The Truth As I Experience It

Can I fix my own Prius battery? (Yes, but be smart and careful as you do it) This is the question I asked myself when the repair shop said it would cost $1800 to $2800 to have them replace it. But let's back up a bit. Somewhere around 11-01-18, on the dashboard of my 2007 Prius, the  check engine  light came on, followed by the  VSC warning light,  then the dreaded  "red triangle of death"  (as I call it) with a beautiful grand finally of the  red caution symbol  on the center console display. It was a progressive light show that grew one after another over a series of maybe a couple days. It felt like a small success because pretty much every light that could come on, was on. To help you understand my next steps, you need to know that I bought my Prius used from a taxi cab company 4 years ago in Las Vegas and it has over 560,000 miles on it. So warning lights are no stranger to me and sometimes they just go away after a bit and we move o...

Being raised in a  Unity youth program means that I am very passionate about the spiritual enrichment of today's children. Lately I have been talking with my fellow ministers about the obvious decline of adult church attendance, but even more importantly the maybe less obvious decline of youth attendance. As we put our heads together, trying to come up with reasons why youth attendance is down, we see a couple patterns unfolding. Obviously less children attend when less parents attend, but even those parents who are attending still don't bring their children to the youth experience. This points to a very obvious problem that modern parents don't see value in a church youth program. If they don't recognize the value, there is no way they will be able to push past their child's initial resistance to trying something new, like Sunday school. This is a real problem. As I was pondering this issue, I stumbled upon this article from the BBC, about how much tim...

Growing up in Boulder Co., I was the "son of a preacher man", or what some would call a "church mouse". My father and mother were busy running Unity of Boulder  church, while my siblings and I spent endless hours entertaining ourselves in and around the facility. Christmas was a special time of year at Unity... "special", because that meant we had to spend even more time at the church . 😝 My parents come from a theater background in New York City and so every Christmas for them, was a giant production at the church. Set building, acting rehearsals, choir rehearsals, run throughs, tech throughs and on and on, all through December. And in our family, if you were old enough to breath then you were old enough to be part of "the show." You of course begin (reluctantly) as a Shepherd with no lines, dreaming of the day you get to be a King, Joseph or maybe even the Archangel Gabriel. But you're not ready yet. First you will have to work yo...

So there I was, 17 years old, busy with high school, sports, church, work, family and on top of all that, I was having issues with my girlfriend. But what really stands out to me now, about that time, was a specific instance that occurred one Sunday morning as I was heading downstairs to join my youth group. It just so happened that the youth room was right across from the church meditation room, and on this particular Sunday, I had arrived early enough to stop in for a quick meditation. The issues with my girlfriend weighed heavily on my mind as I entered the dark room, found a place to sit and listened to the soothing background music. As I then began the process of going into meditation and allowing my thoughts to become still, I suddenly found myself in another location. I could not see or hear where I was because gentle hands were covering my eyes and ears, but I knew I was no longer in the meditation room. The absence of sight and sound lasted only for a moment befor...

Growing up my mother used to talk about her adventures as a young woman in New York City, trying to make in show business alongside her good friend Bernadette Peters . And as children naturally do, we never questioned the legitimacy of mom's stories and simply accepted them as what they were at the time, stories. It wasn't until I was 11 years old that my mother really got to bring these stories into reality, when we took a family trip to New York City and went to see the Broadway musical 'Into The Woods', starring none other than Bernadette Peters. What was really exciting, unbeknownst to us kids, mom had contacted Bernadette ahead of time and arranged for the whole family to meet her backstage after the show. Sure enough, after the final curtain, an usher escorted us down a hallway to the "Star" dressing room and knocked on the door. The door opened and... Now, before I get to what happened next, I need you to understand some more crucial backsto...

A few nights ago I was rushing across my living room floor (not ceiling) and had the so familiar, but incredibly unwelcome, sensation of my small toe making a swift and sudden impact with the sofa foot stool. Now, for those of us who have experienced this delightful, blindsided pedi-attack, we know it is immediately followed by a shooting pain firing straight up the body like Old Faithful  (link included for the Yellowstone challenged). Once this pain swiftly reaches the subconscious mind, it triggers a deep-seated primal urge to scream, as if one had been tackled from behind by a saber-tooth tiger. As soon as the scream breaks the threshold of the mouth, the conscious mind steps in, wasting no time in launching a counterattack on the perpetrator... the evil, vindictive, aloof, but nonetheless guilty footstool. Sometimes physical, sometimes just verbal, but the counterattack is swift & just. The Truth I discovered from a footstool was that I am making some spiritual pro...

This last week I had the pleasure of taking part in our Groverland family reunion, floating in a houseboat on Lake Powell, UT. Each morning when I woke up to meditate, I hiked a bit further back into a nearby canyon to find the perfect spot for peace and quiet. By the third day into our trip, I had finally found it. This spot was about a 25 minute hike from where our boat was anchored, but completely worth it. It was on the top of a hill, with a nearly flat surface, surrounded on all sides by awe inspiring canyon walls that reached to the sky. Thick foliage wrapped around the bottom of the hill on which I sat with complete silence, save a bird or two calling out now and then. This was peace, serenity, heaven...this shall forever be known as Shad Rock. But the stillness of meditation was short lived as a new character arrived on the scene. It was a special character because all other insects of flight could not reach me in the strong but comforting breeze, except the one whom we...

(No gerbils were harmed in the writing of this blog) When I was 8 years old, my family had two gerbils that lived in a cage just outside my bedroom. They were an entertaining pair and so it was quite sad when we discovered that one of them had passed away while I was at school. It wasn't long before my parents felt really sorry for the cute little gerbil that remained behind, friendless and alone. One might think the obvious solution was to buy the gerbil a new friend, but my parents had something else in mind. "We are going to set him free," they announced with excitement to the sad and confused faces of their three kids. Surely mom and dad knew what was best, so we all skipped along behind the cage as it was carried outside to the wooded surroundings of our backyard. With appropriate drum roll and circus ringmaster flair, my father announced the opening of the cage door with a dramatic flip of the latch. Although we had expected an equally dramatic gerbil, lau...

When I was 16 years old I went to Lake Powell, Arizona with my family and good friend named Derek. My parents had rented a houseboat for a few days out on the water, as well as a Jet Ski for joyriding. Being 16 means it wasn't long before Derek and I were challenging each other for who could do crazier tricks on the Jet Ski, which just so happened to catch the eye of several young women on a boat floating nearby. They asked if they could take turns riding on the back, with Derek and I also taking turns as the driver. With testosterone high and wisdom low, it was only fitting that I wound up crashing backwards into an embankment at 20 miles an hour, flinging my pretty young passenger across the sand like a gymnast in the final tumbling pass of a floor routine sure to land her Olympic gold. Funny?     No!      Terrifying?   Yes!!! In the haze of smoke, sand & humiliation,  I surveyed my surroundings to discover one destroyed Jet Ski ...

My research into the heaven that Jesus actually taught The purpose of  this paper is to take an in-depth look at two questions: “Where is heaven?” and “What is heaven?” Because of the large scope of this topic, we will be using the New Testament as our primary source, focusing on the direct quotes from Jesus found in the Canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Many religious ideologies have a concept of heaven, or describe a place similar to the idea of the Biblical heaven, but our focus will be on the ideas contained in the Bible and the various Christian interpretations of heaven. For the purpose of this paper, it was necessary for consistency to choose a specific version of the Bible, and I have chosen the New Revised Standard Version. The reason behind this choice is twofold: First and foremost, I believe in its accuracy of translation and second, I am personally familiar with this version from my years of Bible study. As the reader begins this analys...