01

What we leave behind
what we crop out and subtract
is so important.

02

Your identity…
what do you value and prize?
can you rethink it?

What do you keep in your life?
What do you keep out of your life?

Like a photograph or a film or…just about anything, you have to choose what to keep in and what to keep out. A lot of times we don’t think about things as decisions, as conscious choices we are making, per se, but, like standing on the sidelines while injustice happens - in the name of ‘neutrality’ or ‘peace,’ - the non-choices we make also define big chunks of our lives.

Relationships can be work. They are work. They rely on people choosing to not let entropy take over their life and to simply drift in the currents of where life is flowing. There’s nothing wrong with that perhaps, in balance and to a certain degree. But I would argue that many people’s relationships with each other and relationships with a church have less to do with conscious choosing to walk away, or conscious choosing to excise someone or something out of their life, and more to do with simply drifting, with letting things end up where they may.

Again, there is a power in understanding the limits of our knowledge and the futility of relying only on our own power. But there is also power in owning up to the choices we make and the effects we have not only on our own life, but on others.

This is a lot of words to say a simple thing: this is somebody I am so grateful for. My brother, born when I was almost 11, a man who has inspired me since he was a kid and stood by me - and many - for so many years. For many years, we have kept a bond not only intact, but growing stronger by short mini-bursts of conversations and calls, punctuated sometimes by longer ones.

Our relationship, in many ways, has reached the point of motor memory, where it is instinctual to pick up the phone not simply once or even twice, but sometimes multiple times a day to relay something of trivial importance over a 60-second conversations.

Those sixty seconds add up.

They add up to everything.

The thousands of micro-decisions we have chosen to make over our 30-plus years together have added up to something that continues to grow and bloom and flourish - and stand by each other when it feels like there’s times that aren’t growing or blooming or flourishing.

I am filled with appreciation and joy for the focal point he’s been in my life’s frame. Far or near, close by or a phone call away, night and day, month in and month out, across ages and time. We keep showing up in each other’s slideshows.

Yeah, I just said slideshow. I’m a kid of the 80s.