Dispatches From the Edge & Other Stories From The Margins: Facts & Figures & The Rest Of Her Life She sat in the waiting room chair the way people do when they have been waiting a long time for something, not just the appointment, but the reckoning that tends to arrive when you finally are invited into the office. The chair she was sitting in was vinyl. It sounded like it sighed when she shifted her weight, and it had a small tear near the seam that looked like it had been th

Hi friends, I'm ending 2025 with something that feels a little like my own set of theses tacked to the door. Not because I'm angry, but because I love my people. Good, honest, courageous people who show up day after day to do the hard work of social services. The helpers. The caregivers. The ones who go to places most people would rather not even think about, let alone enter. When I was a boy, I was taught a simple lesson about making your way in the world. If you want to be

Sometimes the work we are called to do asks more of us than long hours or tired hands. Sometimes it reaches into our hearts and rearranges the shape of our lives. Matt and Emily discovered this the hard way. His choice to serve those in great need was not a career so much as an obedience, and obedience has a way of carrying consequences that echo far beyond the moment they are chosen. This is a story about love that mattered, paths that diverged, and the lasting truth that do

Dispatches From The Edge And Other Stories From The Margins: Chosen to Love & Choosing To Love This one is for the merry and the worn thin. For those whose houses glow with laughter and for those whose hearts feel a little drafty tonight. For anyone who has loved a child they did not help create. For anyone who said yes when walking away would have been easier. Draw close. This one has been stirring in my heart and mind for a long time now. So come. The fire is low, and this

Dispatches From the Edge & Other Stories From The Margins: A Christmas Story Well, here we go again. No sooner do we say goodbye to Uncle Stewy and Aunt Ruth after an evening of Thanksgiving overstuffing does the Grand Poobah of the holidays, Christmas, show up at our front door. And by the time December settles in here in Cedar Creek, the town has already begun behaving like it knows it is being watched. The lampposts wear wreaths, the hardware store window fills with tin an

Dispatches from the Field & Other Stories from the Margin The Tiki Room and the Tired Ones You’ve probably heard about the Enchanted Tiki Room if you’ve ever walked down Main Street in Disneyland, sun on your shoulders, a Dole Whip in your hand, and the faint sound of chirping birds drifting through the air. It’s a cheerful little corner of the park now, full of singing parrots and flowers that nod along in rhythm. But what most folks don’t know is that when Walt Disney dream

Dispatches from the Field & Other Stories from the Margins: The Man & The Mop You can grow to love the sounds of a place. Ours was a building of endearing flaws. Like the tell-tale squeak of a neighbor's door, the reassuring clank of the radiators waking up on a cold morning, and the deep, steady groan of the stairs that had held generations, nearly one hundred years' worth, of footsteps. Add to that the shuffle of three hundred tired pairs of shoes and the smell of warm caff

Dispatches From the Edge & Other Stories From The Margins: Christmas Miricles Great & Small The thing nobody warns you about outpatient rehab is the clipboards. They appear without mercy. Clipboards with pens tethered by little plastic chains like anxious pets. Clipboards asking deeply personal questions in fonts normally reserved for dental offices. Now, on this particular Tuesday morning, our hero, whom we will call Dave in our story because that feels statistically accurat

Dispatches From the Edge & Other Stories From The Margins: A Manger in the Corner Well friends, it's Christmastime again, and it has its usual way of dressing the world up in ribbons and good intentions. Everywhere you look, trees are glowing like they have stories to tell, and wreaths hanging on doors that never saw so much greenery the rest of the year. And old Saint Nick is on his annual goodwill tour, shaking hands with toddlers who want nothing to do with him and eight-y

This year I found myself thinking about a man I never met. A Quaker with a plain name and an uncommon kind of courage. His name was John Borton. He wa s alive a few centuries before anyone in my family learned to work a microwave or argue about football scores or gather around a dining table with too much food and almost not enough elbow room. Yet somehow I feel close to him now. He stood on the shore of old England long ago with a faith so honest and straightforward that it

There are people in this world who wake up each morning, drink their coffee, pull on their boots, and walk straight into a job that nobody really understands unless they have lived it. J ered was one of those. Transitional housing director. Which meant he was the mayor of a seven story village where most of the citizens had seen better days and were still hoping there might be better ones ahead. He was part landlord, part social worker, part peacekeeper, part janitor, and par

The scariest silence isn’t the absence of sound, its the absence of courage. Having been working in social services for a quarter century, I've seen some pretty strange stuff. But every now and then, work and life ratchet it up a notch and really slip into that Twilight Zone territory. Not with aliens or time machines, mind you, but with something far stranger and much more insidious. It doesn't happen too often. Thank goodness! But every now and then you find yourself standi

There was a woman I used to know many years ago now named Betty Lou. Betty Lou lived in a transitional housing building where I once worked, just off the Scioto River, close to downtown Columbus, Ohio. She was the kind of person you might not notice at first, because she preferred it that way. She didn't care for talk. Words, to her, were like coins, best spent sparingly, and not all at once. Still, she did like people. She enjoyed being around them, hearing the scrape of cha

And that’s when I remembered the old me. The me who used to give freely, who trusted that kindness was never wasted. The me who believed that helping was its own reward. And I wondered, not for the first time, if all those years of serving had made me a better man, or just a harder one.

There are jobs that people take for the money, jobs they take for the prestige, and jobs they take because they want to see if they can survive them without losing their minds. And then there are jobs where the paycheck is more of a consolation prize for what you had to live through to get it. This was one of those jobs. Picture a building the size of a small-town high school, but instead of a gymnasium full of sweaty teenagers, you have three hundred people all trying to sta

New Jersey, bless its heart, is often treated like the punchline to a joke, exit numbers instead of names, jokes about the smell and how rude its people are. And I guess we’re stuck with all that nonsense, and I guess New Jerseyans will just keep taking it on the chin, as we do, in good fun. They still do call it the Garden State after all, and I suppose some folks will say that with a smirk as well, like it too is a joke that’s been told too many times. But I know better. I

There comes a time in life, not just once, but often, when you find yourself standing in the hallway with your coat on and your hand on the doorknob, heart thudding, unsure whether to step out into the wind or go back inside and pretend the world isn’t changing. Maybe it’s moving on from a good job, or the last kid leaving home, or the doctor using the word “cholesterol” with too much seriousness. Maybe it’s waking up one morning and realizing you’re not who you used to be, a

The boy walked across the stage and shook his favorite teacher's hand, his tassel turned, diploma firmly in hand. And poof, that was that: my last child, the caboose of the whole operation, had officially graduated from high school. The youngest of five, spaced neatly every other year like a chorus line of destiny, each one arriving just as we were getting our bearings with the last. My wife and I spent a full decade in the land of diapers and midnight feedings. We were up to

I can still vividly picture those times when I would be facilitating a group in rehab, the circle of chairs creaking like a bunch of old men trying to stretch, and the air carried the particular smell of bleach, sweat, and hope. I used to sit with fellows who were fighting for their lives, often hoping they didn't push their loved ones a little too far this time around. Some were coming off years of heroin, others were clawing free from alcohol or pills. They all had their st

There's a quiet, thieving killer that moves among us, and it doesn't carry a single physical weapon. It doesn't need to. It simply needs to whisper in your ear. Its voice is soft, and it often even sounds friendly at first. "Maybe not today," it says. "Maybe next week. Maybe when you've got things all figured out." And we nod along like obedient children because it always sounds sensible at the start. Who is this diabolical doubter? None other than Fear itself. Now, this Fear

When you are a caseworker... Your work is with people who are stuck in places that do not have easy exits.