Yo-Yo

Dealing with teenagers can be a real challenge. A typical teenager is concerned with one thing in their lives: themselves. As a result, they tend to make their relationship with their parents very transactional. They expect to request and to receive, and nothing more. Give them the car keys, and they are happy. Give them money […]

Loving Hard

The house I bought after my divorce was a real fixer-upper. One of the many projects I tackled was to redo the landscaping in the front yard. It was a mess. One part of the project was to literally scrape the sod off the lawn and transplant it to where I had removed a tree…in […]

Turnabout is Fair Play

I don’t think there has ever been a more public display of human suffering than the Passion of our Lord. His suffering was not limited to one particular place, witnessed by a few. His suffering was through the streets of Jerusalem with thousands witnessing the entire grueling ordeal. In the midst of that suffering, Simon […]

Hitting the Wall

I often equate going through a divorce to being in a severe car accident. In both cases you emerge very badly battered and wounded, one emotionally and the other physically. Just as it takes a significant amount of time to heal from the physical injuries of a car accident, it also takes significant time to heal emotionally from […]

True Freedom

Divorce always sounds like the word “divide” to me. I am no Latin expert, but my guess is they both have the same root word. Sadly, divorce is a time marked by division. Much of what you love and cherish has been lopped off. You tend to be consumed with fighting to keep what is […]

New Math

The best way I can describe the suffering from my divorce is it was like a heavy weight strapped to my back, combined with a gnawing ache in the pit of my stomach. It was always there. The only relief I would get was when I slept. Unfortunately, the second my eyes opened, the pain […]

Today

The list was quite long. It was my friend Sam’s list of all the things he wanted to make sure he got done during the week. He was beginning to panic as he thought about getting everything done while juggling work, parenting, and life commitments. Being a single-parent meant he had to do much of […]

Consumed

“Ouch!”, my three-year-old daughter cried as I tried to dig the back of her pierced earring out of her earlobe. Evidently, the earrings had been left in her earlobes for too long allowing the backs to close too tightly. While I was keeping calm for her sake, inside I was filled with anxiety. I felt […]

Angels

“If God really loves me, where is he now when I need him the most?” That was the thought that ran through my mind often during those first weeks and months when my divorce hit. Sure, I read over and over in the Gospels how God will never abandon me. How even the hairs on […]

Out-Of-The-Blue

When the thought to move my kids to a totally new area of town after my divorce first entered my mind, I dismissed it as nonsense. I was a single parent, and I was up to my eyeballs in the day-to-day reality of raising three kids on my own and running a business. Plus, I […]