I listened to a variety of people being interviewed on how and when they pray and what happens when they pray. Muslims, agnostics, Christians, and some that aren’t even sure what they consider themselves…but they pray.
There were a few themes that developed:
People pray because they want to…almost feel a natural compulsion to communicate with Power beyond them. Even if they don’t follow a religious tradition, they pray. Even if they don’t understand what it means, what it does, or if it does anything, they pray.
Prayer changes people. People described an increased feeling of peace or contentment. They were able to acknowledge their ultimate lack of control over their life in a manner than didn’t increase stress…almost releasing them from the pressure to attempt to control the impossible. Prayer helped people’s attitudes adjust to something that felt more compassionate or understanding or kind. Praying was good for people and better prepared them to face their world
People are often ashamed that they will be “caught” praying or even to admit to another that they do pray. It seems they fear others will judge them in some way…though no one articulates why they are so shy about praying, most avoid talking about it, or try to hide when they do pray.
Seems like something that is such a powerful tool that serves an important purpose in so many peoples’ lives should be celebrated and acknowledged as a normal part of life. Many people exercise, many people enjoy reading, many people pray as part of their normal life. Should it have to be a hidden secret?
I find myself going over to The United Kingdom's The Guardian page of "24 Hours in Pictures" occasionally. The pictures are stunning...images captured within a specific day around the world. Some beautiful, some remarkable, some depicting bravery or courage or suffering. It reminds me of the global community, it helps me breath deeply and get perspective on last night's irritation because of a junior tribe member, it reminds me that the world is more than that my little world.
The world is more than that of my little world...sounds obvious...but we so often don't live like that, do we.
Reminding myself that the world is more than my little world...I think, that makes me a person better prepared to face my day.
I love this video from Kuinerrarmiut Elitnaurviat School 5th Grade class in Quinhagak, Alaska. It brings the Hallelujah Chorus alive for me all over again.
(Sorry I can't embed the video in the blog...I'm working out a few glitches and I will be able to soon)
“…the same elements that make a movie meaningful are the ones that make a life meaningful. I knew a character had to face his greatest fears. "...the same elements that make a movie meaningful are the ones that make a life meaningful. I knew a character had to face his greatest fears. That's the stuff of good story…
...most of our greatest fears are relational. It’s all that stuff about forgiveness and risking rejection and learning to love. We think stories are about getting money and security, but the truth is, it all comes down to relationship. I tried not to think about that stuff, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I knew a story was calling me. I knew I was going to have to see if my father was alive. And once you know what it takes to live a better story, you don’t have a choice. Not living a better story would be like deciding to die, deciding to walk around numb until you die, and it’s not natural to want to die.”
I’ve been continuing to slowly read through Miller’s book…looking at “story”, and it’s role in our lives. The above paragraph hits me square between the eyes…it’s a powerful one. I’m not the only one who thinks so…I’m reading it on Kindle, and 214 other people have highlighted the above section in the book.
Sometimes, when I read something, I feel “understood” by the book…like it’s said something I think or feel, but says it clearer than I’ve ever been able to think it…but when I read it, I feel like it says something that’s powerful and important, and says it better than I could have said it…although even though I haven’t said it exactly like this, it actually is something I’ve been thinking. Have I made any sense at all on this to you? ☺
So, anyways, having been a counsellor for years, and watched people struggle and triumph, argue and reconcile, take risks and feel the rewards…it feels “true”.
For example, a client will come asking for help in a particular area, say for help in not being jealous about a girlfriend’s contact with males…and we work on that area…and as we do so, growth in that area spurs on thoughts and feelings of discouragement and frustrations--and opportunity--in other areas. And a client will find themselves “walking taller” in general, or feeling “like the world is a warmer place”, having greater confidence at the workplace, and being more assertive with store clerks in ways which generate smiles and friendliness. People find themselves invited to a better story, and feel a compulsion to walk into that story, and are the richer for it. It’s risky, because it means facing “relational” fears…but the payoffs from one area make it worthwhile to try in another.
Being a counselor watching people take these risks and enjoy the fruits of entering better stories is one of the unspeakable holy perks of my role here in ways that are awe-inspiring and humbling. They challenge me to be a part of a better story too…and because I then learn, as Miller speaks of, what the better story looks like, and what it is and how it feels, I’m called out of any relational complacency I might be in…being personally numb isn’t so easy when I work with people who are experiencing the joy of living the richer story.
It is an unspeakable privilege to walk with people into their “better story” that they feel called to and thus then search for. And, as a human being witnessing relational risk around “all that stuff about forgiveness and risking rejection and learning to love”, there’s something profoundly compelling about being a witness to it. It affects me deeply as a human being, beyond providing a professional service as a therapist. There’s something incredibly life about being a therapist,that implicitly places a challenge to call me to my own “better story”.
An excerpt I especially found myself coming back to is begins as the author is chatting with a friend whose daughter is caught up with a “bad news” boyfriend, and is experimenting with drugs:
“I told him about the stuff I’d learned, that the elements of a story involve a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it. Even as I said this I wasn’t sure how it applied to his daughter…she’s just not living a very good story. She’s caught up in a bad one.”
A couple of months later I ran into Jason and asked about his daughter. “She’s better,” he said to me, smiling. And when I asked why, he told me his family was living a better story.
The night after we talked, Jason couldn’t sleep. He thought about the story his daughter was living and the role she was playing inside that story. He realized he hadn’t provided a better role for his daughter. He hadn’t mapped out a story for his family. And so his daughter had chosen another story, a story in which she was wanted, even if she was only being used. In the absence of a family story, she’d chosen a story in which there was risk and adventure, rebellion and independence. “She’s not a bad girl,” my friend said. “She was just choosing the best story available to her.”
