And there was so much more: short stories, letters, old resumes, project proposals, budgets… so much stuff. Maybe it was a passion for nostalgia, I’m not sure, but since I was a little kid, I’ve never found it easy to throw things out. My mom used to call me a pack rat. I just hold on to things as if they were precious stones.

A number lights up on Michael's screen, and before he even reads it his heart is already racing. He knows who it is, and part of him wonders what trouble she's found this time and how much this call is going to cost…

A number lights up on Michael's screen, and before he even reads it his heart is already racing. He knows who it is, and part of him wonders what trouble she's found this time and how much this call is going to cost — not only in dollars, but in the hope he'll spend on it and the disappointment that usually follows. Every conversation lately has ended the same way, and he has no real reason to think this one will be different.

As Americans, every July we celebrate the freedom our independence brings. Two hundred and fifty years ago we fought for the right to decide where we would live, what we would do, how we would worship, what groups we would associate with, and how we would make a living, rather than have those things decided for us by a foreign power. On the national level that had tremendous consequences. But there is a smaller, more personal level that I think carries more meaning

Some decisions are made in a moment and then the consequences haunt for years.

A sixteen-year-old girl suffers from abuse and neglect at home, goes to prom hoping for more than an escape. She wants what many girls want at that age: to be saved by a hero and live happily ever after.  The 18 year old boy’s promises make him that hero.  She believes sex will consummate them.  Her desperation blinds her to the negative consequences of her choice.  She’s not trying to destroy her life, but hoping for a new one.  

It was just after the 6 o’clock news. Sid had watched the clips of firefights from Vietnam. Young men fired M16 rifles and M60 machine guns, one was on a radio screamed into its handset, others carried wounded soldiers toward helicopters in a field of tall grass, waving chaotically from the down draft of the rotors. Then another clip, flag-draped coffins being carried past a saluting honor guard into an airfield hangar. Numbers were posted on the screen: Killed in action, 30. Wounded, 210.

"Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose." It is a lyric from a song called "Me and Bobby McGee," written by Kris Kristofferson. It is a ballad about a couple in the 1960s traveling together, hitchhiking, sleeping outdoors, or wherever they could find a place to sleep. They were sharing the joy of being free. But then, somewhere near Salinas, Bobby McGee discovered she was meant for something else. The song is sung from the nostalgic perspective of her companion, who would trade his whole life for one more minute with her.

Moses was a man who knew who he was before he knew his purpose  He was raised in Pharaoh's house, but it would be hard to believe he didn’t know he was a Hebrew.  Pharaoh’s daughter, upon finding him said, “This is one of the Hebrews' children.”  (Exodus 2:6)  She sought one of the Hebrew women, his actual mother, to nurse him.   Hebrews 11 tells us that when he came of age, he refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter.  Then, Acts 7:23 says it came into his heart to visit his brethren, confirming that he wasn’t ignorant of his identity.  

I am writing this for those of you who have, or have had, a broken mother in your life. That's a mom who was absent, addicted, depressed, or failed to protect you in ways that left wounds that still affect you. She's the mom you don't know how to honor. But it's for broken moms too, who need to be honored more than anyone and have a hard time believing they deserve it.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and over the next four weeks I want to walk through something I run into often in my coaching and pastoral counseling: unmet dreams that harden into expectations, and the way they can quietly haunt a person until they tip over into self-destructive behavior or real mental health suffering. The only durable solution I have found is to drop the expectations and re-focus our desires on God.

Do we serve God, or do we serve mammon? Or is it power, pleasure, status? Jesus said, "No man can serve two masters," (let alone four) though in my experience most people have several they turn to. Who we serve becomes evident in situations close to home. Like on a Tuesday afternoon, when you're tired, scared, depressed, or angry, and the consequences of reaching for quick relief seem smaller, and more insignificant than the Bible makes them sound.

The way I behaved added to each African’s idea of what a white person was, what an American was. In fact, one of the Peace Corps’s main goals was to expose the world’s other cultures to Americans, assuming, of course, that the representatives they sent would shed good light on Americans in general.  I’ve already written about some of my bad behavior. This is one of them I can’t help but think of with shame.

There were no accommodations for rent.  It was a rural village with no electricity except for the border guards’ station, which ran on its own generator. Surrounding it was a mud-hut village that looked like a photograph from National Geographic magazine. Beautiful in its way, but not exactly set up for overnight guests.

There is a principle in our faith that contradicts our basic, natural beliefs. Summed up in St. Francis’s prayer — We must give in order to receive. Love in order to be loved. Die in order to live. These are not ideas that come easily. They are truly against a our in-born desires to protect ourselves and avoid pain and, because of that, they are easy to reject.  I have been especially stubborn in this area. It was not until my late fifties that I began to understand them.

We were poor; much of it was made worse by my stepfather’s alcoholism. My feelings toward him were complicated. During my senior year in high school, I went to school in the morning and worked full-time, second shift in the factory where he worked.  I wanted his approval, but I also resented him. I resented that I had to work, that I gave up sports and time with friends, that I had to buy my own clothes and help with groceries. Still, I wanted him to accept me as his son. I wanted him to be a father to me.

“You’ve got to fight fire with fire.” I don’t know how many times I heard that growing up; as a boy and as an adult. Here’s what it meant: if you don’t meet offense with equal or greater force, you’ll be taken advantage of for the rest of your life. Like many, I took it to heart.

Many years ago, I was teaching math and education at a teacher’s college in Ghana. Each year the local schools held a basketball tournament. It wasn’t like tournaments in the United States. The courts were outdoor concrete slabs in rough condition. There were no bleachers. The lines were painted, but I doubt the dimensions were exact.

One of my favorite TV shows of all time was Firefly. It was a space western. That may sound like a contradiction, but it worked. Unlike most science fiction shows, there were no humans in makeup pretending to be aliens. The story centered on people who left “Earth-that-was” and settled in other parts of the galaxy. There was space travel and planet development, but the real focus was on people and how they handled their environment and culture.

Back in the 1980s, when I was serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ghana, I lived in the Northern Region in a small town called Tamale. The economic situation in the country was bad. The currency, the cedi, had a fixed official exchange rate of three cedi to one U.S. dollar. That rate wasn’t realistic. Goods were priced according to the black market rate, which was closer to one hundred cedi to a dollar.

Our political systems cause more anxiety than security. Violence seems normal as it’s a minute by minute part of the news cycle.  The economy feels fragile and families work multiple jobs just to survive.  The weather is increasingly unpredictable. Wars and rumors of war are constant just as they always have been.  Now as then, the world is still too chaotic to explain hope.