I taught a class at the PAR C (Panhandle Adult Rebuilding Center, Amarillo’s outreach for people experiencing homelessness in our city) recently on a question we’ve all heard before: Is the glass half empty or half full? But as I was preparing, I realized the real question isn’t about optimism or pessimism at all. The glass is always full. The question is: what is it full of? I went in that day wanting to teach about perspective, but then I realized I needed to ask them about

I heard Austin Price speak recently on being a confident, courageous Christian. The more I sit with it, the more I realize we’ve gotten this whole thing backwards. We think the goal is to be comfortable, but I’m learning it’s better to be comforted by God rather than comfortable without Him , and trusting through discomfort is how you actually become more Christlike. The struggle of human existence has become the pursuit of comfort. My experience has been that when I’m really

Remember our previous post about being quiet and recognizing the sublime ? In that blog I shared a supremely sublime moment in my life that happened when a friend texted me the night after I’d been fired. But there is another sublime moment that always fills me with awe. It happened when my friend Jeff and I were working on a problem at work, and suddenly we saw something that had been in front of us for years but we’d never noticed. From this, we ended up creating a patent t

In our lives, we give people permission—sometimes knowingly, most times unknowingly—to control us with invisible strings. They’re the ones that tie us to our past, to someone else’s expectations, to the version of ourselves that we think we’re supposed to be. Unfortunately, gifts from loved ones often come with strings like these. My parents taught me about this in very different ways. My dad’s love language was excessive generosity. He gave freely, abundantly, and without co