we feel, the more false stories we create. The cycle pushes us into deeper isolation.

Rachel Scott’s father knows this too well. Since his daughter became the first victim in the Columbine shootings in 1999, he has worked to build kindness and connection in schools. In his talks to combat school violence, the statistics he shares are alarming but unsurprising: isolation breeds self-harm and violence.

Alone, we tell stories furthest from reality. The stories we make up there have the power to turn us against relationships as a whole. Isolation fuels false stories, and false stories fuel isolation. Left unchecked, they erode our capacity to value life itself.

Opportunities to Surrender

How often do we surrender to our limitations rather than writing a story to relieve us of our pain?

This question brings me back to the story of Joseph and his brothers in Genesis. Joseph’s father Jacob favored him above the other brothers. It was no secret. He clothed him better and gave him his ear as Joseph reported back on his brothers’ work. Joseph began to have dreams of taking authority over his brothers. When he shared them in detail, tales of his brothers bowing down to him, it was not hard for the brothers to fear their future and then begin to narrate it. They longed for what they didn’t have, and in their hunger they likely told themselves dangerous stories:

• Life would be better if we had our father’s attention. (Partly true.)

• We must take matters into our own hands. (Not true.)

• If we get rid of Joseph, we will have our father’s love. (Not true.)

So they acted, kidnapping Joseph and selling him off as a slave. And while God eventually worked good from their mess, it was still a mess.

We face the same temptation daily. There are things we want but cannot have and directions in life we cannot control. In our fear of the future, there are opportunities for surrender. But instead, we write stories to rescue ourselves from present and forecasted pain. Those stories rarely end well.

No one begins life wanting to live under false stories. But eventually, we all do. And the cost is high.

The question is not whether we will tell defective tales, but whether we will notice and learn to hold ourselves accountable as storytellers.

So long as we breathe, we will tell stories. We are made for them. The real work is learning to notice and then take proper action on the stories we tell. Whether we live connected to reality or spend our lives living apart from it depends on it.

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I saw them from above as they tanned by the pool. The husband sat at the pool’s edge, dangling his feet in the water. Beside him, his wife stretched out as if to catch some rays. It was 9 AM on a summer morning at the YMCA. Normally, kids on the swim team own the pool until 8. Then come the moms with toddlers, followed by senior citizens for aqua aerobics. But this couple didn’t fit any of those groups. I judged them to be in their fifties.

My morning clients had canceled, so I took the opportunity to close my workout rings. From the rowing machine overlooking the pool, I let my mind wander. The couple became a story.

I imagined the man was retired. His wife had raised their three kids, two in college, one finishing high school. Now they came to sit at the pool on a Thursday morning simply because they could. While the rest of the world worked, they got to sunbathe. What would it be like to retire early, to show up at the pool whenever I wanted, with nothing else pressing for the day? I wanted their ease, their happy kids, their overflowing bank account.

I wanted their life.

Then the man stood up. And just like that, the woman disappeared. This was not Hollywood magic where a character vanishes. Turns out she had never been there at all. What I thought to be a woman, wife, and mother was a pool bag, some towels, and a sunhat bunched together in the shape of a reclining figure. The man had been sitting alone the entire time.

I stopped rowing. I had made up a story, and I had wandered into it.

For a few minutes, or maybe only seconds, I had drifted out of my own life and into fantasy. I fabricated characters and plotlines to soothe myself, to reconcile some longing in me with the story I wished I were living. But unlike Dorothy in Oz, I wasn’t asleep. I was wide awake, pulling the row bar to my chest while slipping out of reality.

What was I chasing? What was I running from? Answering those questions matters if I want to return fully to my own story. What struck me first, though, was the shock: I had left myself again, and for so little reward.

I miss too much of my real life by escaping into imagined ones.

In those minutes of exercise, I did a poor job of being Luke. I got lost, and I lost me.

But I know I’m not alone. Story-making is a universal human reflex. We do it to seek the life we long for and to escape the exile we feel.

And before this sounds too critical, let me say this: it is not wrong to make up stories. Storytelling is one of humanity’s great gifts. Your capacity to craft a story is as sacred as your capacity to love. God hardwired us for story. We’re made for it. Yes, we consume stories for entertainment (thank God for C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling, and Shakespeare). But our wiring goes far deeper than amusement. We learn best through story. We interpret the cosmos through story. We script our very lives by the larger story we believe reality to be.

The stories we believe, write, and consume bless us when they help us live more fully in truth. At its best, storytelling enriches life and gives us courage to face it. At its worst, like all good things, it can lead us astray. This reflex can be both a gift and a trap.

What follows in the coming posts are reflections on the ways our storytelling can help, or hinder, our growth, and how we can use this gift wisely.

Because here’s the truth: you are a storyteller. Whether you’ve published twenty books or spin bedtime tales for a four-year-old, you carry this gift. As Lewis reminds us, “Someday you will be old enough to read fairy tales again.”

Maturity moves us back toward story. Sometimes that looks like rediscovering Twain, Brontë, or Spielberg. Other times, it’s learning to tell better stories to ourselves.

