Love & Hope

UPDATE: The world has changed since Love & Hope started on Jan. 1, in ways that none of us expected. I’ve tried to adjust this show to the present reality, but the concept isn’t really adequate to cover what’s going on. I’ll have one more episode after today, but that will be the end of Season 1. I’ll let you know what’s coming after that when I know.

Episode 14 — If we are about to face the financial meltdown which I fear is being triggered right now, everything is about to change for all of us. Normal life as we knew it might very well be gone. And that could change everything for you — including your family’s future. As I try to explain what could be coming and why it will matter, I have to give you some context. I have to explain how I arrived at such a frightening conclusion, especially since I started out in life believing everything my government and “the experts” told me. We’ll talk next week about steps you might be able to take to protect yourself, but I’m giving you just a little bit this week about how I ended up as a “prophet of doom” about social and economic collapse.

Here are two YouTube videos I recommended during this episode:

Fractional Reserve Banking video

How does money creation work?

Episode 13 — When something has been wrong for a long time — or when books have been out of balance — there eventually comes a day of reckoning. That’s when debits and credits are added up and there’s either a credit or a price to be paid. In our culture, we have been living on borrowed time for about a hundred years, because we’ve built prosperity on a foundation made of shifting sand. Today, we face the possibility of that system crashing down around us. Most people are scared and they have reason to be. Who can you trust as we enter this age of reckoning, when all that we’ve known is probably going to be torn down?

Episode 12 — This is a very short episode this week and it’s not in my normal format. As you all know, there’s a crisis going on in the world right now and it has arrived in force all across the U.S. over the past 10 days or so. Most people’s thoughts are on medical fears and other concerns, so we’re taking a week off to consider what we can learn from what’s going on and where we should go from here.

Episode 11 — The quality of your life is determined largely by the meaning you find in the relationships you choose, but many of us end up with broken relationships that need to be repaired. What’s just as bad is that we waste time with relationships that need to die. We forget that the time we spend on a toxic relationship is time we can’t spend on a more healthy one. This is true whether it’s a romantic relationship or a close friendship or a family relationship. The quality of our lives will change depending on the choices we make about shedding what she be dumped and healing the relationship that need to be repaired.

Episode 10 — Nobody ever thinks he or she will end up in a love-less marriage, much less an abusive relationship with serious physical abuse. So why do so many people end up with partners who are either abusive or who can’t provide what they really need? Much of it is because we are so desperate for love when we’re seeking love that we’re easily fooled by love’s closest counterfeit — and that counterfeit love is always toxic in the end.

Episode 9 — Have you ever found the love you thought you wanted but then lost the relationship because you picked it apart — and ultimately lost the love — because the other person wasn’t perfect? We do that because we get comfortable having something we wanted and then we start demanding more. We refuse to get clear about which things matter and which things don’t, so we give up the things that really matter because of a pointless pursuit of achieving the perfect life that our ego wants. (The episode originally planned for this week has been moved to next week. I was too sick to record a new episode this week, so I used something for this week which I had already recorded.)

Episode 8 — Why are people who fall in love so often willing to pay a tremendous price for the love they want? I first encountered this question as a child in the book of Genesis when I read about Jacob’s love for Rachel. Why was he willing to work seven years to marry her? It seemed crazy to me. It wasn’t until I eventually fell in love myself that I started understanding that love for a woman changes everything for a man — and it makes him capable of doing things he never dreamed he could do.

Episode 7 — I have horribly mixed feelings about Valentine’s Day. I grew up being told that it’s a very artificial holiday made up by companies that want to sell you something. That still makes sense to my head, but my heart strongly identifies with the things we associate with the day. In a lot of ways, that head vs. heart struggle perfectly captures all of my lifelong struggles with loving and being loved.

Episode 6 — Everybody has some delusional expectations about life when he or she is young, but most people outgrow such things pretty quickly. I started out with bigger delusions — bigger expectations and plans — and they only got bigger by the time I was an adult. I didn’t realize it, but being raised by a father with narcissistic personality disorder had left me with delusions of grandeur. It was only when I finally woke up from my lifelong nightmare that I started seeing myself clearly.