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My wife and I bragged all through my son’s “terrible twos” about how great a kid we had. We looked at other parents who had hellions in their carts at Walmart and smugly grinned as we looked down at our little angel. Then three hit. He had big feelings, and he let us know it. At a birthday party for my dad at a nice restaurant, surrounded by family and friends, my son decided that he would be that hellion, and we left early because the feelings won.

As adults, we have more self-control than a hungry three-year-old, but our feelings can’t be allowed to define our actions. Our feelings are real, yet they are not the core of who we are. We are people who have feelings, and it is our responsibility to look at them, name them, and decide what to do with them rather than obey them automatically. Over time, God intends not just to restrain our feelings, but to retrain them so they align more closely with His heart.

Where do these big feelings come from, though? Sometimes, out of nowhere, we have a visceral reaction to what someone said or did, and I believe we are being silently formed. We move through life mindlessly consuming podcasts, websites, social media, music, movies, and television, assuming they are harmless distractions from “real life,” when in reality the ideas they carry are slowly shaping how we think and react. You are actively choosing now who you will become, and even when you rightly enjoy something for entertainment, you are still standing in a river of information flowing into you. The real question is whether those waters are refreshing your soul or poisoning it. Curating the flow of content into your life is crucial to your formation.

If you do not like who you are becoming, you must change what you ingest. We should observe and interrogate what we are consuming, and when it does not align with who God calls us to be, we must reject it rather than letting it form us, and replace it with inputs that help us love God and others. Over time, new inputs and repeated obedience slowly reshape our emotional reflexes so that we begin to feel and respond more like Jesus instead of simply acting out of unchanged desires.

Maybe big feelings and public temper tantrums are not your battle, but you have identified areas where you long to grow. The battle feels tough, and the results are not there yet. It can be so frustrating to start making positive changes and wake up day after day feeling like nothing has changed. Real transformation almost always includes a lag between the work you start and the fruit you can see. Whether you are growing in discipleship, building new habits, repairing relationships, or changing how you work, yesterday’s obedience almost never shows up as today’s visible breakthrough.

When you believe that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and cares for you deeply, and that He wants to see your life transformed, the only response that makes sense is to live as if He is actually trustworthy. Trust in that kind of God should not produce a small, risk-averse life, but a bold willingness to attempt things that feel bigger than where you are, because you are filled with His power, wisdom, and love. This gives you hope, even when you are stuck in the lag.

Much like changing eating patterns or starting a workout plan, you feel the effort heavily at first while seeing almost no visible results. In relationships, old patterns can still echo even after you have repented and begun a new journey. The call is to keep doing your work. Audit your inputs, including what you scroll, watch, and listen to, and begin filling your life with daily obedience to His word and pauses to hear the Spirit’s input into your life. Show up, repent, obey, love, and trust that God is at work so that, in His time, a harvest will come.

This simple quote hit me hard in a good way today.

“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.” ~ William Arthur Ward

I lean towards optimism – which can lead towards me feeling disappointed when what I’d hoped for with bright eyes falls through. Being a realist and setting my sails to power forward is inspiring.

When learning something new, I get fixated. Hours pass like seconds, and five hours of sleep (or less) a night becomes common.

My current focus is streamlining my life with the award-winning Drafts app. Close behind is the idea of Learning in Public. I’m constantly trying to figure things out. Often, I can’t find a specific solution to the problem I’m experiencing.

Enter problem number one. I wanted to post a random thought about a quote I’d been toying with using Drafts to post to Pika on my iPhone. I’d spent some time between meetings drafting and editing my little thought in preparation for posting. I went to the Drafts Directory to search for a Pika add-on. Nope, none there.

Solution attempt one. So I Googled. Nope, can’t be done directly. I did find ONE blog post. Something about Apple Shortcuts not working, but writing a script with Claude did something good. But I wasn’t smart enough to figure out what he was doing.

What to do. What to do. I noticed a “You can find me on Mastodon” link and hit the dude up. He was great and pointed me in the right direction. Thank you, Austin!

