What people who just talk about war—people like me—sometimes fail to understand sometimes is that a bigger issue is at play. The bigger issue is that people fight wars. They generally aren’t the people who are just talking about the wars.

I’m OK with the storms of life. They blow in, toss and turn me about, but I know that they will pass. Fog, however, creeps in slowly and lingers quietly--just a low-lying cloud that kills the view. It may burn off as the sun comes through, but sometimes it stays all day.

As I watched the dogs strain toward new smells and scenery, I realized that people aren’t that different. We get complacent and settle into routines. We just go round and round the block. Some of this is the discipline we need in life, but some it is the fear of the unknown, which can cripple our sense of adventure.

Maggie and Scooter love to run free. When they get out, they go for awhile. Maggie is a natural hunter and Scooter is a natural at following the leader, so he goes, too. But they’ll only really take off if they don’t have their leashes attached.

But raw, authentic prayers—the kind that are heard when someone is first learning the language—are my favorite. I’ve heard two great prayers of this sort in my life.

It strikes me that we often treat our prayer life—our conversations with God—as a second language that we don’t know very well. We speak what we can, but unless we learn the language, we may never say what we really want to say.

A kite without a tail is like a dreaming man without relationships. He is blown all over the place with no true sense of purpose or direction. Grand ideas turn into being blown around by surrounding circumstances.

A youth ministry professor of mine in seminary, Dean Borgman, used to talk about the four questions that represent the stages of getting to know someone. Here they are:

Scooter was gone. I went to my computer, got the cutest pictures of him I could find and made a bunch of posters. Then we went to surrounding neighborhoods and began to staple them to street poles and tape them to road signs.

I sat for awhile trying to think of the most impressive thing that I could write here for the first entry. I asked Emma what she thought, and she said, “Chip, your gift is writing about God showing up in everyday life. Just write about that.”