I’ve never hiked the loop without getting lost for a while. Obviously, we ultimately found our way since I’m here to tell you about it. Like our lives, you have to be lost first, before you are found.

It was over one of those cream puffs that I met Carol Gritton for the first time. Carol had been sent from denominational headquarters to cover the meeting. Following the conference Carol and I maintained sporadic contact. A few months later Carol called to tell me that she’d just learned that her own brother, Clarke was HIV+.

Is there a set path in our genes to be followed or as I was taught, to find the will of God for your life, as if there was a specific plan. Back then I feared that in failing to find that plan it would be like a NASA launch to the moon

I've been a lap swimmer since my late twenties. Just before I decided to get into lap swimming many of us at First Nazarene got into what a physiologist, also at the church, dubbed 'temple conditioning'...mostly around becoming a runner.

All of this to say, many of us have these thoughts of being on the outside. I am far from alone as it turns out. Yet Maya Angelou’s statement is profound. The reward is great even though the comrades along the way get fewer.

In our world of 24-hour news, multiple platforms and social media that stream the tragedies and traumas from around the world into our faces via smart-TVs, all our screens and our phones, how are we to cope? How do we begin to deal with it?

The read brought back a memory of Jeannie and I at a John Denver concert on the Boston Commons many years ago. Denver quoted a poem, The Ambulance Down in the Valley. It struck me so profoundly that I wrote him for a copy. He sent it, or ‘his people’ did.

Maybe it's the life I've experience as a social worker, after all, we have been described as the 'bleeding hearts' of our society. Or, just maybe it is that I see things, or better said, feel things, that others often don't.

Talk about a worn-out word. It is thrown around in our culture in a 1001 ways. We ‘love’ everything from tires and toothpaste to our sitcoms and cars. So much of media is trying to tell me what love is….

That I would be together enough, figured out enough, so you could not see me in a few years saying “that’s not what you said you believed in that blog you wrote back in 2001”. I started writing eighteen years ago.