Category: Encourage

Everything changes

I put Tom Petty’s Wildflowers on the turntable and realized he made that album more than 30 years ago. Thirty years is a long time, more than a third of a lifetime for most folks and more than an entire lifetime for more people than seems fair. And 30 years before that was my youth.

Long times ago, we didn’t know what we didn’t know, we heard the songs and the possibilities were endless. Somewhere along the way we began to slow our search for possibilities; even though they were still endless, we didn’t expect them anymore. This was the way things were, and we were not going to change them. That was life’s lie, of course. We always had the power. We have the power today.

This does not have to be “the way it is” — those hands right in front of your eyes have all the power you need to craft a different future, a future different from your present, and this morning is as good a time as any to start making that different place.

“Make a difference” — the very phrase says a difference is something you have to make, you have to build. Oh, a difference can be imposed on you — but where’s the joy in that? Why live in someone else’s world when you can make your own?

Make your own difference. Be the change you want to see. Thirty and sixty years ago, it all seemed so promising and possible, and somewhere along the way we became discouraged that we could change the world. But we did make changes, we built and we grew, and we preserved and conserved, and the world way out there didn’t seem to change much — until decades had gone by and so much was different, and one day we woke up and saw: We made that difference.

Bit by bit, one day at a time, year by year, change happens. Nothing lasts forever, not the sweetest happily-ever-after and not the most horrifying horror. All things must pass, and all things change. It’s up to you, it’s up to me, it’s up to us to work on making it a change for the better. We probably disagree on what “better” looks like, and so you be you and I’ll be me and let’s not try to mess with each other’s dreams except when they harmonize.

Thirty and sixty years on, so much is better. (My 2019 car runs well, and the odometer says 210,000 — sixty years ago our cars were done after 100K miles.) We have not solved hatred or tyranny, but lives are better because of those who would not stand for it.

And always, then and now, the power of change is right there at the end of your arms, in your heart, and behind your eyes.

Watching for wonder

When I can hardly bring myself to face the day, I start looking for wonderful things to happen.

I didn’t use to be that way, of course. If I really didn’t want to go somewhere, or I didn’t feel like diving into an obligation, I would stay home, or I would defer the task. If I felt like I couldn’t face the day, I wouldn’t face the day.

Then I started noticing a trend about those days that I faced anyway — the days when I didn’t want to go somewhere, but I went, or went through with something I didn’t want to do: More often than not, something unexpectedly cool happened.

I would meet an old friend I had not seen in a long time. The pastor would preach on a topic that spoke straight to my heart. That project I was skeptical about would turn out just fine, maybe even earn an accolade or two. Oh, and you’ve heard me talk about a woman, Mary, who gave me a hug after church one day and soon after lifted me out of my grief? Oh man, I really didn’t want to go to church that morning!

There is a force in this world that makes us lie to ourselves — I don’t mind calling it Satan, the Father of Lies — and when we’re about to have an amazing experience that may even change our lives, it whispers to us: “I really don’t feel like doing this, I really don’t want to go there, I really don’t want to be here …”

It happened enough times that now I recognize the symptoms, and when I find myself really not wanting to, my attitude adjusts almost instantly and I start anticipating something wonderful. Maybe my life doesn’t change dramatically, but I’m glad I faced the day and went through with it, every time.

Yes, here we are, another Monday. I suspect I know how you feel; we’ve all been there. I’m here to tell you that if you feel like you can’t face what this day has in store for you, this day may have something incredibly grand in store for you.

A riot of peasants

A friend posted a Fox News report about an earthquake off the Russian coast that sparked tsunami warnings in Japan, Alaska, and the entire west coast of the U.S. of A. (and, I presume, Canada). I applied search engines and found no news coverage; a further inspection found that the Fox report was dated July 29, 2025. Once again, the words of the philosopher poet Tom Petty ring true: “Most things I worry about never happen anyway.”

Afterward she asked, perhaps rhetorically, why these sort of things appear in her Facebook news feed, and I replied with H.L. Mencken’s famous quote about practical politics and hobgoblins, adding, “Social media algorithms seem to have been designed with practical politics in mind.”

I wanted to quote Mencken accurately, and so I turned to In Defense of Women, the 1918 book where that wonderfully succinct sentence appeared, and I discovered that the context remains also tremendously relevant:

“Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. They are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury. Here the effect of civilization has been to reduce the noblest of the arts, once the repository of an exalted etiquette and the chosen avocation of the very best men of the race, to the level of a riot of peasants. All the wars of Christendom are now disgusting and degrading; the conduct of them has passed out of the hands of nobles and knights and into the hands of mob-orators, money-lenders, and atrocity-mongers.”

I’m not sure if I would ever describe war as “waged by the will of superior men” or “the repository of an exalted etiquette and the chosen avocation of the very best men of the race,” but I probably forget that Mencken was possessed of a supreme wit and sense of irony. 

The point is that Mencken, 108 years ago, described war and politics as accurately as one of our contemporaries might. Of what are our practical “republican” or “democratic” politicians capable beyond “throwing the mob into a panic”? Who are they other than “mob-orators, money-lenders, and atrocity-mongers”? And how could you better describe our political conversation than “an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary”?

When I peruse what passes for the news of the world today, I need to keep a couple of things in mind. First, no matter how insane it all appears, God is in control, and “for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” Second, Henry Louis Mencken was one of the canniest observers of the human condition ever to have lived.