Rather than making a New Year’s resolution for 2014, I selected a guiding word for the year, and the word I chose was “compassion.” The selection feels even more appropriate now. At the start of the year, I embraced my guiding word with a “14 Days of Loving-Kindness Challenge” on my blog. As...

In many ways, I feel like I’ve been holding my breath for the last two weeks – trying to wrap my brain around everything that has happened; struggling to find my voice because silence is deadly. Silence is not acceptable because silence implies acceptance. As a pastor’s kid, the words of the...

Twenty-six years ago my family went to Dallas for Thanksgiving. I don’t remember quite why my parents decided we would go to Dallas that year. It was just a couple of hours away from where we lived at the time, but we didn’t have family to visit. We just went on a whim. As chance would have...

I’ve written about the “gratitude shift” previously on my blog and perhaps even here. Basically, the gratitude shift is a perspective readjustment by which one seeks to view everything through the lens of gratitude. It isn’t always easy, but when it works, it really works. Here’s are a couple...

Imagination, fantasy and make-believe are commonplace at our home. It’s rare for a day to go by without one of my sons transporting himself to a fantastical world of play and pretend. On any given day my boys will most likely “be” Darth Vader-Anakin Skywalker, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Chewbacca...

Sometimes it’s hard to love people, even people we want to love. They push us away as they work through their own struggles and issues. They push all of our buttons because they can and because they take our love for granted – which they should be able to do as our loved one, particularly our...

Today is the International Day of the Girl, a day established by the United Nations to promote girls’ human rights, highlight gender inequalities that remain between girls and boys, and address the various forms of discrimination and abuse suffered by girls around the world. While those are the...

October 5-11 is Fire Safety Week. One of my fellow members of the No Kid Hungry Social Council is a firefighter. Last year, she shared her top 10 tips with me to pass along to kids when teaching fire safety. I feel No. 2 on her list is particularly important, as I know many kids would feel the urge to...

Sometimes a memory comes to me in the form of a song – not the usual thing where the song triggers a memory, but rather the song is the memory or is representative, more often, of a series of memories which, in my mind, have bound themselves together with the song. It’s really like a montage...

Residents of Val Verde came out in numbers and made their feelings about the expansion of the Chiquita Canyon Landfill known – 112 to 0 AGAINST the expansion. Despite a clear presentation of the amount of money the community would receive from the landfill if it voted in favor of expansion, the...