I have something I like to call a "crystal ball complex." Whenever a new situation presents itself, I have to stop myself from declaring how it'll likely all turn out.

A few weeks ago, my pastor shared this story: in the early 1900s, a British newspaper posed the question, "What is wrong with the world?" Well-known author and theologian G.K. Chesterton reputedly replied, "Dear Sirs: I am."

I've always felt a deep annoyance for the English word "happy." It's one of those words, like "love," that has been applied too broadly—to mean too many disparate things—and therefore, has lost all meaning.

Help me. It's not something I've ever been good at saying. Ask my mother. Though I was a talkative toddler with a broad vocabulary, I guarantee I uttered no phrase with more frequency than, "I do it myself."

Martha Serpas has a poem I love called "As If There Were Only One." It takes its title from a line in Augustine's Confessions, where he writes, "God loves each of us as if there were only one of us."

I live in a studio over a garage, built before (evidently) they'd invented insulation. Winter is in full swing, and when I get home from work---which, these days, is around 6:30 or 7:00---it's about 50 degrees inside my apartment.

Whenever I've broken up with someone, I've spent a good deal of time in mourning, in part for the life we had together, but mostly for the future we'd now never live.

I remember when my grandma, my father's mother, was nearing death after years of fighting cancer. I'd flown home for spring break, and we drove up north to where my grandparents lived, to say goodbye to her.

Father's Day fell two days before my dad woke up suffocating. In his sermon that Sunday, my pastor focused on fatherhood, on how this relationship (or lack thereof) impacts a child's life, and how he didn't realize how deeply he'd been affected by his dad's absence from his upbringing until he had children himself.

My father died on June 27, 2015, after a sudden allergic reaction to a medication he'd been taking for years. He was in a coma for four days before he let go and let God take him. This is the eulogy I gave at his memorial service.