And as the stories we tell go, so often do we.

—

Next Post: Defective Storytelling: The Cost of Poor Storytelling

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EMILY: Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?

STAGE MANAGER: No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some.

— Thornton Wilder, Our Town

It was the last week of their freshma…

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I met an old friend for breakfast. He was five minutes late, as he often used to be. I saw him first, walking through the parking lot with a smile on his face. He looked for my car to see if I had arrived. Little did he know I now drove something different. Like before, the hair gel he used kept it all in place in all the places. When he saw me, he spread his arms for the same bear hug he notoriously gave.

“Great to see you, bro!”

He always said “bro,” beating the kids these days by decades.

As we stood in line, I knew he wasn’t going to let me pay. He never did before. Why would he now?

It had been years since I had seen him, but he hadn’t changed.

He pulled out his card. “I got this, bro.”

He ordered his bagel and cream cheese, and I asked for a breakfast sandwich. I tried to talk him into a coffee, but he stuck with tea. We found a table and got busy catching up. He asked me about myself. As I started to share, I felt my defenses awaken. With each sentence, I anticipated him breaking in to one-up me. This is what he does, I recalled.

“You, too? We visited Europe two years ago and made it to five countries. My favorite was…”

But as I shared about my trip to Iceland and Norway last year, he remained quiet and attentive. Not once did he interrupt. Not once did he turn the conversation back to himself. When I finished, he asked about the fjords and the frigid white water.

Sitting there, speaking and knowing he listened, it became clear he had changed.

People do not change.

I hear this from time to time, and as a therapist in the business of change, it pains me. I believe in what I do. I believe people change. But I also know the reality:

Change is slow.

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We met, either by divine will or Southwest’s new seating policy. On planes, proper introductions come last. You learn the stories first. Where are you from? W…

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Have you ever sat in a place so dark you cannot see your hand two inches from your face? You know it is there as you raise your arm and move five fingers toward yourself. Four inches becomes three an…

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When a house is on fire, do we let it burn?

The obvious answer is no.

But what if it is my home,
and it isn’t my house?

I live here. Others do, too.

The fire ignited before I moved in.
I did not see smoke.

…

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Do I really want to be like God?

It sounds noble to want God’s character, but when love costs us something, most of us reach for power instead, and that choice reveals more about our hearts than we’d like to admit.

That fork shows up as two trailheads. Both catch our attention because they reflect glimpses of the divine. Something inside whispers: Follow this way. And we do. But the two trails diverge, and they end in very different places—one taking us far from God and far from ourselves, the other taking us deeper into both.

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I ended last post by saying: No one would choose to be God if we understood the cost. We would run in the othe…

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As I listened to my friend’s pain and pursuit of his daughter, I thought back to the Tower of Babel and the ways our culture still chases after godlikeness. At first the story sounds almost childish—stacking bricks to the sky, as if heaven could be reached by scaffolding. Any child with a bucket of Legos has dreamed the same. He dumps his blocks, stacks them higher and higher, and when the tower finally eclipses the couch he shouts, “Mom! Come and see!” That is the heart of a child: curiosity, possibility, a need for encouragement.

But Babel’s “come and see” had a darker ring. It was less, Come and celebrate with us, and more, Come and look up at us. Come and see what we have built without God. Come and bow down.

That contrast frames the surrounding chapters of Genesis. In chapter 10, God is creating again after the flood—life and family spreading across the earth. In chapter 12, He is creating again through Abraham—covenant, promise, relationship. But in chapter 11, humanity takes creation into its own hands. Like Eden, Babel is planning without God, creating for power, control, and a name for themselves.

In a sense, they are only doing what we instinctively do. Whether we know God or not, we will pursue godlikeness. The real question is how we go about it.

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Part 2
We chase after godlikeness in the spotlight. But what if being like God looks less like fame and more like love?

I began to see the difference when I sat …

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In 1991 he captured his first title, and that August Gatorade decided to ride the wave. They created the iconic “Be Like Mike” commercial, which had people everywhere singing what they already felt as they watched his Airness:

Sometimes I dream that he is me
You’ve got to see that’s how I dream to be

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We began with light in the darkest month. Then we saw ourselves as scattered puzzle pieces. And we heard Jesus tell Nicodemus that God-light entered the world, yet people preferred the dark. Odd as it sounds, we don’t just live in darkness—we choose it. We want God’s light about as much as we want surrender on the way to wholeness, or God-help instead of self-help.

Eustace knew the feeling.

In the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the ornery boy follows Edmund and Lucy into Narnia. He would note against his will, for Eustace Scrubb only did things his way. When their ship requires repair, Eustace sneaks off and discovers a dragon’s hoard. Driven by greed, he stuffs his pockets with treasure and slips on a golden bracelet before falling asleep. He wakes to find the lair is now his, for he has become a dragon.

His greed cost him moral integrity, and his dragon-form cost him his integrity as a boy. At long last Eustace has the strength and size to bully others, but now he must face another reality: he is even further from himself and friendship. Desperate to return to form, he begins to peel away his dragon scales. Yet every layer he sheds only grows back. He needs a cure he cannot provide.

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