As a child, I would sit at the top of the old towering pine and watch the world gloriously spread itself out at my feet. And it wasn’t until I climbed that tree many decades later that it dawned on me how much I have trampled that world under my feet. And so, maybe I need to do a lot more climbing and a lot less walking.

It is until I can no longer hold something in my hands that I often realize that I never really cherished it in my heart.

I can only see life as this most miserable accident that I have been forced to endure simply because I refuse to see it as the most astounding plan that I have been privileged to engage.

Starting over begins when I develop a reawakened appreciation for what I already have, a renewed recognition of what I’ve recklessly forsaken, a rehabilitated understanding that I foolishly do both of those things, and a revitalized commitment to live the rest of my life never doing either of them again.

The finish line is the culmination of a journey. As such, we should never pay it so much attention that the culmination of the journey becomes the whole of the journey at the expense of the journey

Everything that I hold will eventually be gone. Subsequently, the quality of my life will depend on whether I choose to appreciate those things ‘now’ or wait until ‘then.

Until I realize that it’s all I gift, I can hold all of it and yet receive none of it.

If I have never had, or worse yet, I have lost the conviction that life (despite all of the blows it wields and the savagery that it spawns) is nonetheless an incalculable privilege, I will have in that single loss forfeited the whole of my life and effectively wiped out any hope that I can or will do anything other than exist.

To judge someone is to say that I have the right to define who they are, verses understanding that God has handed me the priceless privilege of discovering who they are.