Tag Archive - Time Magazine

Anxiety is Good…

November 29, 2011 in Ministry-Theology, Therapy-Psychology, Writing with 1 Comment

Philosophers and Poets, from their perch on the cutting edge of reason, have always seen the advantage of anxiety. It is the “dizziness of reason,” argued Soren Kierkegaard; “the handmaiden of creativity,” said T.S. Eliot; “the beginning of conscience,” observed novelist Angela Carter. So have actors backstage, summoning eternal energies and edges for the roles they play, and sprinters on the block, finding hormonal springs in the fear of failure that allow them to achieve race times they never managed in practice.

So begins the opening paragraph of TIME Magazine’s December cover story, The Two Faces of Anxiety.

This is a timely topic as the release of my book The Anxious Christian: Can God Use Your Anxiety for Good? is being published by Moody Publishers on March 1, 2012. When I was in the book proposal writing/submission phase in the late Fall of 2010, anxiety was the topic that my acquisition’s editor Randall Payleitner seemed to be really focused on. You see, in all my anxiety of trying to submit the right proposal I had submitted a large, sprawling dissertation that lacked any real focus or clarity, but Randall seemed most excited about a chapter I had submitted on anxiety. So eventually, one chapter idea became the whole theme of my new book.

I think anxiety is an important topic because everyone at some point in their life struggles with it, and many struggle with it on an ongoing basis.

But is all anxiety necessarily bad?

I don’t believe so….in fact, anxiety can actually be good for us as I see it as a catalyst to help us grow as people. There are only a couple of options when you begin to feel anxiety.

  1. Pretend it doesn’t exist and push it below the surface.
  2. Acknowledge that the anxiety is there and use it as an opportunity to move you forward/to grow in life.

You choose.

Are You Afraid of Marriage?

July 8, 2009 in Marriage-Family with 1 Comment

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[image by makelessnoise]


Yesterday I posted about therapist David Schnarch’s view that marriages (committed relationships) are “people growing machines.” But for us to grow in a committed relationship obviously takes a lot of work and a lot of sacrifice. It’s not unusual to work with couples who are shocked by the amount of work a marriage does take, and soon begin to wonder if the sacrifice has been worth it. In fact, I think every relationship asks these questions at times, but some continue to go on and thrive, while others shut down and lead towards separation, divorce, or just two people living separate lives under the same household.

There has been a slew of articles and news stories recently on the state of marriage today, and I still remember sitting in my first graduate course in marriage and family therapy as the professor talked about the “state of marriage today.” Obviously we all come from various backgrounds and different experiences when it comes to the issue of marriage, whether it be our parents, or our own. These experiences often color our view of how we perceive marriage and whether or not we want it for ourselves.

A couple of weeks ago the Today Show had a segment on On Marriage: Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off. You can see the video below:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

And then just this week, TIME Magazine’s cover story is, “Is There Hope for the American Marriage?” In the article, the author states:

In the past 40 years, the face of the American family has changed profoundly. As sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin observes in a landmark new book called The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today, what is significant about contemporary American families, compared with those of other nations, is their combination of “frequent marriage, frequent divorce” and the high number of “short-term co-habiting relationships.” Taken together, these forces “create a great turbulence in American family life, a family flux, a coming and going of partners on a scale seen nowhere else. There are more partners in the personal lives of Americans than in the lives of people of any other Western country.”

An increasingly fragile construct depending less and less on notions of sacrifice and obligation than on the ephemera of romance and happiness as defined by and for its adult principals, the intact, two-parent family remains our cultural ideal, but it exists under constant assault. It is buffeted by affairs and ennui, subject to the eternal American hope for greater happiness, for changing the hand you dealt yourself. Getting married for life, having children and raising them with your partner — this is still the way most Americans are conducting adult life, but the numbers who are moving in a different direction continue to rise.

Lots of thoughts have been running through my head after reading through the articles and watching the videos this week.

There are lots of questions I want to ask. But I’ve started to wonder if people are afraid of marriage because of the large amount of failure they have seen around them when it comes to marriage. Maybe your own parent’s were divorced, or live in a marriage that you hope to never live in yourself. Or maybe your best friend from college is married and is miserable. Or maybe you have already been married, and are now divorced. Lots of scenarios.

Are you afraid of marriage?

Do you want to be married? Why or why not?

The Beautiful and Intriguing Simplicity of Twitter

June 23, 2009 in Technology-Social Media with 4 Comments

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[image by Robyn Twomey]


The thing about Twitter is that it is beautiful in its simplicity, and powerful in its capability. Not everyone gets it at first…or second…or third time. But if you stick with it, it will pay off for you.

I was struck the other day with some of the common themes around the uncertainty of those who first tweet (What’s it all about?), as well as some of the subtleties that attract people to it.

Couple of things:

One, Twitter is sort of weird the first time you try it. I mean, when have you ever before sent out something in 140 characters or less to lots of friends. Okay, maybe text messages and Facebook status updates. But there is something unique about Twitter. Here is a sample from my article in Collide Magazine from March/April, and from Time Magazine’s latest cover story on Twitter.

Why Twitter? Shaping Your Narrative One Tweet at a Time

“working on my blog,” was the first tweet (Twitter slang for an update) I typed out on the mircoblogging tool Twitter on December 9, 2007. In fact, I remember clearly where I sat in our home at that moment and what thoughts of curiosity, hesitancy, and narcissism ran through my head as I posted those simple little words. It doesn’t seem like much does it? In fact, I used only 18 of the allotted 140 characters, unsure if anything I had to say was worthwhile at all. I had two questions for myself: Who is going to read this? Who cares? In and of itself, one tweet is just that: one tweet. But in the context of all the tweets that compose my growing Twitter profile, a more complex portrait of my life began to emerge, forming a narrative that is the beginning to a relational connectivity with others online, (and most likely in person) that is easier to achieve than it was before.

How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live

The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your “followers,” and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It’s not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, “If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal.”

Second, I think that if you think of Twitter as only isolated, short, 140 character messages at a time, then you are missing out on it’s beauty. In my opinion, it’s about the totality of your narrative you are creating. The more you tweet, the more there is to shape that story. Again, here is a sample from my Collide Magazine article below, and one from the Time Magazine cover story…I love the phrase “ambient awareness.”

Why Twitter? Shaping Your Narrative One Tweet at a Time

We all have the privilege to sit with people on a daily basis as they share various snapshots of their life with us. In fact, some of my fondest memories of being a college ministry director involve sitting across from a student at a coffee shop as we engaged one another over a cup of coffee and conversation. Those were memorable times, but one coffee talk chat was hardly enough time to even begin to get a sense of who that student was. Instead, I needed multiple trips to the coffee shop with them. One standalone conversation was just a short chapter in the larger narrative of that student’s life. But when compiled, all the conversations began to paint a beautiful portrait of who they were and what kind of story they were living.

How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live

And yet as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this “ambient awareness”: by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don’t think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.

In your opinion, what makes Twitter so amazing?

And if you happen to be in Los Angeles September 11-12, come out and hear me speak on Twitter at the Christian Web Conference.