"Kindness" by Naomi Shihab Nye

Finally, all of you, be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble.
1 Peter 3:8

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Native in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the nights with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raise its head
from the crowd of the world to say
"It is I you have been looking for,"
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

- Naomi Shihab Nye

A Prayer of Deep Listening

The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?
“I the Lord search the heart and examine the mind”
Jeremiah 17:9-10a

God of silence and God of sound,
help me to listen.
Help me to do the deep listening to the sounds of my soul,
waiting to hear your soft voice calling me deeper into you.
Give me attentive ears
that begin to separate the noise from the sounds that are you;
you who have been speaking to me
and through me my whole life,
for so long that you can seem like background noise.
Today help me hear you anew.

- Author Unknown

Just Stop and Rest

Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work.
Exodus 20:8-9

Shabbat Shalom! I hope you’re enjoying your Saturday today. Here’s a short inspirational reading to nourish your soul. 

In an unofficial survey I took over the past few years of working as a hospice & hospital chaplain, I realized that most people’s health deteriorated in three primary ways: substance abuse, poor diet and exercise (i.e. diabetes), and lack of rest. You’d be surprised how many patients I encounter who are surprised by their medical condition; but when I listen to their stories, its obvious to me that they’re in the state that they’re in because they rarely, if ever, take regular times of Sabbath. Now, Sabbath does involve adequate bodily rest, but it’s much more holistic than that. The way that God intended for human beings to practice Sabbath is more restorative rather than recovery.

So, how do you practice regularly Sabbath?

“As we keep or break the Sabbath Day we nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope by which man rises.”
-Abraham Lincoln

Are You Creative?

Do you consider yourself to be a creative person? If you do, you probably find yourself connecting with your spirit or with God while you are creating. If you don’t, you probably have a deep desire to be creative but something is holding you back. Where do you think this internal desire to want to create comes from? Is it something childlike within you? Is it a desire to use both sides of your brain? Or is in inscribed in your DNA as a human being? I believe all of these things are true because that is exactly how God designed you. God created you in His likeness, which means you are creative just as God is creative. The desire to create is a God-given desire and we will not able to fully experience or appreciate our spiritual lives unless that is regularly tapped into.

“Creativity - like human life itself - begins in darkness.”
-Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

Are We to Manage Our Anger?

My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry.
James 1:19

How do you regulate your anger? I think we all know that feeling anger is human and healthy to express every once in awhile. However, how do you regularly express and process your anger to safe people in safe spaces? For me, I tend to suppress my anger so often that it leaks out unexpectedly, especially around the people I love. So as one of my favorite authors wisely said, “Mange your reactions, but do not suppress your emotions.”

Open Doors

Al and his little brother circa 1986

A friend loves at all times,
and a sibling is born for a time of adversity.
Proverbs 17:17

Do you have any siblings? If so, how would you describe your relationship with them? Also, how has your relationship with them changed as an adult? Sibling relationships are some of the longest relationships people will have in their lifetimes, even longer than those of most people’s parents. There hasn’t been too much research done on adult sibling relationships, but in 1989 Dr. Deborah Gold of Duke University came out with a study “Sibling Relationships in Old Age.” In it she concluded there were five types of sibling relationships: intimate, congenial, loyal, apathetic, and hostile. The most common relationship among siblings is loyal, which means they show up for each other in times of need. The second most common relationship is apathetic, which means their sibling relationship doesn’t mean much to them. Unfortunately, intimate is the least common relationship among siblings because it’s rare to find siblings who are deeply connected, beyond just friendly or cordial with each other.

As people of faith, we should strive for intimate relationships with our family, friends, neighbors, partners, and colleagues. While intimacy will not be attainable with all of them, that is something everyone longs for; intimacy with God and intimacy with others.

Open Road

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put childish ways behind me.
1 Corinthians 13:11

The road of life can introduce us to some unexpected people, new experiences, and profound challenges. However, there are many ways many tend to avoid these people, experiences, and challenges along the way. They avoid unexpected people by surrounding themselves with people just like them. They circumvent new experiences because they stay in their little socioeconomic silos. They rarely confront profound challenges because they remain shelters and complacent. But who’s really paying the consequences in the end? When we don’t embrace unexpected people, new experiences, or profound challenges, our worldview remains narrow and we cease to grow.

Be open. Open-minded, open handed, and open hearted. Because if you’re not, the only person you’re cheating is yourself.

Go With the Flow

Jesus stood and said, “Whoever believes in me, rivers of living water will flow from within them.”
John 7:38

I spent a lot of time in water this week. On Monday & Tuesday, I took my two kids to a water park. Yes you read that correctly, two days at the water park! And if that weren’t enough, on Friday, I went to Santa Monica Beach with my hospital colleagues for a chaplains staff retreat day. As I was swimming in the ocean on that warm Friday afternoon, I kept getting beat up by the waves. After a few minutes of getting tossed and turned by the ocean, I relaxed my body and adjusted my body to the rhythms of the waves instead of resisting them. When a wave was big but didn’t break, I just floated with it; when a wave broke ahead of me, I dove underneath it; when the waters were calm, I just stood or tread water. Whenever I resisted the flow, I was getting beat up and tired. I realized it was far easier, enjoyable, and empowering for me to go with the flow.

What current flow are you resisting that you really should be riding?

Are You Staying Hydrated?

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?
Psalm 42:2

Want to hear a funny story? A few summers ago at my previous job, I had a coworker who would always run hotter than the average person. Our jobs required us to wear suit and tie during our meeting days, so this one summer day when we were returning from going out to lunch, my coworker was drenched in sweat. The collar around his neck was soaked, he had pit stains on his dress shirt, and he was panting like a dog in heat. As soon as we parked our cars and started walking back to the office, he said, “I’m so thirsty!” He immediately goes to the office fridge, takes out a box of cream puffs, and starts tossing them into his mouth like M&Ms. I was baffled. I said to him, “I thought you said you were thirsty?” He replied, “I am!” as he continued to destroy one cream puff after another.

This makes me wonder how we often replace our spiritual nourishment with cheap substitutes. We ignore our spiritual thirsts because we distract ourselves with busyness, activities, and entertainment. We fill ourselves up with junk when all our spirits needed was the living water.

Growing Pains

Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance.
James 1:2-3

One of my favorite units to visit in the hospital as a chaplain is the Rehabilitation Unit. The patients in this unit are often very determined to get better, so they endure a lot of difficult and often painful physical therapy in order to recover from an injury, surgery, or condition. There’s almost always pain involved, but the patients embrace the pain because they know the pain is a necessary part of their growth and healing.

Have you experienced “growing pains” lately? Sometimes they come unexpectedly, sometimes we choose to endure them, and other times they’re sort of forced upon us. 

The one thing I know is that if we always avoid growing pains, we will never experience growth and healing.