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Last week I attended a Zoom meeting for a friend’s ministry. For an icebreaker, my friend asked us what was one good thing that happened for us as a result of the pandemic. This was not intended to minimize the impact of the pandemic, but to notice where we still experience blessings in our lives […]
October 19, 2020
“I’m not easy to live with, I know that it’s true. You’re no picnic either, babe, that’s one of the things I loved about you.” Don Henley (Not Enough Love in the World) “When I’ve shown you that I just don’t care, when I’m throwing punches in the air, when I’m broken down and I […]
June 1, 2020
Do you have some hot button topics that are sure to result in a fight? How about some things that really bother you but you don’t want to say anything because you fear it will just blow up? You find yourself sucking it up because you don’t like confrontation? I don’t like conflict or confrontation […]
February 23, 2020
“Years ago, my mother used to say to me — she’d say, ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be –‘ She always called me Elwood. ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be oh, so smart or oh, so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. And you may quote me.” Elwood P. […]
November 13, 2019
Here’s the script from the third College of Marriage session on handling conflict. Welcome to the College of Marriage, session 6. This is the third of our sessions that are specifically about handling conflict. Today we are going to work on skills for handling conflict. Much of this comes from the research by John & […]
October 23, 2019
If you were reading my posts from last summer, you may recall that I am facilitating classes for the College of Marriage at my church. We are also making videos for the lecture portion of those sessions. This is the video script for the first of three sessions on Handling Conflict. When the videos are […]
September 7, 2019
There is a famous orchestral work from the 18th century by Joseph Haydn entitled The Seven Last Words of Christ. It was written for a Good Friday service in 1787 and continues to be performed on Good Friday. The title has sometimes been appropriated to highlight resistance to change in the local congregation. The “seven […]
July 2, 2019
I don’t know about you, but I like being the hero in my own stories. From my experience, most people seem to. If you think about it, the stories you get wherein the person telling the story was in the right or made the right choice or responded to a situation in a very mature, […]
November 19, 2018
Our family experienced an unexpected tragedy a few weeks ago when my brother in law, Rick, was killed when another boat collided with the fishing boat he was on. One would not consider fishing to be a high-risk activity, and he had made this trip many times before. It makes it shocking to have Rick, […]
December 7, 2020
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