This past June I attended Don Miller’s Storyline Conference in Santa Barbara. I knew it was going to be inspiring. I didn’t know it was going to hurt. I’ve done okay as an actor and writer: worked on some movies, wrote a book. I’m long overdue for getting another book out into the world; and I’ve had a few ideas. But something has stopped me from doing those other things. A show. Before Angry Conversations…
Several years ago I attended Socrates in The City, a literary salon hosted by author Eric Metaxas (Bonhoeffer, Amazing Grace) and featuring many great Christian thinkers. The guest that evening was Rev. John Polkinghorne, a British theologian and physicist who was knighted for his role in discovering the quark. Talk about physics and my eyes glaze over, but Polkinghorne said something that stuck with me: When an equation is correct, mathematicians call it ‘beautiful.’ A…
One afternoon I got a notice from the post office that I had three parcels waiting for me. I had been expecting a script, but not a parcel. I drove to the post office to pick them up. They were boxes from my sister. I recognized them: It was my mother’s crystal. When my mother had a stroke and developed dementia, she moved in with my sister. My sister got the dining room set, my…
Growing up, I didn’t think my mother liked me. I knew she had to love me, she was my mother. But I wasn’t sure she liked me, or at least she didn’t know how to handle me. Mom was quiet and melancholy; I was brash and angry. Melancholy and anger were the mechanisms we each used to cope with the family’s dysfunction. But we had little in common. Well, except for the dysfunction. But I…