I wrote the script with a lot of heavy lifting from Perplexity.

iOS Script

// Get full content\nlet content = draft.content.trim();\nlet lines = content.split("\n");

// First line = headline, rest = body\nlet headline = (lines.length > 0) ? lines[0].trim() : "";\nlet body = (lines.length > 1) ? lines.slice(1).join("\n").trim() : "";

// Basic validation\nif (!headline) {\n  let p = Prompt.create();\n  p.title = "Missing headline";\n  p.message = "The first line of this draft should be your Pika post title.";\n  p.addButton("OK");\n  p.show();\n  context.cancel("No headline");\n} else {\n  app.setClipboard(headline);\n  app.openURL(PIKA_NEW_POST_URL);\n}\n```

It worked! The first line is your title. The body is the paragraphs below. Hit the "Post to Pika" (or whatever you named your action), and the title is magically in your clipboard, and you are taken to your posting dashboard in your browser. Paste. Swipe up and to the right to go back to Drafts, then tap the wonderful little button that says "Copy Body," and magically you'll be shot back into Pika so you can paste the text into the body and hit publish.

Done. That's as good as it gets on iOS.

**Enter problem number two.** This works all well and good on your Mac, too. BUT, I figured there was a better way. Something faster. Enter a little app called [Paste](https://pasteapp.io). Their [Paste Stack](https://pasteapp.io/help/using-paste-stack) seemed to be exactly what I wanted. Grab two items and paste those somewhere else in sequential order.

Long story short. Fiddly and needed too many hot keys to pull off. One to open the clipboard and another to paste what was copied.

If you'd like to use Paste, maybe you have the muscle memory with that app already, the script is the same as the one below. The only difference is you'll use Paste key combos.

**Solution number two.** I remembered that [Raycast](https://www.raycast.com) can do just about any dang thing. Sure enough, you can do sequential pastes. Now, all I have to do is run my action. I hit (my custom programmed key combo) shift+command+V once in the title field and once in the body. Hit post, and you're done!

I’ve decided to leave my phone at home more often. Sometimes, I carry my old iPod, which I dug out of a box, and listen to music or podcasts. But lately, I’ve been walking around tech naked, except for my Oura ring and a paper notebook. I figure paper and pen are some kind of tech.

At first, this was very difficult. My wonderful mechanical watch, which I may post about one day, had phantom vibrations. My pocket shook like I got a notification, though the pocket was empty. And my thoughts, geez, my thoughts, felt like bumper cars spinning around the floor and bumping into one another. Chaos.

Gradually, my quiet moments as I waited in line for my morning coffee and the silent commute became more ordered and organized. My hand stopped cramping after writing a few sentences in the notebook, and a theme kept coming back to me over and over. “What are you doing with each moment you’ve been gifted?”

I recently read this in Chris Hadfield’s An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, and several thoughts immediately connected, which happens more frequently in these newfound quiet times.

“In space flight, ‘attitude’ refers to orientation: which direction your vehicle is pointing relative to the Sun, Earth and other spacecraft. If you lose control of your attitude, two things happen: the vehicle starts to tumble and spin, disorienting everyone on board, and it also strays from its course, which, if you’re short on time or fuel, could mean the difference between life and death. In the Soyuz, for example, we use every cue from every available source—periscope, multiple sensors, the horizon—to monitor our attitude constantly and adjust if necessary. We never want to lose attitude, since maintaining attitude is fundamental to success. In my experience, something similar is true on Earth. Ultimately, I don’t determine whether I arrive at the desired professional destination. Too many variables are out of my control. There’s really just one thing I can control: my attitude during the journey, which is what keeps me feeling steady and stable, and what keeps me headed in the right direction. So I consciously monitor and correct, if necessary, because losing attitude would be far worse than not achieving my goal.”

My default mode is to press, to make things happen, to strive to achieve success. This quote showed me that my focus was misplaced. While I can’t control every outcome, I can control my attitude and actions and focus on the moment I have right now. This is what will keep me heading in the right direction.

My favorite author right now, Viktor Frankl, sums it all up better than I could. Dear readers, expect to read this quote frequently.

“Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run—in the long-run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”

“Encourage yourself by remembering that any detection of negativity within you is a positive act, not a negative one. Awareness of your weakness and confusion makes you strong because conscious awareness is the bright light that destroys the darkness of negativity. Honest self-observation dissolves pains and pressures that formerly did their dreadful work in the darkness of unawareness. This is so important that I urge you to memorize and reflect upon the following summary: Detection of inner negativity is not a negative act, but a courageously positive act that makes you a new person.” — Vernon Howard

The quote above is from Vernon Howard’s The Power of Your Supermind, and it helped me reframe my thoughts. Instead of this negative thought being about ME being a terrible person, it’s about ME being a good detective and taking notice of this thought.

