Prayer Lord, I have spent much of my life running from pain and loss, medicating my pain and quickly moving on to the next project——the new urgent demand. I ask for the grace to embrace all of life—the joys and the sorrows, the deaths and the births, the old and the new. In Jesus' name, amen.

We don't become mature human beings by getting lucky or cleverly circumventing loss, and certainly not by avoidance and distraction. Learn to lament. Learn this lamentation. We're mortals, after all. We and everyone around are scheduled for death (mortis). Get used to it. Take up your cross. It prepares us and those around us for resurrection. — Eugene Peterson

What are the hurricane winds, internal and external, that prevent us from becoming all God intends?

What are you angry about (a betrayal, a coworker's hurtful comment, a car breakdown, unanswered prayer, etc.)? What are you sad about (a small or big loss, disappointment, or a choice you or others have made)? What are you anxious about (your finances, future, family, health, church)? What are you glad about (your family, an opportunity, your church)?

We tend to think, 'Life should be fair because God is fair.' But God is not life. And if I confuse God with the physical reality of life- by expecting constant good health for example- then I set myself up for crashing disappointment.

Christianity helps us face the music even when we don't like the tune.

Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for power equal to your tasks.

All evils are equal when they are extreme.

The Why's of suffering keep us shrouded in a seemingly bottomless void of abstraction where God is reduced to a finite ethical agent, a limited psychological personality, whose purposes measure on the same scale as ours.

I went through a lot of battles in high school.

The challenge of mindfulness is to work with the very circumstances that you find yourself in - no matter how unpleasant, how discouraging, how limited, how unending and stuck they may appear to be - and to make sure that you have done everything in your power to use their energies to transform yourself before you decide to cut your losses and move on.

These qualities are beautifully encapsulated in the famous statement of Victor Frankl, himself a survivor of Auschwitz (and a neurologist and psychologist): "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." MBSR