publishing peace

  I have always struggled with the idea of self-love. I have heard a lot of people, much of my life, say this phrase: "You have to learn to love yourself before you can love anyone else." And pretty much every time I heard that, I went, "Well, that's just absolute garbage." Because guess what? I love everyone, all the time, a whole freaking lot. But myself? Mmm. Not so much. It's not that I have ever actively, aggressively HATED myself. But taking care of myself has never been something I knew how to do. I knew how to show love to other people, and I knew how to care for them. But I never thought about applying the same principles to me. And then there was also the small matter of my personality. As a human, I am generally what I like to call progress-focused. I am never not trying to be better at something. This is, for the most part, a good thing, and I've tended to be pretty proud of it most of the time. In my brain, this was what made me good -- that

About two weeks ago, I went rock climbing for the first time in a long time. I forgot how much I enjoyed it. It's a challenging sport, requiring a lot of strength I haven't built yet, but there's something else about it I find thought-provoking and a little bit fascinating. It's one of the only sports I can think of where you give your life entirely into the hands of another person. Of course, it's possible to climb without that risky element, but as far as beginners go, if you choose to climb without a belayer, you're either taking a much bigger risk or limiting yourself -- either by how high you can climb or by how many routes you're able to do. Having someone to catch you when you might not have the strength to continue is possibly part of why the rock climbing community is so supportive and helpful -- these are people who have to learn to trust, and have to be worthy of trust, each time they get on the wall. The stakes for rock climbers are pretty high,

When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up? I wanted to be an astronaut. Flying amid the planets and stars, floating around on a space ship, that sounded like the life for me.  When I told my dad this, he told me that you have to be big and strong to be an astronaut -- and plus, you have to know math. The big and strong part was not nearly as daunting to me as the math was, funnily enough. I have since wondered how many dreams have been shattered by math -- but that's a tangent for another time. As the years have passed, my desire to sail in the stars has remained -- just pointed in a different direction. While I no longer want to go to space (at least not in a pressing way), I do have an itching urge to see the whole entire world and everything in it. (Sometimes I think it might be easier to learn math.) There is something spiritual that happens to me when I'm travelling, something big and beautiful that builds up inside me and teaches me things that I'

I feel like the title of this post is funny in multiple ways! This morning, as I was sitting in church thinking about what I can personally do to come closer to Christ, I thought about my tendency to want to know EVERYTHING about EVERYTHING. My friends and family know this. If someone is making plans to hang out with me, I wanna know when they're coming or when I'm going, what we're doing there, how long it will take, how much money it'll cost, where things are happening, how long it takes to drive there, what I need to bring, if anyone needs snacks, the truth about the Illuminati, where Sasquatch lives, and how many stars there are. Honestly, I might be a little more chill about it than I just made it sound like I am, but I do appreciate having a plan, even if we end up deviating from that plan. I especially enjoy knowing what the plan is to begin with. So you can probably imagine that the whole concept of faith, in its many facets, has been considerably more difficult