Personal Stories

Little Life Lesson: Winsome Witness

~ D. R. Meriwether, Ph.D. ~ Leave a comment

Header image credit: me // Featured image credit: Helena Lopes (freely available via Unsplash)

While on a lovely walk this afternoon with some friends around a local lake, we were rather rudely interrupted by a lady’s asking us if we were signed up for a rally.

The curtness of my immediate, “No” in response caught even me by surprise, and I’ll admit that it was perhaps too brusque. However, as I continued to ponder over this brief exchange throughout the day, I began to feel more convinced that my response corresponded appropriately to the disruptiveness of her interruption. And I began to realize why it was so off-putting.

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A Light in the Darkness

~ D. R. Meriwether, Ph.D. ~ Leave a comment

Header image credit: me // Featured image credit: Ivanić-Grad (freely available via Unsplash)

I get the appeal of suicide.

Don’t get me wrong: I am not suicidal. I have never harbored such ideations, and I feel safe in saying that I never will (by the grace of God). Also, my life belongs to the King of Kings; it is His to take—not mine—when He deems the time to be right.

But, I get the appeal.

I get being in a darkness so suffocatingly oppressive that it chokes out the memory of light’s warm touch. I get experiencing a night so despairingly long that you’ve lost all faith that the sun will ever rise again. I get feeling like your life is so burdensome and valueless that, like George Bailey, you think it’d be better for everyone if you’d never been born. I get being utterly and completely hopeless that life will ever get better that you’d rather it just end.

At least this life, that is. But thank God this earthly life isn’t the only one.

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From the Heart No. 2: Heart-Healthy Eating (or, Freedom from Food)

~ D. R. Meriwether, Ph.D. ~ Leave a comment

Header image credit: me // Featured image credit: Julian Hanslmaier (freely available via Unsplash)

There’s so much information available on the Internet about what healthy eating looks like; so, being no nutritionist, I’m not going to presume that I have much to add to that discussion (though I might relay some of that discussion some day). But, having a background in psychology and a nearly lifelong, unhealthy relationship with food, I do have something to add to the discussion of what a healthy approach to eating looks like—at least for me.

In line with that, this post is about having a heart-healthy diet not in the literal, cardiovascular sense of “heart-healthy”, but in the metaphorical, emotional sense of the term—which, I would argue, is the more important of the two. After all, having an emotionally healthier attitude towards food can make it easier to have a nutritionally healthier diet, whereas changing what you eat may not as potently affect how you feel about what you eat. At least that’s been my experience.

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From the Heart No. 1: On Goals (Or, Great Expectations II: The Problems and the Pitfalls)

~ D. R. Meriwether, Ph.D. ~ Leave a comment

Header image credit: me // Featured image credit: me

I’m going to do something a little different in this post, what I intend to be the first of many such occasional posts: rather than talk about science and connect lots of interesting facts and findings together, I’m going to speak from the heart and use anecdotal experience rather than empirical evidence to make my points. (Wow, and even in that disclaimer, I still sound like scientific fact man. So on with it already!)

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What Is a Renaissance Man?

~ D. R. Meriwether, Ph.D. ~ Leave a comment

Header image credit: me // Featured image credit: me

Da Vinci. Pascal. Descartes. Newton. Einstein. They broke molds. They pushed boundaries—not just the boundaries of their disciplines, but of themselves, of who they were. Discontented with the gap between what was and the what could be, they pressed on; they persevered; they made progress; they advanced. And as they did, they brought with them their disciplines, their peers, and their societies; their advances advanced humanity. We owe them a great debt, these renaissance men.

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