Negative thoughts course through me at any given point in the day. They may be about a person, an event that just happened, or random observations of things I don’t like. In the past, I’ve fought these negative thoughts by noticing them, telling them to shut up, and then trying to ignore them, pretending they don’t exist.

Dr. Wayne W. Dryer in Excuses Begone! says,

Living your life oblivious to your thinking patterns and beliefs, day after day, year after year, is a habit that encourages and elevates your ego or false self.

It’s compounding, unchecked negative thinking that spreads through us like cancer. I will no longer be oblivious to these thoughts but instead receive them as the gift they are: opportunities to interrogate them, ask if they are true or false, and check to see if they align with who I want to be and who I was created to be. If not, kill it or take action not to let it harm me, but drive me towards resolution and peace.

In Choose the Life You Want by Tal Ben-Shahar, you learn about decisions. When I think of decisions, the big ones come to mind: buying or selling a house to move across town or the country, choosing what school to attend, what career to enter into, and even who you will marry.

Tal makes this point:

“But the dramas of life’s ‘big decisions’ (which, almost by definition, are few and far between) should not hide the fact that in life we face choices all the time. Every moment of our waking life we face choices whose cumulative effect on us is just as great, if not greater, than the effect of the big decisions. I can choose whether to sit up straight or stooped; whether to say a warm word to my partner or give her a sour look; whether to appreciate my health, my friend, and my lunch, or to take them all for granted; whether to choose to choose or to remain oblivious to the choices that are there for the making. Individually, these choices may not seem important, but together they are the very bricks that make up the road we create for ourselves.”

Each small choice we make sets the stage for the life we will live. Every morning, I set an intention to give my wife and daughter a giant hug after they wake up. This small choice has created small times where they frequently open up and share how they are or what they’re feeling. Comments that would have likely never happened, glimpses into their thinking that I’d have never known. It’s helped me to suss out where some smoke is before a fire starts. It’s also helped me be present and listen to them, building trust.

Darren Hardy of Success magazine says in The Compound Effect:

“The Compound Effect is the principle of reaping huge rewards from a series of small, smart choices. What’s most interesting about this process to me is that, even though the results are massive, the steps, in the moment, don’t feel significant. Whether you’re using this strategy for improving your health, relationships, finances, or anything else for that matter, the changes are so subtle, they’re almost imperceptible. These small changes offer little or no immediate result, no big win, no obvious I-told-you-so payoff. So why bother?

Most people get tripped up by the simplicity of the Compound Effect. … What they don’t realize is that these small, seemingly insignificant steps completed consistently over time will create a radical difference.”

Our lives are the compounding product of each small decision we make. You lose ounces a day to drop 30 pounds over a few months. To be experienced as a caring boss or leader, you stack smiles, encouragement, gentle correction, and guidance. To be the husband or father you want to be, you listen intently, hand out hugs generously, and serve in small ways, like washing the dishes or noticing the fixes you need to make around the home.

Tal points out that we often save our best behavior for strangers and take greater liberties with those close to us. We can let down our guard and act more callous and gruff towards those closest to us. Intimacy and a long shared history can lead us to take the gifts these people are in our lives for granted.

Tal proposes a modification to the Golden Rule that says:

“Do not do unto those close to you what you would not have done unto others (who are not so close to you). We can get angry and upset, we can be disappointed and hurt, but if we want our relationships to flourish over time, we must treat those we love with at least as much respect as we do those we have just met.”

Today, I will focus more on the small decisions that lead to significant change over my lifetime: how I choose to speak to others, how I move through the day, the foods I choose to eat, and even what time I go to bed. I’ll place a bet that a year from today, I will reap the harvest of these small decisions.

Allen

“Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just the first step.” -MLK

“Tomorrow becomes never. No matter how small the task, take the first step now!” -Tim Ferriss

“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult.” -Seneca

I don’t post often, but I’m trying to change that. I’ve been reading a lot lately and this book was jam packed with great quotes from James Allen. Additional thoughts from others.

