I was a poor distance runner most of my life.

No, that’s not quite right. I am a poor distance runner.

For most of my life, however, I always stopped running before the term “distance” could apply to what I was doing.

In a college physical education class, I had to log six miles of running each week. Three nights a week, my friend, Jay, and I went to the football stadium to run laps around the quarter-mile track. Neither one of us was in running shape when we started, so we did more walking than running.

But by the end of that semester, we could finish eight laps (two miles) around the track at a slow jog.

That’s as far as I could go. The sensation I got when running was that an iron cage was tightening around my chest and my lungs were turning to paper.

Over the next few years, I tried to take up running again as a New Year’s resolution. The weight gain I longed for in high...

I hope you’ll excuse me. The thoughts that follow are new for me. Rather than present them to you on a plate with garnish and a glass of wine, I’m letting you watch me work in the kitchen.

In this pandemic, nature is giving us one hell of a laboratory for life. Everything is an experiment these days!

The changes that the pandemic forced on us are also forcing us to think about like never before. How much of our lives, and our thoughts about our lives, was on “autopilot”?

I think I said before that, God willing, I will look back on my life as “before the pandemic” and “after the pandemic.” I hate to say it, but I feel like the pandemic is the end of me being young and the start of me being old. That could explain the ache of the low-grade grief I feel all the time these days. The only world I ever knew is dead. What else can I do but feel grief?

This grief, like all strong...

What is the best compliment someone ever gave you?

Enjoy thinking about that for a few minutes.

Got it?

How did that compliment change you or change your life?

Enjoy thinking about that for a few minutes.

Words can make whole new worlds, can’t they?

Two people gave me two compliments that made the whole world new for me. The moments they spoke their compliments to me were like the moment when God said “Let there be light!”

The first compliment came from my friend, Andrea. She is not a Christian, which is one of my favorite things about her. She is an artist, which means she is a person who throws her life wide open to the Spirit that moves like wind through the world. The same Spirit that was “hovering over the face of the deep” in Genesis 1:2. I happen to believe that, out of all people, artists come closest to being prophets like the ones in the Bible. Like the prophets in the...

My dad preached 3,640 sermons in his career as a Christian pastor.

That’s my math. He may figure something else.

I heard at least two thirds of those sermons.

I’m sad to say (for Dad) that the sermon I remember best is the one I grew to think of as maybe his worst.

The title of the sermon was ‘The Most Important Thing in the World’ or something like that. I remember it because Dad and I talked about the sermon the week before he gave it on a Sunday morning.

Dad started the sermon by asking: “What is the most important thing in the world?” The rest of the sermon tried out different answers to the question. Things like pleasure, popularity, and wealth.

I don’t recall, but I bet my entire haul of Christmas gifts this year that Dad used this Bible verse in the sermon: “For where your treasure is, your heart will be also” (words of Jesus Christ in Gospel of Matthew 6:21).

The...

My wife, Tracy, and I were at the kitchen table one morning not long ago.

She was scrolling emails and I was scrolling The New York Times.

This is not antisocial behavior for us.

Tracy sips her orange juice and tells me about work situations that sprung up since the night before. She supervises a large staff, so work situations pop up like a 24-hour game of Whack-a-Mole.

I sip my coffee and read the news to her.

On this morning not long ago, I read her some news I thought she would like. A new COVID vaccine from the pharmaceutical company Pfizer was nearing government approval. The vaccine proved 90 percent effective at keeping people from getting COVID. The vaccine could be available within weeks.

I expected Tracy to get big eyes and say something like “that’s great!”

But she didn’t.

She got quiet. Her eyes pressed shut, her face scrunched up, her lips trembled, and her...

This year, two things have been stuck in my head.

The first is the Hamilton theme song because my son asked me to play it for him several times a day for about six months straight.

The other is a few lines the Spirit moved an old Christian teacher to write to a church of Christ in ancient Rome:

“We who are strong ought to put up with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Each of us must please our neighbor for the good purpose of building up the neighbor. For Christ did not please himself…” (Letter to the Romans 15:1-3a).

While Hamilton is stuck in my head for good reasons (my son loves it and it’s some of the best music I’ve ever heard in my life), Romans 15:1-3a is stuck in my head for reasons that are not good.

I don’t like to say it, but some of the loudest Christians I heard this year seemed to forget that Romans 15:1-3a is in their Bibles.

Rolling...

This year, Thanksgiving is going to be different.

Some customs will be the same. Mom Smith will host us at her home and she will make all of the Thanksgiving foods we love to eat.

But “customary” stops there.

We won’t see my sister-in-law and her family. They are wisely staying home in western New York.

Those of us who do gather at Mom Smith’s will do so in the back yard or on the front porch. I’m hauling our portable fire pit up there so we can have some warmth while we visit outside. Rather than ooh and ahh as we crowd over the feast at the table, Mom Smith will plate individual portions and bring them to us from inside. We will limit our stay to less than two hours.

It’s what we need to do for the health and safety of our own family.

It’s what we need to do for the health and safety of the people each of us may meet in the next couple of weeks.

It’s what we need to do for...

A few days ago, I wrote about the time I moved to Texas for grad school and the mess I made of everything while I was there.

I left a couple of details out of that story.

The first is that I didn’t do my homework before I enrolled in grad school and moved to Texas. I was bored at my job and felt like it wasn’t taking me where I wanted to go in life. So, I applied to grad school and made the decision to move to Texas without doing much research or thinking at all.

It’s worse than it sounds. I didn’t even know my graduate program was a three-year full-time graduate program until I was already a month into it!

The other detail I left out of the story is that I dropped out of grad school seven or eight months before I finally left Texas.

That means I spent several months not doing much of anything while I fell into depression and turned to charity and hand-outs just to get by.

Why...

This is the story of how my emptiest Thanksgiving turned out to be my fullest.

The year was 1998. I was a senior at Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas.

That year, as always, my dad and mom hosted a big Thanksgiving celebration at their home in Ashland, Ohio.

In the Irwin family, “Thanksgiving” means “full.” To this day, my parents fill their home with family and friends. A place is set at every square inch of the table. Mom starts every Thanksgiving Day by serving a huge family breakfast at the table. Around 10 o'clock in the morning, she lays out a “goodie table” that stays in the living room all day. Around 3 o'clock, Mom serves a gigantic Thanksgiving feast followed by pecan and pumpkin pie. Leftovers come back out in time for the Irwin family’s Thanksgiving evening tradition: Watching ‘Home Alone’ (with “Mystery Science Theater 3000”-style commentary from my two sisters).

Life is full of distractions.

You can’t avoid them.

They choose when and where to come at you.

Some of them come from within you.

Have you ever tried to sit is silence and still your mind for even five minutes?

What happened?

So, if you think you will find a place to be free of distractions, give up.

The best you can do is make friends with your distractions.

“But what if I don’t want to be friends with my distractions?”

Good question and you have a point.

We may not be able to stop distractions from coming at us in life. But we can choose more of what kind of distractions we will be around.

What distractions are likely to come at you at Disney World versus the ones that are likely to come at you in Las Vegas?

When you choose where to be in life, you choose what kinds of distractions are likely to come up most often in life.

I once worked at a place where my coworkers...