Troy Hawks

Jesus follower, husband, father, brother, and Husker & Wildcat fan — in that order.

[CFB Kings @CFBKings]

Today marks the halfway point of the College Football offseason. 🗓️

The 2025 season ended 111 days ago and the 2026 season starts in 111 days.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up.

He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour.

Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself.

Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it.

Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows.

Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result.

Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing.

The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.

[Troy Hawks @TroyHawks]

@MopurifyII Love to see it! #GBR

[Will Compton @_willcompton]

Holy shit man

Take two minutes to listen to this

[G-PA @IndianaGPA]

They say a father is the one person who quietly roots for you to outgrow him—to go further, do better, and live bigger than he ever could. There’s something really powerful in that. 🥹💕

[Immortal Tessy @TheresaArueyin1]

I’m starting to see that the gospel isn’t about forcing yourself to stop sinning, but about loving God so deeply that sin loses its appeal.

[Troy Hawks @TroyHawks]

I could watch this all day.

[End3of6Days9 (Helen) 🇺🇸 @end3of6days9]

This guy takes his four dogs out for a run, but not the way you’re thinking… he jumps on his four-wheeler and lets his dogs run full-speed.

All these dogs are living their best life, but Sarabi (a 2-year-old greyhound speed demon) is out there absolutely flying with that incredible agility and pure joy you can feel through the screen.

Did you happen to see his speedometer? He had to drive 80 mph just to catch up to the greyhound! 🐕💨

[Steve 🇺🇸 @SteveLovesAmmo]

This is a good joke.

But his delivery is what makes this very funny.

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

US fertility reached 1.57 last year, the lowest ever recorded, and the WSJ explanation is "uncertainty about finances, relationship stability, and the political climate"

my great grandma had eleven children during the second world war, in a country being bombed, in a house with no running water, on rations.
poor people have always had kids. the poorest people on earth right now still have kids and the financial excuse is a story we tell ourselves because it makes us feel good and the real one is unbearable

the real mechanism is that we got rich enough to redefine children as an expense instead of the point. somewhere in the last fifty years the cultural goal inverted and a child stopped being what life is for and became a line item competing with the lifestyle. once you frame it that way the math never works, because the math isnt supposed to work. that's the point

we are living in the richest moment in human history and we decided to use the surplus to buy ourselves out of the future. the most prosperous civilization that has ever existed is committing demographic suicide at the altar of personal optimization and comfort, and the official line is that we cant afford it

the birthrate is a lagging indicator of a civilization that forgot why it was alive

[NocNoc97 @_nora_brady_]

Do it for Lute! 🐻⬇️❤️💙

[The Biblical Man @Biblicalman]

Joseph of Arimathea pulled a corpse off a cross with his bare hands.

Blood under his fingernails. The weight of a dead man sagging into his arms.

He wrapped God in linen, pressed the fabric into wounds that were still wet.

Nicodemus brought seventy-five pounds of burial spice. A king's funeral for a man the world just murdered.

They carried Him into a hole in the rock and rolled the stone shut.

And everything you've ever done went in with Him.
Every night you can't sleep because of what you did. Every morning, you can't look in the mirror. The thing you did to her. The thing you did to them. The
lie you've been carrying so long it feels like bone.

The version of you that drinks alone and pretends tomorrow will be different.

That man was buried with Christ.

Stone sealed. Done.
Not managed. Not in therapy. Not on a payment plan with God where you slowly earn your way back. Buried. In a tomb. Under rock. Gone.
Three days of silence. Three days of a cold body in the dark.

Then the stone moved.
And when He walked out, the grave clothes were folded on the slab. He didn't stumble out tangled in death. He left it sitting there like a man who's done
with the clothes he used to wear.
Lazarus needed someone to unwrap him. Death still clung to him even after he was breathing.
Jesus folded His own burial linen and walked out clean.

That's the difference between religion and resurrection. Religion unwraps you slowly. Asks you to manage your sin. Attend the class. Read the book. Try harder next week.
Resurrection says the man who walked into that tomb is dead. The man who walked out doesn't know him.
You're not fixing the old you. The old you is in a sealed tomb in Jerusalem, and he's not coming back.
The man reading this, the one who thinks he's too far gone, you're not too far. You're already buried. The funeral happened two thousand years
ago.
Now get up. The stone's already moved. The linen's already folded.

Walk out.

