Is God Out to Lunch? Toward the end of Bryan Stevenson’s book, Just Mercy, he writes of a time at the close of a difficult case that he returns to his law office discouraged and wearied by the fight for justice for a wrongly condemned person facing execution: “The lack of compassion I witnessed every day had finally exhausted me. I looked around my crowded office, at the stacks of the records and papers, each filled with tragic stories, and I suddenly didn’t want to be surrounded by all this anguish and misery. As I sat there, I thought myself a fool for having tried to fix situations that were…

I turned 70 in July – as did 3 million others born in 1946. That means I can start collecting all the good stuff owed to me – like deeper senior discounts, Medicare, full Social Security benefits, people giving me their seats on the subway and getting my luggage into the overhead bins on planes. I’m the stereotypical Boomer in that I demonstrated against the Vietnam war (my draft number was actually #1), grew my hair long, owned and operated a coffee house for a short time, and demanded everything in my world be changed to accommodate me. I was strident, spoiled, obnoxious and shouted more than I listened. Every…

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] Early on the morning of July 15, 2005, a young man stepped over the guard rail and stood on the edge of the Cold Spring Bridge in Santa Barbara, California. He was spotted by Ken Rushing, a local deputy sheriff. Ken said at the time, “He gave me a thousand-mile stare. He basically looked right through me.” And then the young man leaned back and just faded away into the fog-cloaked gorge below. Andrew Popp was a 6’9″ basketball and volleyball star who had recently graduated from San Marcos High School. He was a fine athlete and excellent student. Prominent universities were pursuing him, and his future was, seemingly, bright.…

Every creative person I know has something we call “the inner critic.” It is that voice inside your head that sabotages and undermines all your efforts with questions and demands like, “You are stupid. No one cares about this. You will fail so why try?” The inner critic is not the same thing as an overactive conscience. It is not even a moral guide. What most distinguishes the inner voice from a conscience or guide is its degrading, punishing quality. Its demeaning tone tends to increase our feelings of self-hatred instead of motivating us to change undesirable actions in a constructive manner. It is the part of us that is turned…

When our daughter, Haley, decided to drive from her home in Hollywood back to Texas for a visit, I asked her if I could fly out and then come along on the road trip. Yes, I was concerned about her being alone in the desert with a high-mileage, 10-year-old car, but I was equally enthusiastic about traveling the route itself.

If all I knew about my grandfather was what I read in his 1952 diary I might think he was a man whose life was a monotonous string of colorless days. My grandfather, Bunyan Smith, was a pastor in one of the poorest sections of Nashville, and I knew enough about his life as a preacher to expect that his diary would not likely be thrilling. However, I was completely unprepared for how unremarkable it would be. His first entry on January 1 begins with, “Up about 7:00 a.m. Family worship at breakfast. Dressed for the day. Went to church to pray. Studied. Visited the sick. Wrote letters. Ate supper. Retired.” His…