Outside the Language

A long time ago in a hospital elevator, I overheard three people speaking intensely in a language I did not recognize. Their acute sadness was easy to feel, even though I didn’t understanding their words.

I wanted to offer my support but the lack of a common language sidelined me, made me unable to share thoughts or ask questions. With no way to communicate, I felt like an interloper—a self-conscious intruder standing mutely in the midst of their crisis.

So intense was that experience that I still ponder its meaning today.

Could it be that each of us communicates in a language no one else truly”gets”? And that we are surrounded by friends, family, co-workers, and strangers trying to talk with us—maybe even crying for our help—in words we cannot comprehend? Any parent (or grandparent) of a teenager knows this is true, at least on some levels.

Remember this story? An elderly couple was passed by a car appearing to carry just its driver until it got close. Amused to realize two young people were snuggled so closely, the elderly gentleman chuckled, “Would you look at that!”

“We used to snuggle in the car, you know,” his wife reminded him. The gentleman thought a moment, then whispered to his spouse, “I haven’t moved.”

It’s amazing how many human problems are really about relationships.

Wherever you look, it is not the solitary, individual aspects that command the most attention. It’s the liaisons, alliances, leagues, factions, associations, mergers, treaties, and unions that cause the mightiest issues.

It may be that nothing exists individually, all by itself, and that aspects appearing individually are actually constellations of relationships.

Look up at the clear night sky and you will be overwhelmed less by individual stars than by the grandeur of galaxies. The atoms in your computer are not individuals, at their very core, but teams of subatomic particles that share an affinity for one another. In other words, they are bands of relationships.

After a long day, afternoon traffic speeds before me into the growing dusk as my fellow commuters and I drive home in this holiday season. Stopped at a light, I reflect: Aren’t we always trying to find the way “home?”

The idea is embedded in our souls. Home is where the real chicken soup is. With reverence, we journey to the homes of our childhood. Norman Rockwell’s paintings – our iconic images of the American dream – hold out the promise of peace, security, and love of home.

A promised new home in America has beckoned generations of “homeless, tempest-tossed” immigrants. In America’s pastime, baseball, the high point is the run to home plate. Even trained pigeons and Lassie always come home.

A promised new home in America has beckoned generations of “homeless, tempest-tossed” immigrants. In America’s pastime, baseball, the high point is the run to home plate.

Your Special Power

Would you do something today? Take a moment – even if just a brief pause – to consider the power of gratitude. Doing so is far more important that most people imagine. And it’s easier, too.

A well-developed sense of gratitude focuses on the present while it releases the past and entrusts the future to God. Being grateful for the goodness expressed in our lives today is a choice, a decision we can each make.

Never try to withhold gratitude until everything is OK in our lives and in the world, or until some personal goal is met. That’s a stage unlikely ever to be reached.

Instead, work on developing a “muscle” of gratitude for life as it is now, rough spots and all – just as you would exercise any other muscle.

A clear way to start is to make lists of the good people, wonderful things, and fortunate circumstances in your life.

Consider gratitude to be like a light in the dark. Flipping a light switch doesn’t add new things to your world. It only illuminates what’s already there.

TIME ENOUGH

In response to last week’s column, “Un-Stress,” a reader emailed: “But I don’t have time enough to be I the present moment. Help?”

Maybe you can identify with that reader’s dilemma. It’s how I felt until I made an important discovery about myself: Finding “time enough” would require me to develop patience.

Before that realization, I was always anxious about some long to-do list that pushed me to rush, loose patience with circumstances, view people’s needs (including my own) as impediments to progress.

And the prize for actually completing one of my numerous to-do lists? Nothing more than another to-do list, with its own set of urgent-seeming tasks.

This way of setting priorities kept me always looking ahead, feeling frustrated that I never fully accomplished my goals.

PING!

Lucky for me, I never have to venture far down the technology superhighway alone. My college-age grandkids and my tech-minded friends are willing to gently Sherpa me along that (sometimes steep) path.

I depend on them to keep my computer and me on the safe side of the leading edge — that’s a whole lot better than stumbling down that slope by myself. In the process, I get a desk-side seat to their fearless view of new applications. And I marvel at it.

Be A Mentor

It’s that time again. Summer is winding down and back-to-school rituals are underway.

From registering for the right classes to shopping for the perfect fashions, parents are depending on last-minute to-do lists to provide sons and daughters with the confidence to succeed socially and scholastically.

But no matter how smartly chosen, these steps fall short of their loftiest goals.

There is one factor that can help youngsters succeed at school (and elsewhere), and that’s a deepened awareness of their innate value. The good news? This gift doesn’t require cash outlay. The challenge? It may not be quick to achieve.

You can help the young people in your life – sons and daughters, grandchildren, nieces and nephews, students, friends and neighbors — build positive self-identities through confidence and balanced personal esteem.

As a first step, leave behind the cultural norm that youngsters are ego driven. Instead, focus on the spiritual nature and the potential for good always present within them.

Jesus, the Master Teacher, laid the foundation for this outlook when he said, “You…are in me and I am in you.” John 17:21

Circles of Community

If the past months of money stress have brought us any lessons, perhaps one of the most important is: For our community to thrive, we must depend on one another – a lot.

Are you plugged into the new electronic networks? It’s fun to make “friends” in the virtual world, even with people we’re unlikely to ever meet.

But HERE is where we live, in our real communities.

Do you sometimes feel separate, like you’re not a part of lives going on around you? Take a look around – at your neighbors, your church, your local stores, the nearby schools. Some of those people and groups are struggling.

Ask how you can help with a project being neglected for lack of funds.

At your church or neighborhood school, maybe you can lend a hand in the office or gardens. If you’re a parent, perhaps you and your children can host other families on a low-cost summer outing.