[Blue Lives Matter @bluelivesmtr]

Jeff Foxworthy: "I started leading a Bible study with a group of homeless men.

I asked a simple question… 'What is the Bible?' One man’s answer turned into a story I’ll never forget."

POWERFUL. REPOST this absolutely EVERYWHERE.

#thinblueline #lawenforcement

[Jason Romano @JasonRomano]

“The man on the middle cross said I could come.”

Easter week. Watch it. And watch it again. And then chase after Jesus.

[Josh Howerton @howertonjosh]

This remains one of the most powerful lessons from the New Testament. And it's the greatest news you'll ever hear ahead of Easter 🙏

[Steve Magness @stevemagness]

Arizona's was Down 7 to Purdue at halftime of the Elite Eight. Their first Final Four in 25 years slipping away.

Coach Tommy Lloyd walks to the front of the locker room and says: "Guys, the coaching staff and I are going to leave right now. You guys figure this deal out."

There wasn't some huge speech. He walked out.

Every instinct in a coaches body says to give the movie style inspirational speech. Light a fire, demand more, sound like Al Pacino in Any Given Sunday...

Lloyd did the opposite. He left 5 minutes on the clock and sent a key message to the players: This is your team. I trust you to lead it.

The veteran players took charge. They'd been through the tournament losses before, helped with emotional regulation, and reiterated that they still had a shot.

Freshman Koa Peat said afterward: "They told us to keep going. Can't get too high or too low. Just stay even-keeled."

Arizona outscored Purdue 48-26 in the second half. They had zero turnovers and shot 51.6% from the field.
Second half: Arizona outscored Purdue One.

They put on a clinic.

When asked why he did it, Lloyd said after the game:

"The most powerful thing in a team sport is a player-led program. The coach, you have to help them navigate it, but when you can get the players to own these moments, you are just so much better."

He said he'd done it four or five times this year and it worked every time.

There's a mountain of science behind Lloyd's approach

In 2003, researchers Mageau and Vallerand found autonomy-supportive coaching, giving athletes choice, acknowledging their perspective, and avoiding overt control, consistently produced more motivated, more resilient athletes.

Controlling coaching did the reverse: higher burnout and lower resilience.

This is at the heart of one of the most theories in psychology, Self-Determination Theory

When people feel autonomy, competence, and relatedness, you get the highest quality motivation.

When a coach trusts his team to figure it out and right the ship, he's handing them all three at once. It's the ultimate signal of trust when his team needed it the most.

Lloyd built a culture where the players internalized the stuff that matters.

A 2025 meta-analysis by Clare and colleagues looked at 50 studies and over 17,000 athletes.

They found that team captains had nearly twice the effect on performance as coaches did.

Coaches help set the culture and expectations. They guide good leaders, but the players look to who else is in the arena with them.

We need peer pressure in the positive direction.

Lloyd understood this. Too often, as coaches we think we need to "do something." That instinct pushes us to over control, to grip the wheel harder.

When so often, what we need to do is trust that we've guided them the best we can, and show them the trust they deserve.

Steve Kerr once did something similar with the Warriors, telling his team that he was sitting out and they were coaching the team for a game.

Build the culture. Coach the team up, giving them the skills and ability.

And then sometimes, you've just got to step back, tell them you believe in them, that it's there team.

That ownership and self-belief is the fuel of the purest motivation.

Sometimes, when we're struggling, we don't need all the answers. We just need to hear that we've already got the inside of us. And to give us that belief to go get it done...together.

-Steve

Research:
Mageau & Vallerand (2003)
"The coach–athlete relationship: a motivational model." Journal of Sports Sciences, 21(11), 883-904.

-Clare, Hardy, Roberts, Tod, & Benson (2025)
"Do Leaders Actually Influence Sports Performance? An Integrated Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses." Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 47(4), 205-222.

[Josh Howerton @howertonjosh]

I learned something new about the reality hell that I'd never seen until my sermon prep this past week.

Listen closely to what Jesus says in the parable of the sheep and the goats 👇

[Troy Hawks @TroyHawks]

@_10delta_ @grok what is your take on this? Is this an accurate analysis?

[Erika Day @erikaleaday]

This might be the best photo from the entire tournament.

[Hurrdat Sports @HurrdatSports]

Wahoo Elementary in Nebraska is having “Sam Hoiberg Day” today in celebration of the Sweet 16. 🥹❤️