The takeaway. Be bold and take that step towards being who you know you were designed to be.

When? Today. Why? We do not dare.

What is stirring in your soul? If you knew you couldn’t fail, what would you try today? What if I believed this? What if in failing I may learn something so powerful it’d be worth the try?

I’ve been a LONG TIME Garmin watch owner and lover. On Mother’s Day, I bought an Apple Watch Ultra 2. Yes, I’m a guy. Yes, I bought myself a gift.

I love nearly everything about my Apple Watch Ultra 2. If it broke today, I’d immediately buy another one. Notifications I can respond to, running with just my watch and paired headphones, Apple Fitness+ magically starting and ending workouts, Siri setting Pomodoro timers or reminding me when dinner’s ready… it’s all a bit magical when it works.

But that battery life, man. I’m the type who cranks my watch up to 11. Full brightness, full volume, apps running wild in the background, and more apps stacked on top of those. There’s always a trade-off, like choosing between a sports watch with graphics straight out of a Sega Genesis or the slick functionality of having nearly an iPhone on your wrist.

Looks like I’ll just have to keep chargers stashed everywhere. Totally worth it.

I’m a “mall guy.” My wife… not so much.

During the Christmas season, I head to the mall a couple of times a week. When I travel, I don’t just sit in a hotel alone. I Google where the biggest mall in town is and go there to walk, people-watch, and sit in the food court, eating nostalgic food served with a large ladle onto an overflowing plate. Usually Cajun chicken and fried rice. Every mall seems to have that.

More often, though, I find myself pulling into an empty parking lot and walking past stores with security bars pulled down. Closed. You can see what was and feel what could be. It’s disorienting to step into a space that should be filled with life and energy but instead feels like a ghost town. I end up power-walking around the city’s most expensive indoor track.

More than once, I’ve walked through a mall and seen one of those oversized maps with a bright red dot and the words You Are Here. It’s supposed to help you get where you’re going, but sometimes it just reminds you that you’re standing in the middle of a place that used to be and a place that could be. Used to be and could be… I think about that a lot lately. Standing in places that feel like they should be full of movement, but instead, they hold a quiet sort of longing or waiting.

You are here?

Liminal space. The in-between. The transition space between what was to what could be.

In June 2024, my family bought five acres in small-town Oklahoma, home to an old church and a parsonage. We’re converting the church into our home, a place to host friends and bring people together. The parsonage? That’s where my in-laws live as we walk with them through medical challenges, loving and caring for them along the way.

We planned to move in during the holidays. That was supposed to be November, 2024.

Now, I stand in a grassy field, looking at a 95% completed home. Our Chouse (church house). I see what was. I feel the future. And I sit right in the middle of the tension between them.

It’s strange to stand in an empty space, to feel the flutter of excitement in my gut but not yet fully inhabit what’s ahead.

I’m not discouraged. I’m hopeful. But I’m also not living the way I long to live. Surrounded by laughter, the smell of pulled pork in the air, good music playing, and kids running around in the field.

Soon. I hope.

We’re pulling away from the house when my 13-year-old daughter looks back and notices our landscape guy mowing the yard. “Have you asked him how old he is?” To me, a 48-year-old guy, it seemed like a funny question, but I rolled with it and mentioned that it never came up.

Her little question has stuck with me for the rest of the day. At 13, age is very important. A couple of years younger, the person is a baby in elementary school. A couple of years older, and they’re the cool kids in high school. Shoot, she sees her 20-year-old brother as a grown man way older than her. I look at them and see a couple of kids not that far apart in age.

At my age, what are the important questions? I don’t care about how wealthy a friend is, what they drive, or the house they live in. More and more, I care about how peaceful it feels to be around that person. Like my daughter, I can see myself asking a question, “How anxious do they make me feel?”

Chaos is all around us. We can find it on the news, our social media feeds, our family circle, and our daily interactions when out and about. The anxiety from the chaos is contagious, and we pick it up from others so easily. I’m looking for friends who don’t add to the anxiety but help bring calmness everywhere they go because a peaceful presence is contagious, too.

As I think and type tonight, the important question is, “How can I move toward being a peaceful presence everywhere I go?” Growth here is difficult but worth it for our sake and those around us.