Is Christmas What It’s Supposed To Be
It’s my 20th Christmas at Ginghamsburg. I thought my prominent emotion would be gratitude. While it’s still top three, it’s actually grief that holds the microphone.
My first Christmas at Ginghamsburg was 2006. There was no cute baby Jesus in a quiet little manger. It was unsettingly grim.
Does Empathy Make Me Weak?
It’s easier to dismiss empathy than to practice it. Empathy threatens fixed worldviews. It invites questions where we’ve been trained to recite answers. It asks us to stand under the authority of someone else’s experience—to lower our defenses, suspend our certainty, and submit to the possibility that we might be wrong. That takes courage. And in many ego-protective circles, dogma is hard to compromise.
I Loved That Tweet…But It Got Me In Trouble
What if it’s the upstream discipline that influences everything else downstream?
If we practiced more peace in our speech, more empathy in our disagreements, more clarity in our convictions—maybe, just maybe, the culture wouldn’t be so angry, so reactive, so violent.