Month: July 2025

If you grew up in the 1980s, you probably know who Vanilla Ice. One of his most well known and oft-quoted lyrics comes from the song “Ice Ice Baby.”

“Stop, collaborate and listen.”

These lyrics are bouncing around in my head this morning while reflecting on an encounter with my partner yesterday while finalizing some travel plans and I was using a few unfamiliar websites and apps.

When I am trying to learn something, I often “lock-in” and try to figure it out. This tendency come from a combination of wanting to learn, trying to figure things out, and a need to achieve mastery at something.

In and of itself, those are not bad motives, but when you mix them with a deep-seated need to display your expertise from a childhood where performance equaled worth, it’s a recipe for me not showing up as my best self. Last night was no exception to that outcome.

What I should have done is listen to Vanilla Ice and stopped, collaborated and listened. I should have been appreciative, not defensive. I should have assumed positive intent and not been so hell-bent on figuring it out on my own. Sometimes I frustrate myself as much as I do those around me.

There is a quote by Viktor Frankl hanging on a wall in my house and sitting on a shelf in my office. (Yes, I actually bought two of the same piece of wall art.) It says, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.”

I don’t keep that quote clearly visible at home and work because I have mastered it; quite the opposite. I constantly need the reminder to widen the space between stimulus and my response. Yesterday was but one more salient reminder there is still much work for me to do.

We all have those things that set us off. Maybe yours isn’t a need to prove you can do it yourself. Maybe yours isn’t a deep-seated need to justify your worth. One of the biggest tasks of everyone’s self-work is to discover what those things are.

But that discovery is not the end goal; it is a gateway to the next level. That next level, my friends, is where the real work starts. It’s one thing to know what triggers you. It’s a whole other thing to engage in the work of widening that space between stimulus and response.

It’s pretty clear to me every day we all have work before us. I see it in our politics. I see it in the workplace. I see it in my community.

I wonder how much better we could make the world around us if we all strengthen our power to choose our response instead of letting our response choose itself. Maybe we would lash out less, strike back less, and, in the process, stop hurting other people so much. That sure sounds like growth and freedom to me.

The next time something triggers an emotional response, think about broadening the space Frankl talks about and listen to Vanilla Ice. Stop. Collaborate. Listen. Take a step towards developing the power to choose a response which brings peace and connection rather than one fueling discord and separation.

Does anyone else struggle with vacillating between feeling too important and not important at all, or is it just me?

I was thinking about that this morning while sitting on the back porch of my partner’s parents’ house, listening to the river just beyond the line of trees in their backyard. As the birds chirp, the sun begins to rise, and the dew glistens on the grass, the river flows by, adding constant background music to the birds’ beautiful melodies.

I want to be the bird, singing for others to hear. I want to be heard. At times, that need to be heard leads to me believing my voice is more important than others, more worthy of being heard.

From my years of therapy and self-work, I have learned this is a coping mechanism developed in a childhood where I felt emotionally neglected at home, often left to take care of own emotional needs. In order to feel important, I would create an internal world where my importance became a bit consuming, causing me to have an inflated ego. That still happens more often than I care to admit.

But that same emotional wound can cause me to quickly switch directions and swing to the other end of the spectrum, leading me to think I am not important at all. Like that young boy left to nurture himself, I feel like no one in the world sees me, feeling invisible and believing everyone is better than me. This often feeds my insecurities and creates imposter syndrome.

I hope most people don’t struggle with this like me, but imagine some do.

This brings me back to the river.

I am like a drop of water in the river, both vitally important and seemingly insignificant at the same time. Living in this tension is where life is best lived, being part of something always in motion and much larger than me.

I believe everything in the world is connected through the divine, an ever moving force and connection, love in action. When I slow down long enough to listen, I hear the voice of that presence moving in me and around me, flowing like a river.

