For all the guys out there, let me ask you a question (ladies, I will ask you something next week). 

Do you remember as a boy, wanting to be Spider-Man or a Jedi Knight or (insert your favorite hero)? 

And why did every long stick become a sword and every short stick a laser firing blaster?

I would suggest that there was something...

Life, for most of us, feels like a movie we've arrived to forty minutes late.

Sure, good things happen.  But tragic things happen too.  What does it mean?  

We find ourselves in the middle of a story that is sometimes wonderful, sometimes awful, but usually a confusing mixture of both.  And, we haven't a clue how to make sense of it all.  No wonder we keep losing heart.

If you walk into any mall, amusement park...

I think the deepest kind of pain ever had in my life is relational pain. There's a lot of hurt that we all experience in life. But there's something about relational pain that can hurt so deeply that it's really hard to let go. 

Maybe you are in a relationship that is falling apart right now. And in that process, someone has hurt you in such a way that it feels like it would be impossible to ever rebound from that situation.

Maybe you were betrayed (a friend repeated a secret), abandoned (a spouse/parent left you), or trust was broken (there was an affair).