The Second

Be present.   This sage advice saturates the world around me, yet this same world teems with increasingly numerous varieties of distractions and crises.   Countless wonderful people find themselves caught in these chaotic cross currents.   Many ride them with apparent, yet frenetic, ease, turning them to useful outcomes.   Others compartmentalize, carving parts of their lives to enter the flow.   But as good as these strategies are, staying “grounded” proves elusive.   Somewhere along the way you discover voids that have deepened through neglect, neglect reinforced with time spent in the swift currents of distraction.   So, yes, that sage advice reverberates loudly in these empty spaces:   “better not to have yielded to distraction, better to have been present!”   Hopeful as this sounds the idea falls short, being a negation of the unpleasant reality: be not-distracted.   So if distraction has a real antidote, what is its substance? ...

Happy New Year! Let’s begin the year with one of the big questions.   No, not, “Why am I here?”   Instead, “Why am I a Christian?”   I don’t believe I have ever attempted to answer this directly.   At the level of intuition, it’s simple.   But piecing it together, articulating the intuition is too complicated. So, here’s an attempt to go straight to simple. I am a Christian first because I am certain that god exists. That’s half the journey, the smaller half.   From there everything—nature, civilizations, past and present events, human nature, etc.—opens up into one utterly compelling question, “What is god like?”   There is an answer.   God is Personal, Powerful, Good.   Experiencing this answer is why I continue breathing. That’s it.   The rest is details.   A great many details.   All of them amazing.   Some difficult.   Many beautiful.   All incomprehensible.   So much more remains unknown....