There are times in life when NOT doing something can usher in a sacred moment.  I had one recently.  I learned a lot from this moment, and I want to share. 

My energetic, bright, and confident daughter brought me a few pages of an essay that I had seen her working on for the past few weeks.  She was exceptionally excited about this essay that is a true story of the scariest moment of her life.  I was a character in this essay, and I could see in her eyes her need for me to approve of her work.  She was proud and delighted to share it with her mom.  I sensed in that moment that in believing in her work, she would feel my love for her.  How I would value her work was tied to how I felt about her. I could see it.

I read her words out loud.  There was so much energy and life in the story. I saw how excited she was to tell this story…but I also saw typos. I saw misspelled words. I saw incorrect placement of commas. I saw how the story wasn’t exactly how it happened.

And I had a choice.  I had a choice to use my strengths (insight, assistance, discernment to make changes for the better…people pay me to do these things) or to RESTRAIN.  Without a doubt, it was God working in me in that moment.  I had been learning about the Discipline of Restraint from one of my mentors, Alicia Britt Chole.  I had worked to build up the muscle of restraint.  This, my friend, was a test. 

I looked at her, mirroring back to her the excitement that she was oozing, and I told her how proud of her I was. I told her that the story kept me on the edge of my seat even when I knew the ending. I gave her a hug.  I celebrated her work, and I celebrated her. 

Fast forward a week or two.  As I picked up my daughters from school, my daughter told me about her day.  She said that her teacher read her essay to the class.  The teacher praised my daughter, saying that in the history of 25 years of teaching, this was the best essay she has ever read from one of her students. 

I, of course, was so pleased that she did well. But I was even more thankful that I had not been a critical, disparaging voice echoing in her heart.  Had I corrected her, she would have remembered that her mother only saw the negative.  The discipline of restraint saved my daughter the belief that her mother didn’t approve of her. 

I sat back and didn’t say what I thought.  I held my tongue and offered my heart.  I have to say it is one of my proudest moments in the last year, and it is all because I used RESTRAINT.

I will continue to learn to get out of the way, to give less of myself. 

Next challenge:  critiquing my husband’s sermons.

Laura

It’s been raining all weekend and it’s an unusual amount coming off the summer thunderstorms where you’ll have downpours one minute and bright sunshine the next.  These rains were soakers and the sun did not shine through once for over 36 hours.  A friend of mine mentioned to me that he loved weekends like the one we just had, all wet and gray with soot-covered cotton-ball clouds.  When I asked why he said, “It just changes things up… it lets me know that cool weather is finally coming.” 

All Floridians long for cool weather coming out of summers that are white-hot with daily temperatures in the mid to upper nineties.  My son, who lives in Seattle, longs for the sun and heat of Washington’s August and September.  I guess it’s all a matter of perspective and learning to adapt to where we are in our experience.  In fact, I guess perspective is everything, when you get right down to it.  Will my perspective be one that will allow me to see the positive in every circumstance?  Will it lead me to see what God’s viewpoint is as compared to my own?  Someone in Florida who longs for cool rainy weather has a perspective that is carved out of a heat-filled summer.  Someone in Washington who covets warmth and sunshine has a longing that has been soaked in the cold and rainy days of the Northwest. 

Our longing is a reminder that things are not going to be perfect on this earth and that something better is coming.  This does not mean that we cannot embrace the reality of where we are and wring God’s blessings out of every moment.  And the change of the seasons is to me, a reminder that God is continually inviting us into personal change, change that leads to growth.  I invite you to ask God for His perspective on your life, and once you have it, ask Him for the ability to continue to grow.

Jim

I read this quote recently by a woman named, Evelyn Underhill, who is a great female scholar of mysticism, and it got me thinking about a few things.  It goes as follows:

"The spiritual life of individuals has to be extended both vertically to God and horizontally to other souls; and the more it grows in both directions, the less merely individual and therefore the more truly personal it will be."

When speaking of merely individual, she is referring to what affects us as an individual.  When speaking of truly personal she is referring to what not only affects us as an individual, but those around us.  

Much of the time in counseling we are focusing on self.  The wrongs done toward us, the wrongs done against us, and hopefully moving toward the wrongs we have done towards others.  When we reach the point in counseling when we are able to take responsibility for our actions that have affected those around us, potentially because of the actions done to us, we are moving forward.  That is personal. When we are able to move out of our own personal pain and see the pain of others, growth is happening in the human soul.  To always be in a space where we are concerned only with self is not only selfish, it is not spiritual.  Emotional growth can't go beyond spiritual growth and vice versa.  They work in conjunction with one another.  And when both are occurring, we are able to relate to others, have an impact on others, and love others well.  That is spiritual.  And that is personal.

Melissa

I was doing some reading recently and came across this quote by Anne Sexton, a poet:

"The great theme is not Romeo and Juliet....the great theme we all share is that of becoming ourselves, of overcoming our father and mother, of assuming our identities somehow."

I found this quote to be very thought-provoking.  Many, if not most of us, think the theme of our life should be love found in relationships with others.  In many ways it is central to our life being that God is Love and we are in relationship with Him because of His great Love for us.  However, if we don't know ourselves, if our identities are tangled up in our history and we are operating out of our wounds from the past, we cannot really know Love.  We cannot experience Love from God or others.  In our woundedness we seem to either move away from people as to protect ourselves from Love, move toward others demanding that they come through for us, or move against people.  None of these choices present a very viable option for us.  In knowing ourselves we can accept Love in its truest form with God and others.  

Untangling from our mothers and fathers can be hard, exhausting, and painful.  But I think the work is worth the greater reward, which is Love.

Melissa

January is a month of both promise and reality.  It begins a New Year and we resolve to do the things that we somehow forgot or just didn’t want to do the previous year.  And this is the year we’ll really get serious about… you fill in the blank.  But the reality is this: we are still the same person and we live in the same life.  January is the month that reality breaks through.

Every year, as I assess my January reality, I am reminded to do two things.  The first is that I need to prioritize my time.  What is really important?  I take the time to remember that relationships are more important than my job, and that the joy of the ones I love gives me greater satisfaction than trying to continually please myself.  The second is that once I prioritize, then I need to plan my time accordingly.  The road to hell is paved with good intentions… the question is what will I do differently.  I need to bring my hopes into existence by deciding to act, not just think or hope.

Let me use this short blog to encourage you to healthy action.  Don’t be overwhelmed or stuck in the “blues”.  January is a frustratingly busy time, but as we transition into February, take the personal and relational steps to move your life in the direction that leads to spiritual, emotional, relational, and physical health.  Take deliberate, doable steps.  As St. Augustine said: “Lord, help me not so much as to live a holy life and to live a holy minute.”  Here’s to your next holy minute!

Jim