I never thought I would be a hider. Six months after I joined the corporate world in 2008, my supervisor conducted an anonymous 360 review of my performance. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, but one of my colleagues reported that he found me “abrasive.” That one label discolored all the others for me. The colleague…
“The basis of world peace is the teaching which runs through almost all the great religions of the world. Love thy neighbor as thyself. Christ, some of the other great Jewish teachers, Buddha, all preached it. Their followers forgot it. What is the trouble between capital and labor, what is the trouble in many of…
I spend a lot of time with teenagers. I have taught middle school and high school for almost six years, and I have experienced the teen years with my own children. And, yes, while my kids and my students do sometimes fulfill the stereotypes assigned to teens, they are more than that. They have deep…
He wasn’t ready for it, my sweet husband. We’d just had a check-in with our counselor the day before, and all seemed well. All was well, really. I hadn’t knowingly concealed anything, but crashing in. The weight of weeks and months of comparison and feeling inadequate had literally brought me to my knees on the…
This year, I have been reading through the Bible in exactly the way people tell you not to, from front to back. This is not some holier-than-thou hero effort; it’s simply that I just don’t need any more multitasking in my life right now. I have young children, and I just don’t think I can…
It was one of the most heartbreaking moments I had ever known. Our older son, aged six, had decided that he wanted to run away. Embracing the “Let him do it” attitude, I went with him to pack his things. “I’ll take this,” he said. “Nope,” I said, “you didn’t buy that with your money.”…