Mar
20
Reading a column in this morning’s paper about a design psychologist — a person who helps people understand their personalities in order to create homes or offices that are an emotional fit for them.
Some people I know would have an emotional fit over the notion that people can and will pay for the services of a design psychologist while Rome burns. As I watch our local government prepare to close 50% of our public libraries and lay off hundreds of school teachers, it’s hard not to wonder if we, as a society, have left our priorities in our other jeans.
So my spiritual challenge is to give it my best shot to be emotionally fit when it’s so tempting — so much easier — to to have an emotional fit.
For me, that begins with remembering that I do not have all the answers. I may not have any of the answers. It’s been a revelation to me that I am most in touch with my best self…with the source of love and truth and grace that I know as God…when I keep in mind that the only thing I know for certain is that I don’t have a clue. And that leaves me with no choice but to tap that source of love and truth and grace for answers to life’s spiritual and emotional challenges.
Mar
15
When I first met Jane, she was everything I wasn’t…soft-spoken, sweet, shy, pretty in a way that never asked to be noticed.
One day, she pulled me aside to tell me that the doctors thought she might have ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease, a degenerative muscle disease). She was a little afraid, anticipating all she could lose. She wanted someone to tell her things she already knew far better than I did — to stay in the present moment, to trust God to give her whatever she would need. Platitudes, I guess, but things Jane believed and knew how to live.
Little by little, Jane lost her freedom of movement, her voice, every shred of control she had over her life. And the more her body failed her, the more her spirit rose up in her and made itself known. She glowed, became pretty in a way people couldn’t help but notice. Every word she couldn’t speak came out in her eyes, in her smile, in the gentle grace with which she faced each day and touched each life. In fact, her quietness of spirit spoke so loudly it touched everyone who came around her. Her spirit that could not be silenced became the defining quality of her family and her home and her friends.
Without saying a word for months, Jane transformed lives.
Jane died last week. She was 58.