As a drop of water in the river of creation, I do matter. My momentary encounter with a rock in the stream may not noticeably change that rock, but when countless other drops come before and after me, we collectively change that rock in noticeable ways. This makes us both insignificant and vital at the same time.

If there was no water or just my drop, nothing would change, but as part of a larger movement, I can make a difference.

I am one person out of eight billion in the world and a speck on the timeline of history. However, in this time and place my life occupies, I matter.

So I will keep flowing down the river of history, knowing at some point my drop will evaporate. In the meantime, I want to touch every life I encounter and do my small part to leave love’s imprint on every person I meet. If I do that, my insignificance becomes significant and makes the world a little better. If we all do this together, we will change the world in ways we never thought possible.

Most memories from my teenage years are foggy at best, clouded by trauma and scattered by ADHD. But there is a memory that is fairly clear.

It was a warm summer day in the high school band room and practice had just finished. I am sitting with my friends chatting and hear my dad’s voice from the door. “Come on, Mooso.”

To be clear—and fair to my father—it wasn’t said with malice or a tone of derision. To be honest, at the time I didn’t even realize the wound it was causing.

I don’t remember exactly when my weight became a struggle, but it was around the time I both hit puberty and experience sexual childhood abuse, an unfortunate intersection of life-altering experiences. Before that, my parents could barely find pants that would stay on because I was so skinny.

Adolescence came at me hard, and seemingly with a vengeance. And my dad unknowingly piled on, the high school band room experience serving as Exhibit A.

As Enneagram Type 7, I move to Type 1 in stress. For those who aren’t familiar with the Enneagram, this means that in stressful moments my inner critic starts screaming like a parent at their child’s sporting event.

Adolescence is stressful. It’s even more stressful when you feel all alone in a world consumed with belonging and fitting it. When everyone seemed to have a boyfriend or girlfriend—or at least someone interested in them—I was the chubby kid that all the girls said was “nice” and wrote similar messages in my yearbook at the end of each school year.

Looking back, I realize my struggles were far more than my weight; it was a symptom of deeper, underlying wounds. But it added weight (no pun intended) to my inner critic’s voice, a voice that in some ways continues to whisper in my ear.

Even now, in my mid-50’s, I occasionally hear my dad’s voice echoing from three decades ago. He has been gone for over ten years, but he’s still here. The voices of the past can be difficult to silence.

Even now, I sometimes look in the mirror and feel the anxiety of a high school boy wanting to be wanted, but feeling undesirable. The scars still speak, even though they have healed.

In his book, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Bessel van der Kolk writes, “Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves.”

Overcoming that ignoring and hiding has been the work of the last decade of my life. It has been one of the hardest things I have ever done. And the work is not done.

I share all of this not to illicit pity, but to offer hope.

I know there are people all around me whose experiences, while different, are similar. I see it in the ways they speak and act. As a survivor of trauma, I recognize its often subtle signals. Sometimes I feel like the boy in the Sixth Sense, with one difference, I see hurt people, not dead ones.

Our world is hurting. I see it on my street, on our campus, and across the world. There are hurting people everywhere.

We don’t need more trauma. We don’t more wars, more violent words, more aggression, or more hatred. We need healing.

Richard Rohr says, “If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it—usually to those closest to us: our family, our neighbors, our co-workers, and, invariably, the most vulnerable, our children.” What we are witnessing all around us is the transmission of pain on a global scale.

But global healing starts with individual healing, one person at a time. And while the healing of one person may not sound like much, imagine a wave of healing flowing through billions of people. Imagine a viral spread of healing sweeping across our globe.

I believe every person has at least one “mooso” story, a time when words or actions created a wound. Most of us likely have many more. It is incumbent on us to decide what to do with that pain. Will we transmit it, often causing more pain in the process? Or will we choose to do the harder but better work of transforming, both as individuals and a society?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

These well-known words which appear early in the Declaration of Independence have never been fully embodied by our nation, but countless battles – legal, political, philosophical, and violent – have been waged to make progress in the living out of this ideal.

