• TRACKERS: VOTE TODAY FOR 2025!

• PSYCHO-PATHS: Growing Strong in Hard Places

• CAIRNS: Jimmy Carter’s Biographer Speaks Out

• WAYPOINTS: Five Questions in the Mirror

What topic would help you move to stronger well-being in 2025? I want to know your ideas as I put together great material that can help everyone. HURRY: the Survey closes tomorrow!

The proposed topics are:

• Paths to Forgiving

• Interpreting the Teachings of Jesus

• Stopping the Hate

• Loving My Shadow Self

• Happiness in My Brain

Follow the link to the TRACKERS Community Facebook page to vote on your favorite choice!

Emily P. Freeman, author of How to Walk into a Room: The Art of Knowing When to Stay and When to Walk Away, recently offered ideas for reflection and discernment. Jan and I found them to be helpful as we start a new year. I hope you can find a few minutes to look in the mirror of personal reflection with five questions adapted from her list:

What is a progress I’m celebrating?

What was a pivotal decision I’ve made?

What is a question I’m still carrying?

What’s one thing I know for sure?

What do I want most in the new year?

Find more of her material at https://emilypfreeman.com

It’s realistic to think that 2025 will bring some tough times. My recent podcast and videocast, “Growing Strong in Hard Places,” offers some helps to build our inner strength based on a hardy pine tree I found in Yellowstone Park. The soil of our life will not be perfect. But we can keep growing with intentional care, community, and spirituality.

Segments include:

• A tough tree in Yellowstone Park

• Secrets of the Lodgepole Pine

• Lessons for Resilience in hard times

Listen on Buzzsprout or your favorite podcast provider

Watch on Youtube

Jonathan Alter, biographer of Jimmy Carter, reflected on the Carter he came to know. He wrote on his Substack newsletter,

“I came to believe Jimmy Carter was one of America’s most consequential one-term presidents, with a long list of unheralded achievements and an enduring moral vision.

I was surprised to learn that Carter was our greatest environmental president. (Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt were also historic conservationists but in the era before efforts to combat industrial pollution). I knew about his human rights policy but had no clue how much change it helped bring worldwide. Many little-known accomplishments — from normalizing relations with China to diversifying the federal judiciary to enacting the whistleblower protections that made the impeachment of Donald Trump possible — have shaped our own time in ways that almost no one connects to Carter.

Throughout his long life, he passed what his Naval Academy rule book called “the final test of a man”—honesty. Like most politicians, he exaggerated. But he fulfilled his famous promise in his 1976 campaign and never lied to the American people, which is no small thing today… his intensity and his sense of obligation to God, humanity, and himself. In his daily, even hourly, prayers, he asked not just “What would Jesus do?” but “Have I done my best?” After cantankerous Admiral Hyman Rickover sternly asked the nervous young lieutenant in a job interview if he had done his best at Annapolis — and he confessed that he had not — Carter disciplined himself to make the maximum effort in every single thing he did for the rest of his life. When bestowing the Nobel Peace Prize on Carter in 2002, the chairman of the Nobel committee said. “Carter himself has taken [from Ecclesiastes 11:4]  as his motto: ‘The worst thing that you can do is not to try.’ Few people, if any, have tried harder.”

Whether sprinting as a naval officer through the core of a melted-down nuclear reactor, laboring to save tens of millions of acres of wilderness, driving 100 miles out of his way on rutted roads to talk to a single African farmer, or turkey-hunting at age 95 — Carter was all-in, all the time. Calling him the least-lazy American president is not to damn him with faint praise; the story of his long life should endure as a master class in making every minute count.”

Read the full article reposted by Katie Couric here

My SIGNPOSTS BLOG is now on the world’s most popular writer’s platform: Substack. This new home is free for unlimited reading by simply creating an account.

I plan to use SIGNPOSTS for in-depth explorations of important topics. This EXPRESS newsletter is where I’ll be creating shorter pieces and vital links. On the Substack SIGNPOSTS I’ll be posting long-form articles on the topics that promote well-being.

Topics for 2025 will include engagement with toxic theology, transgender hate, overcoming shame, loving your ugliness, happy sex, ecotheology, and who knows what else!

Subscribe to SIGNPOSTS on Substack!