You will be surprised at the fruits of your investment. Not only will other people benefit, but even a brief participation will also bring you a sense of belonging.

My sister recently gave me an upfront view of the process. For her college study in Community Relations, Teri hosted a block party to nurture ties in her own Cypress neighborhood.


 

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.—Hebrews 11:1

The writer of Genesis draws a picture of the Spirit of God as the wind, “moving over the face of the waters.” (Genesis 1:2) You can’t see it, it is powerful and it moves wherever it will.

 Jesus understood this and said, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8)

 This leads me to consider windmills. They have a cooperative relationship with the wind. Windmills pump water from the ground; turn grain to flour; generate electricity. The wind empowers the windmill.

Are we the same? Just as the wind enables the windmill’s purpose, Spirit enables the fulfillment of our lives – in ways large and small.

 Are we relying on “evidence of things not seen” when we flip a light switch in a dark room, gas up a car before a journey, or launch an email to a friend?

Few of us live lives intimately connected with the earth and its circle of seasons the ways our ancestors did. But even in these modern times, the agrarian calendar remains deeply embedded in our consciousness and culture.

Thanksgiving, for me, is a special time to reflect on these roots.

The holiday honors the season that farmers gathered crops and stored the food that would carry their communities through the uncertainties of winter. This was when they processed the harvest and sorted its seeds for future planting. It was when they gave thanks for the abundance their nurturing had produced.

And it was this season, more than any other, that invited our forbearers to draw faith in the cycles of life on the land and to be certain of their place in them.

The Bible gives us many images of planting and harvesting.

Jesus said: “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there, and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.’”

Emergence

For months, a tedious stop-and-go drive to work frustrated my friend Jim. Then one day his CD player beckoned, and it wasn’t long before Jim’s perception started to change.

Instead of dreading that long commute now, he finds himself looking forward to his favorite music and inspirational recordings.

His blood pressure dropped and his work performance even improved, all because Jim turned his immediate environment into a playground — just as philosopher Eric Hoffer described: “It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal setting for the unfolding of his capacities and talents.”

Jim puts it his own way: “Stop seeing the journey as empty. Instead, have fun on the road.”

If you want new things to happen for you, then try putting your world together in a new way. It is eye opening how much a new arrangement of existing elements can transform everyday life.

Un-Stress

Can’t you almost see the stress building? It happens every year as the months wind to a close. But I think the feeling this year is a bit more intense than usual.

Perhaps it’s because money’s been scarce or the summer’s been extra hot, so lots of home and workplace projects never got attention until now. Maybe you are among those planning to finally hunker down with a neglected to-do list.

And once you do that, you remember that Christmas and other busy end-of-year holidays are just a couple of calendar pages away.

Along the Gulf Coast, many of us keep an eye on the Atlantic this time of year. It’s fascinating to follow the paths of tropical storms and guess which might build into hurricanes bound for our part of the world.

But take a bigger view, and you’ll see something else remarkable. In the vibrant images of satellite photographs and Doppler radar, we are treated to displays of the great circulation of energy that circles our globe.

Global weather systems — all those high and low pressure systems, evaporation and precipitation, warm fronts and cold fronts — constantly move energy around the earth. That energy cleanses, restores, and nurtures the thin layer of atmosphere that sustains us.

Once you notice this vast circulation, you can appreciate its significance. Without it, the world would be lifeless. The wind would never blow, the rain would never fall, every continent would be desert, the seas would be stagnant.   

The concept is true for us, too. In our lives we are given a choice. We can either live in a state of circulation or we can stagnate.

GOOD STUFF!

Many times my Mom would question Dad, “What are you going to do with all that stuff in the garage?” Dad would smile and say, “You’ll see.”

The drawers and shelves in the garage (his workshop) overflowed with nuts, bolts, screws, odd pieces of wood, car parts, scraps of metal. He was a master at collecting.

The time always came when an item needed fixin’. Into the garage he would disappear, and before long, with an impish grin, he would reappear with the item repaired with some of his stuff. With relish he would say, “Well, what do you think?”

Pondering this, I realize that one of the great principles of innovation is to work with what is already available.

In other words, instead of thinking of what we lack, we can choose to focus on what we already have—what is at hand—and creatively build on it. Dad understood this, and something deep inside of us understands this too.

After all, we have had these experiences since birth. Learning to speak came from babbling, walking from crawling, high school from grade school, our jobs from our talents—and more.

Look Anew

Lift your eyes for a moment and watch an airplane etch its way across the sky. There goes one of the great creative accomplishments of humankind. That magnificent machine was once only a vision in the minds of designers – talented people who can see the potential of an airplane in the metals, plastics, oil, and other raw materials. This is the gift of creativity, the transformer of life’s raw materials.

In the imaginations of some people, sand at the beach makes castles. In the minds of others, sand’s silica is a building block of integrated circuits in your computer. It’s all in how you see it.

Creativity can be electrifying or joyful.Who hasn’t felt moved by the ancient cave paintings of Lascaux, France? Who hasn’t smiled at a refrigerator display of art made by little hands dipped in finger paints?

It was the end of a long journey with many delays, cranky children on the flight, and a lost piece of luggage. I departed baggage claim, feeling weary as I stepped outside to the area for arriving passengers. Ah! Simmering Houston.

Almost immediately, my son-in-law pulled up to the curb and Zach, my 7-year-old grandson bounced out giving his ear-to-ear signature smile, presenting me a pink carnation, and saying “Welcome home, Grandma!”

Despite my fatigue, I mirrored his smile, grinned all the way home, and kept the joy of that moment tucked into my heart. Such a welcome is capable of diffusing any lingering travel concerns or stress.

As I recall this, I am thinking that welcoming is a spiritual gift that we give each other. We shake hands, place welcome mats at our doors, offer hugs to our friends.