At the birth of our nation, “men” meant just that. More specifically, men who were white and owned property. In the time of our Founders, this was progress, but it wasn’t the final destination.

There is a reason why the authors of the Constitution built in the ability to amend it. They knew the world would change, people would learn, and their young nation’s guiding document would need to be able to change with it.

Through interpretation and understanding of the original words of the Constitution and Amendments, including the 13th and 14th, we have come to understand “all men” to be more inclusive of all human beings. Well, kind of.

Some seem to want to return to earlier days, to make America great again so to speak.

But is that what our Founders truly intended, to return to times when we were less wise, less informed, and less expansive? One of the reasons they formed this nation nearly 250 years ago was to broaden freedoms, reduce restrictions, and allow people to pursue those unalienable rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

I would argue they intended for us to spread freedom, not hoard it. When we begin to believe freedom is for us, we poison the well of freedom.

Think of freedom as water. When we collect it, store it, and gather it for ourselves, it becomes stagnant and others will be deprived of an abundant life. But when we let it flow, sharing it freely, there is life, abundance, energy, and growth.

Freedom is life-giving. Freedom is love in action.

As a follower of Jesus, both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament inform my worldview as much as the Constitution. Many current leaders restricting freedom claim to be followers of Jesus as well. Their policies and attitudes seem to contradict what Paul wrote to the church in Galatia.

For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters, only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become enslaved to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.

Whether talking about the Apostle Paul or Thomas Jefferson, both seem to have the same idea: freedom is not for self-indulgence, but to care one another and lift each other up. Christianity and the United States have both struggled to fully live up to this ideal, but this doesn’t mean we should cease our pursuit of it.

This struggle expands beyond our borders.

Let me ask a question: What makes a citizen of America any better than the citizen of any other country in the world. Spoiler alert. Nothing.

There’s nothing wrong with taking care of our own citizens, that is part of our obligation. But compassion and love should not and do not require a passport or any other kind of identification.

When talking about those who not citizens within our own border, some will say, “We are a nation of laws.” I agree. But laws are meant to protect, not punish. Yes, there are consequences, but laws should not be a weapon to calm discomfort or serve self-indulgence.

Immigration, foreign policy, and being a global citizen are complex matters, but some seem to oversimplify them to create fear, exercise power, and serve self-indulgence. Whether a lack of understanding and wisdom, selfish intent, or a combination of the two, this not only misses the mark, it’s the antithesis of what it means to be a “Christian Nation.” (For the record, I don’t subscribe to this idea, but let’s go with it for a minute.)

Let’s turn way back to Genesis 12. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the early chapters of the Hebrew Bible (aka the Old Testament), right before Genesis 12, the humans had said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”

Sounds like they wanted to make themselves great and put themselves first. That sounds vaguely familiar for some reason. But a few verses later, the LORD confused the language of all the earth, and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

To use the current vernacular, WHYH decided to control-alt-delete the whole human experience and experiment. In his search for someone to kickoff this revolution, he selected Abram (who would later be called Abraham). Here is his declaration to Abram to build this new nation:

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Genesis 12:1-3)

So often, people want to focus on the “make of you a great nation,” “bless you,” and “make your name great.” (There’s that “great” word again.) But don’t miss what is at the heart of this calling: “so that you will be a blessing.”

Freedom is not our privilege; it is our gift. It is not something to hoard, but to share. Our freedom is not a call to build walls and fences for protection and own benefit. Freedom is something we share to bless others. Freedom gives us license to do much, but it does not give us license to hate, control, marginalize, criminalize, and dehumanize others.

What do we have freedom to do? We have…

Freedom to love our neighbors.

Freedom to speak our opinions.

Freedom to be our whole selves.

Freedom to live without fear of retribution.

Freedom to enjoy the blessings of life.

Freedom to share all of these things with those around us so freedom will truly ring in the lives of all people in our nation and around the world.