Have you ever known, deep in your mind, who you wanted to be or how you longed to live, yet found yourself unable to actually become it? You understood it clearly. You could speak about it intelligently, defend it persuasively, and reflect on it thoughtfully. And yet, somehow, it never quite showed up in your life. It never completed the pilgrimage from your head into your body.

Our ego says to the soul, “Step aside, I have a plan.” The soul says to the ego, “Tap on my shoulder when you’re ready for the real plan.”

In the film “Never Look Away,” Kurt, a German teen, sits in deep thought in the boughs of a huge tree while looking at the blue sky. The wind shakes the tree gently as he becomes one with its branches and the wind. Suddenly he rouses, descends the tree and, in a flush of excitement, runs into his family’s farmhouse announcing at the top of his voice to each family member, “Now I understand everything, now I understand!” Each family says in their own way, “Great.” Then they resume their tasks. But after Kurt tells his father that he understands everything, his father asks, “What do you understand?” Kurt’s reply is, “That everything is one.”

When truth is treated as optional, the soul begins to ache.

Healing rarely happens in isolation. When one person’s strength falters, another’s presence often becomes that strength.

In moments of shock, whether from sudden danger, unexpected beauty, or life-altering news, many of us instinctively cry out, “Oh my God.”

The soul is not static. It moves through seasons, just as our lives do.

Some decisions do not feel like choices at all. They can be terrifying, yet sacred moments when whatever we do changes us forever.

Before I ever knew what Mardi Gras meant, I knew what it felt like. And all of it was not good.

In 1956, my first-grade class participated in the school-wide annual May Day celebration. Excitement mounted up until the special day. The sixth graders did the Maypole dances, and every other class had its own performance across the large playground. For many of us, this was our first experience with being “on stage.”

An old American saying about people who save money only to lose far more in the process: “They would stop a parade to pick up a penny.”

Not all parades celebrate victory or joy. Some parades expose the darkest capacities of the human soul.

When we witness the parade of the Spirit, everything inside us can shift. 

Not every parade is a party. Some are a public march toward cruelty.

Have you ever noticed how something deep inside us stirs when a parade passes by … something older than thought, something that wants to rise, to be seen, and to join the celebration?

Most of us fall into romantic love, dazzled by beauty, charm, personality, and promise. But the longer love lasts, the more it asks a deeper question: Do we love what is eternal beneath what first captivated us?

We do not fall in love with God just once. We fall in love again and again, each time letting go of the God we knew, to discover the God we are now ready for.

Sometimes what we call love is not intimacy at all, but a powerful fixation that quietly takes over our inner life, our perspective, and our behavior.