What is my word for 2019, you ask? Every year i try to have a word or phrase to focus on and give me some direction and purpose for the year ahead. Last year's word was Bridge-Building, with a sub-description of 'Stepping Towards' - finding ways to pull people together, to unite, to help people engage, to listen more, to create spaces where this can happen and to be a catalyst any way i can. The [...]
For me, Christmas is a reminder that Love came down. Love got its hands dirty. Love got involved. Love interrupted the normal flow of things. Love reached out specifically to all of those that society, culture, religion and government pushed to the sides. Love allowed itself to be interrupted while on mission. Love called out injustice. Love refused to accept the status quo. Love turned over tables in the face of greed and extortion. Love [...]
What are you doing Friday night? Going to a workshop that interrogates whiteness. Wait, what? And I am paying for it. Those words might seem like they come out of an SNL sketch if South Africa had an SNL type show. But we don't. And it was the brave decision of eight white people to respond to an invitation that my friend and colleague Megan Furniss put out on Facebook: I am Megan Furniss, a [...]
For the last 40ish days i have been dropping one tip to help you 'I do' better and so now we have a collection of 40 Tips to help married people improve their marriage. For the journey through a more in-depth look at each tip, you can start over here... But for those of you who have journeyed with me, i thought it might be helpful to have all 40 tips summarised into a line [...]
We head into the last 5 tips of this marriage series. If this has been helpful in any way please SHARE it on your social media and tag your friends so they can benefit as well. Would love to hear some summary thoughts you might have in the comments... Marriage Tip #36 Fight well. i do think because of the nature of marriage being between two people that each one looks quite significantly different from [...]
Some more marriage advice for you as we head into our final ten: Marriage Tip #31 Walk. Now i imagine there will be varying degrees of this for different people. i also imagine some couples will roll their eyes and instantly dismiss this because walking (and that's not your vibe). But i would suggest (with less exceptions than people who think they are the exceptions) that the amount you collectively enjoy walking or not should [...]
The next five married tips to help you think about and act on how to do marriage well: Marriage Tip #26 Rage, Rage against the selfishness of the me. Just as online people tend towards stupid [a brettfish original], offline people tend towards selfish. In a world that has at times whispered but more often shouted 'THIS IS ALL ABOUT YOU!' into your ear as it has watched you grow up, this should not be [...]
Marriage Tip #21 Tend towards the cleaner one. Now this is not to much specifically a marriage tip as it is a people-who-live-in-the-same-space tip and i probably observed this more living in community with tbV and others in Philly than with just me and Val. But it can be huge. The person who hates breadcrumbs on the counter is MUCH MORE emotionally invested than the person who doesn't care [or notice] breadcrumbs on the counter. [...]
Last night was the big combined end of year poker game for a group of mates i had been playing poker with once a month. Thirty plus people and a long evening of challenging competition planned. In a nutshell, i had all of the best cards but got completely bad beat three times and ended up being second person out with Val still representing and looking set to continue for a good while. She suggested I [...]
Marriage Tip #16 Communication. Work at it. i touched on this yesterday when mentioning Expectation as missed expectations can be a huge source of conflict or resentment in marriage. And someone mentioned Communication which is key to having a healthy marriage. We looked at the five love languages in tip 5 and in some ways, i think communication works in a similar way. We communicate in different ways and we hear things or retain them [...]
