I’ve found myself dissatisfied with my house recently. My wife and I have been watching HGTV home remodeling shows streaming on Netflix.

I usually love my house, but when I see some of the marvelous modifications the designers and artisans create I wonder, “why not me too”?

I wonder, why not me? Is it…

Time?
Money?
Talent?
Laziness?
Low priority?

And, that’s just my house.

Those same questions apply to my level of fitness, my clutter, my incomplete projects and my unfulfilled dreams. If I settle for what I have – without working for what could be – I’ll never improve on what is.

This coming weekend I will be on a retreat. The images I’m featuring on #mysilentscream this week will be from works of “art” I created on various TreeHouse staff retreats.

I might struggle with painting and drawing, aesthetics and having an eye, but since I was in high school poetic words came more easily.

I learned to put words on paper
That reached deep into my creative soul
Within the frame of eternity
The poet wrote the verse
A gift to one and another
Revealed but thought perverse
Broken, bleeding, stripped, exposed
Our God hung humiliated
Unbound, unburied, freed from pain of death
Heaven’s poet stretched and celebrated

This coming weekend I will be on a retreat. The images I’m featuring on #mysilentscream this week will be from works of “art” I created on various TreeHouse staff retreats.

When my friend Jill Lacher first challenged us to do art I laughed. “I am not artistic. I got Ds in art class, and I earned them.”

In time I learned that I had an artistic eye, but not like in art studios, museums or hanging on walls.

I learned to put words on paper that reached deep into my creative soul.

This coming weekend I will be on a retreat. I’ve been on many retreats. Some of my favorite retreats have been TreeHouse retreats. The images I will be featuring on #mysilentscream this week will be from works of “art” I created on various TreeHouse staff retreats.

I know of no art medium that covers up bad art skills more than pastels. So when my friend Jill challenged me to create art with pastels in hand I was less afraid of failure and rejection for my lack of skills.

This coming weekend I will be on a retreat. I’ve been on many retreats. Retreats are just that, a retreat from the norm; from daily, normal life.

Some of my favorite retreats have been TreeHouse retreats. The images I will be featuring on #mysilentscream this week will be from works of “art” I created on various TreeHouse staff retreats.

Art

When my friend Jill Lacher first challenged us to do art I laughed. “I am not artistic. I got Ds in art class, and I earned them.”

Bart Simpson wrote, “I will not torment the emotionally frail.”

Seth Gobin wrote, “All of us fail. Successful people fail often, and, [they] learn more from that failure than everyone else.”

What doesn’t help? “Getting good at avoiding blame and casting doubt.” To paraphrase Gobin, while it may seem like blame increase your chances for survival and happiness, in fact it merely prevents you from learning from worthwhile failures.

“I will not torment the emotionally frail (including myself)”

Sometimes we put the blame on ourselves. Over the years I’ve probably been hardest on myself when I failed, or when someone was hurt because of me.

I don’t always realize how worry and anxiety affect me. In fact, if asked I would say that I don’t worry very often.

But then something happens, it happens most often in competitive settings.

I want to live a joy-filled life, but too often I have settled for wanting to be successful.

Success or Joy?

When have I chosen the pursuit of success over joy?

I complain when I think Halo or Call of Duty is being unfair to me.
I yell at myself – out loud – when I make a mistake playing tennis.
I become commanding when l am playing football. 1
I pout when my teammates make mistakes.

Yesterday I would have screamed, “Don’t Act Like A Jerk!” if I wasn’t so aware of my tone of voice.

My tone of voice and the underlying thoughts and feelings have tripped me up more than I’d like to admit. Before I got around to admitting it, in this post, I asked: What should you be seeing in your own life? What do you let stand in the way of seeing it?

Hopefully you’ll think about that a while, but in the meantime with an honest assessment in hand, I’ll tell you how I’m dealing with my contribution to the turmoil I tend to create.

What are you adding to your team? We all have something to add, but are we contributing and aware that we are?

We all have our quirks. In a team setting, how do your quirks add value and how do they add drama?

Unfortunately, too often those quirks can make us look like jerks if we let them.

My “Tone”

Wow, do I hate those words. Not because someone doesn’t have a right to say them. Nor that they shouldn’t say them to me, but now, because they brought it up, I have to take an honest look at myself.

We all have blind spots in our life; misguided thinking, bad decisions and the like. Often times other people can see our blind spots but we either ignore, deny, or dismiss them.

On the other hand, sometimes we look at and assess others and assume what we see are their blind spots. Sometimes it’s us who can’t see clearly when we judge the lives.

Here are three people some would calls fools that I admire for their courage.

Three “Fools” I Admire