About five minutes before we were supposed to board, they announced the flight was delayed. I couldn’t believe it. I approached the podium to see if there were other options. The two boarding agents both urged me to fly instead to Seattle.

“Not Seattle,” I groaned. Not the airport where I sat waiting as one announcement after another told of a flight delay that would make me miss my next leg. I was pretty certain that what I wanted was right with a capital R. In fact, it didn’t occur to me to ask the Lord what he had in mind. How he was praying for me. I did not want to go back to Seattle.

“God, why did you take him from us!”

“How will Will’s mom and dad survive without their little boy? Their only child?”

Both of my granddaughters were screaming as loud as they possibly could. I was a little surprised to discover I was not triggered by their intensity. They had just learned a dear friend, a boy, only eight years old had died. And their words just poured out at high volume.

Many faithful believers live with a painful gap between their theological knowledge and their gut-level experience of God. After thirty years as a psychologist, Dr. Todd Hall has found that this disconnect is often caused by "implicit attachment filters"—unconscious expectations formed by our earliest relationships that shape how we perceive God today. While these filters can make God feel distant or inconsistent, there is hope for transformation. Through neuroplasticity and new, secure relational experiences, Dr. Hall shares how we can move beyond mere head knowledge to rewire our brains for true heart-level intimacy with God.

Some 13 years ago he told me to train leaders. He said, If you train the leaders, they will take care of their flocks. It happened back in the season when HCI was making the huge transition from the church, where it all began, to a standalone nonprofit. During a healing prayer session, the Lord gave me a vision. Jesus and I stood at the top of a waterfall, the stream that fed the waterfall was behind us. In front of us, far below was a vast plain fill with a sea of people. Too many to count, perhaps millions. They were marching toward us in unison. And looking at us. No, their eyes were fixed on me, not Jesus. They looked hungry, even desperate. I had nothing to offer them. I squirmed, and pictured running away. “Why are they looking at me?” I asked Jesus. He looked down at me and smiled, “They can't see me yet.” I found reassurance in the “yet.” It meant that they would be able to see Jesus at some point.

We all get overwhelmed at times, and sadly we overwhelm others. What do I mean by overwhelmed? To understand overwhelm we need to understand capacity. I like to picture capacity as a cup. Imagine that you and all the people around you each have a capacity cup. We all have different sized cups. Those will large cups are resilient and can handle a lot of intensity before they get overwhelmed. Those with small cups are easily overwhelmed. Take a moment and think about this: Do you have a stadium-sized cup or an expresso cup, or something in between? Has something lowered your capacity today? Or increased it?

On November 8 of this year, we hosted our 2025 Feast of Faithfulness Celebration and Fundraiser. If you missed it, you won’t know what is coming in just a few short weeks to HCI. Let me summarize:

1. 2025 was an amazing year at HCI as we grew in Christlikeness, introduced a new live retreat, learned more about attachment, and pioneered our first certification program in Spiritual Formation Coaching.

Here’s a graphic that lays it all out. It starts at the top with our free offerings at Level 1 . . .

This year I’m learning a lot about maturity with HCI’s new maturity curriculum making key information from Jim Wilder’s Complete Guide to Living with Men more approachable and gentler. In that learning, I started working on overcoming maturity gaps especially around regulating every emotion and becoming a more empathetic parent. It felt like it was going well (and certainly has borne good fruit in me) but then a friend helped me see that when I thought I was attuning to anger and helping during a meltdown wasn't just anger or a meltdown at all: it was really a tantrum.  Learning this was a game changer for me.

My first semester in seminar—Asbury Seminary for those who are curious—I was assigned the task of leading a group through the book Sacred Rhythms by Ruth Haley Barton. We met a Truro Anglican Church in Fairfax weekly. I liked the book so much that six of us decided to repeat the book as soon as we reached the last page. That was ten years ago. . .

A number of years ago, I was at Virginia Hospital Center in the elevator traveling from the 8th to the ground floor. The elevator stopped, the doors opened and a small young black woman, pushed in front of me as she got on. She was determined to be right in front of all the buttons, so I stepped back. She was followed by a slightly larger black man. As she stared straight ahead, he stood at her side and bereted her. He called her every cuss word that I had ever heard.

It was dark and rainy outside, so my daughter invited the driver in. She had used a service that picks up her car, takes it to be serviced at the dealer, then drops it off at your home when the service is complete. Normally this happens without a hitch but, when the driver brought back her car, he was not going to be picked up any time soon.

 “How are you going to get home?” she asked him.