The first time I saw the ocean, I was fifteen or sixteen. It was summer, and I'd traveled to North Carolina to spend a few weeks with my aunt and uncle on my mother's side, and my cousin. My cousin and I grew up together, and we were more like brothers than cousins. One Sunday we all went to the beach.

It is a debate. Picture two men on a stage, each behind a podium. On the left is a man in a white lab coat. In its breast pocket is a pocket protector filled with pens. The round, thick lenses of his eyeglasses magnify his eyes until they look like the size of ping pong balls. His expression is serious. On the right is another man, dressed in a conservative black suit, white shirt, and tie. He wears no jewelry or affectation except for a small silver crucifix on his lapel. His complexion is red, puffy and he is constantly wiping the sweat from his forehead with a white handkerchief.  His expression is also serious.

The whole trip was about 2,300 miles, but the last five hundred of it took us along state roads, through Nevada and Oregon, running straight through long flat sections of desert and winding up and over mountains. The trip was rigorous, to say the least, but the views, especially for the last part, made up for it.

Fixing people is fundamentally different. Perhaps in a way more rewarding. But also more frustrating. I've tried to fix people with addictions, bad decision making, mental illness, poverty, disability, damaged relationships, criminal behavior, and just living a self-defeating lifestyle.

I rode out the next morning meaning to finish that one job before I quit. Hakim, the other pump mechanic, rode with me. We took the 125cc enduros, with tools and extra drop pipes hung by bicycle inner tubes from the front and rear turn signals. It took a little more than an hour to get there.

There were a lot of reasons I joined the Peace Corps, and I’ve forgotten some of them. Like most people, my reasons were mixed. The one I told everybody, though, was that I wanted to help people, and particularly people who deserved it. The people I’d be working with were genuinely poor, and I believed their poverty was somehow righteous. In northern Ghana, where I was stationed, there were villages that drank out of mud puddles, and others where the women walked ten or fifteen miles to a river and carried back water full of larvae and disease. So I was proud. I was proud that I was doing something worthwhile, and I felt righteous in that pride. What I didn’t know was that my pride wasn’t righteous at all.

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.