Recent science shows that our brain size limits the number of acquaintances and friendships we can handle at one time.

We can have a loose network of about 130 to 150 acquaintances–coworkers, Facebook friends, folks we see at church, professional contacts, schoolmates, etc.

When it comes to close family and friends, we can handle about five very close relationships and up to 15 fairly close relationships.

This applies whether you’re a billionaire or a panhandler, a beauty or butt-ugly, famous or obscure.

You can be famous, powerful, and rich, but that does not give you greater access to loving relationships with close family and friends. The quality and quantity of those relationships has nothing to do with fame or money or power. When it comes to relationships, every one of us has equal access and equal capacity.

Yet we often work so hard for fame, money, or power as if those...

Randall was a friend who lived two doors down in our college dorm. The night before we graduated from Harding University, we were riding around in his pickup truck. He was 21 and on his way to grad school at Kansas State University. His dream was to be an English professor.

On a family vacation a few weeks after our graduation, Randall drowned.

Just a few weeks before Randall and I graduated, we watched the mass shooting at Columbine High School on live TV from the student center. Fifteen high school students (including the two shooters) died in the school.

Cassie Bernall, 17, was shot execution-style. Her parents later wrote a book about her. I read it in almost one sitting. That an ordinary teenaged girl could go to an ordinary school on an ordinary day and die from a bullet at point blank range haunted me then. It haunts me still.

Thirteen years later, I’d confront the same...

Do you have a spare room in your house?

When we bought our house in 2012, we looked forward to having a third bedroom where we could offer guests a place to stay. At the time, I imagined our home as a place where dozens of out-of-town visitors would find hospitality and a quiet place to sleep.

This has not quite worked out the way I hoped.

Our spare room, in reality, is a dumping ground for all the extra stuff that doesn’t seem to belong anywhere else in the house.

The double bed we thought would always be ready for a tired visitor is now buried under assorted junk we tossed there. The closet where we thought guests would hang their clothes is stuffed to the top with our own odds and ends. The floor is covered with piles of stuff everywhere.

We’ve had a few close friends and relatives stay in the room over the last five years, but nowhere close to the variety of strangers and...

Last night, we got home after a ten-hour drive from my parents’ house in eastern Tennessee. We unloaded the car at around 11:30 p.m. and crashed into bed well after midnight.

When we awoke this morning, the scene was depressing as could be for a neat freak like me: The stuff we unloaded from the car stands in piles on the kitchen counters, living room floor, and table.

Or, I should say, in piles on top of the piles we left a week ago when we were rushing to get out of town on time. Tracy was wrapping gifts and left bags and boxes of gift-wrapping supplies in the dining room. The sink was piled up with dishes we quickly rinsed and left behind. Daniel’s toys cluttered the floor all over the house.

And everything is dirty. We didn’t have time to clean before we left. The bathrooms are looking crusty. The floors are looking crumby. Surfaces are looking dusty. The whole place smells...

About two years ago, I began keeping a daily journal. Every morning before the sun comes up, I fill one page with thanksgiving. Whatever gratitude brings to mind, I write it on the page in no order.

Going back through several hundred pages of thanksgiving, it is interesting how many times “fresh, hot coffee” shows up.

It’s not a surprise. The first thing I do when I come downstairs in the morning is grind some coffee and make a fresh cup. I’m drinking it from one of my favorite mugs as I write in my journal.

I’ll tell you what, though: Gratitude journal or no gratitude journal, a fresh cup of coffee at 5:30 a.m. is the champagne of morning time.

The first sip that passes my lips makes me glad to be awake.

It’s a little thing, but after two years of practicing thanksgiving, the little things are the ones that make life good in a big way.

Eating cereal with my five-year old.

...

In my teens, 20s, and 30s–most of my life!–I thought that only a “loser” would stay home.

By “loser” I meant me…staying home.

By “staying home” I meant…

…not being out with attractive, luminary, well-connected people on a Friday or Saturday night…

…struggling to build a home-based business rather than get a “real job”…

…not going out to the most interesting places around town so I can tell everyone else I went there.

“No,” I thought. “Only a loser would be at home on a Friday or Saturday night. I don’t want to be a loser.”

Then along came Tracy and Daniel and our home.

Now, I cannot imagine anyone more attractive, luminary, or worth knowing than my wife and son.

I can’t imagine missing so many special moments that I now enjoy with my little boy because I’m a work-from-home dad.

I cannot imagine a more interesting place than my own home when my family is gathered there.

I...

“Tracy loves. Tracy loves.”

That’s what Marilyn said one summer eleven years ago. Tracy and I were just coworkers then, but we were coworkers becoming fast friends.

By autumn, the leaves were falling and so was I.

On October 5, 2006, Tracy agreed to go on a “real” date. Two years later, on October 3, 2008, we came together in marriage to form a new family.

“Tracy loves. Tracy loves.”

Marilyn knew the facts at the time, but she didn’t know that Tracy’s love is actually something like a miracle, a superpower.

For nine years, I’ve seen “Tracy loves” put to the test again and again.

At least a million of those tests came from me.

But Tracy loves still.

That’s what she does. That’s what she is.

Her love is so unexpected that it seems to be channeling through her from some place beyond the edge of the universe. A divine love from a divine somewhere coming into our world...

I’ve called the month after our son was born my “personal Vietnam” (I beg the pardon of my father-in-law and anyone who served in the real Vietnam).

In those 30 days, I brought two strangers home to a house that was itself a stranger to me: We moved in just a week before our son was born. I didn’t know this new person whose carrying on and crying seemed to synchronize to the times I needed to sleep. My wife who came home from the hospital–her body exhausted and wounded and her mind awash in strange hormones–was not the same woman I took there a few days earlier.

As I cared for my convalescing wife and my newborn son in that strange new house, I wished for the days to speed by quickly. All I wanted was to get back to something that felt familiar, normal.

Those days coincided with the changing of the seasons from summer to fall. Each day, the evening came a little sooner. I got to...

Grandeur is not the standard for the greatest good we can do.

A sloppy crayon-on-paper drawing from my four-year old son is worth infinitely more to me than the masterwork of an accomplished artist.

Give me a choice between a hundred dollar bill or a compliment, a hug, a kind word, or a smile and I’ll let you keep your money every time.

I think most of us would choose the same.

A small kindness that seems no better than dropping a nickel in a beggar’s cup may be worth a million dollars if it changes the course of his life.

Tipping the scale just a little toward kindness today may be the ounce that turns someone away from death and back towards life.

Today, you will meet people who are barely keeping their nose above their addiction, boredom, confusion, depression, disappointment, doubt, exhaustion, fear, heartbreak, hopelessness, loneliness, regret, or shame.

Sending just one...

The situation in Washington, D.C., could serve us all well for the next generation. We are seeing the logical end of hyper-partisanship or what I’m calling “being right to the exclusion of others.”

What does that mean?

It means two things.

First, it means that I believe only one of us can be right. One of us has to be wrong. Put another way: Rightness can only be on the side of one. If rightness is on my side, then it cannot be on my opponent’s side in the least. There is black and there is white. There is no gray area. So I work to ensure that I’m right or that rightness is on my side. My opponent must either agree with me or be all wrong. Compromise is impossible because “right” does not make deals with “wrong,” right?

Second, it means that I cannot and will not share any credit for success with you. If I believe I am right and you are wrong, anything we accomplish together may...