I pictured his daughter flipping throughout the channels of life, as it were, stopping on a story that seemed most compelling at the moment, a story that offered her something, anything, because people can’t live without a story, without a role to play. “So how did you get her out of it?” I asked. And I couldn’t believe what he told me next. Jason decided to stop yelling at his daughter and instead, created a better story to invite her into. He remembered that a story involves a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.
…So, Jason invites his family to join him in building an orphanage in Mexico, an ambitious project for this average family. After initial horror from his wife, his wife (his distant wife whom he hadn’t gotten along with all that well, for a while) tells him she’s proud of him, allows it was a mistake to spring this on her, and that probably bigger mistakes would be made as they actually took on getting this orphanage built. Their daughter, very much not impressed at first, after a time suggests that they visit the orphanage as it is being built so that she can post pictures on her website.
"And you know what else, man? Jason said, “She broke up with her boyfriend last week. She had his picture on her dresser and took it down and told me he said she was too fat. “…
“…that’s done now,” Jason said, shaking his head. “No girl who plays the role of a hero dates a guy who uses her. She knows who she is. She just forgot for a little while.”
Donald Miller (bolded lines mine)
I love this idea of inviting our children to a better story. It got me thinking about what sort of story I have invited myself to be in. Do I like the plot...is the plot big enough with dream to outlast my lifetime, ones that challenge and inspire me to be more than who I am? Do I value the other players, and allow them to develop their characters in ways that grow and challenge themselves and me? Do I want to invite myself into a different story...a better story, one with greater richness?
Are you inspired by the story you have created. Is there a better story you would like to invite yourself into?
as we say goodbye to summer and approach the upcoming winter (which is never a good thing in my books),
as I continue to get used to the early rising hour that fall routine requires (I am SO not a morning person),
as I spent an hour today talking to 50 students (while I’m no longer a nervous wreck doing it, I don’t relish the loooong opportunity to potentially make a fool of myself with the next sentence I might say), and
as I take a junior tribe member to a walk in clinic (where the wait is hours long, and we wait unknown news),
I decided I would look for the little moments of joy…
This is rather in keeping with Brene Brown’s recent blog entry that talked about joy like this:
I think the beauty of twinkle lights is the perfect metaphor for joy.
Joy is not a constant. It comes in us in moments—often ordinary moments. Sometime we miss out on the bursts of joy because we’re too busy chasing down the extraordinary moments. Other times we’re so afraid of the dark that we don’t dare let ourselves enjoy the light.
A joyful life is not a floodlight of joy. That would eventually become unbearable.
I believe a joyful life is made up of joyful moments gracefully strung together by trust, gratitude and inspiration.
I’ve kept up my gratitude journal…which has me be deliberate about capturing snapshots of joy in my day. It's continued to help me shape my world...knowing I will have a chance to write in it, has me anticipating what I will say as I go about my day...I begin enjoying the entry hours before I write it.
Today’s twinkles of joy:
The smell of the roasting hotdogs and cooked onions at the hotdog stand at the Health Sciences Center…walking past that stand on my way to the car from class just had it feel like full-on-summer for a minute. The smell of BarBQ is a powerful twinkle in my mind.
mmmm mmmmmm
Remembering how the lady with a full cart let me go ahead of her with 4 items. She didn’t have to do it…and she was so friendly and nonchalant about it. (May I remember to pay this forward).
Seeing my favorite little toddler after what felt like "too long" since seeing her…and the delight I had when she gestured to my purse because she remembered… “our thing”, her and I, is to play with my iPhone’s camera…we look at ourselves in the camera, and point to noses and eyes, and generally gaze in wonder at what we see in the camera. This is her “posed smile” look which only looks painful…it’s really her scrunching up her little face into what she imagines is cute (and gosh darn it, it is)!
The chance to be bored together with my junior tribe member today while we were waiting. So often, life rushes by, and there’s little chance to hang out with little to do, and less to talk about…just hanging out, and finding some companionable peace in the quiet…sort of like sitting in a boat and fishing…except without the poles and sitting in a doctor’s office.
Did you have any moments of joy twinkling in your day?
Shawn Achor looks at the "happiness advantage"...by looking at people that are particularly successful in life satisfaction and effectiveness, he discovered that what puts a person in optimal position to be effective/happy/content. I posted a blog of him a few weeks ago...but the TEDx talk where I first saw him has now been published on YouTube. He's funny and engaging and says some very important truths.
When in reality, if I know everything about your external
world, I can only predict 10% of your long term happiness. Ninety per cent of
your long term happiness is predicted not by the external world, but by the way your brain processes the
world. If we change our formula
for happiness and success, what we can do is change the way we can then change
the way we can then affect reality.
What we found is that only 25% of job successes is predicted
by IQ. Seventy five per cent of job successes are predicted by your optimism
levels, your social supports, and your ability to see stress as a challenge
instead of as a threat.
We need to reverse the formula for happiness and success…if
you can raise somebody’s level of positivity in the present…your brain in “positive”
performs significantly better than in “negative/neutral/stressed”. Your
intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy level rises…your brain
in positive is 31% more productive than in negative/netural/stressed....
We find there are ways to train your brain to be more
positive….
This is big, folks. It gives each of us an ability to work internally to regulate our emotions, to change our perspective to one that has us feeling satisfied and content. This places us in a position to be relaxed, calm, and effective in our endeavors, taking irritations/failures/disappointments as real and important but tolerable and not overwhelming.
This spring, I came across the raw footage of this talk, watched his further videos and began reading another book that had an important impact on me, One Thousand Gifts. It further got me to thinking about the value of adopting a lifestyle posture of gratitude.
After teaching at the university for the last decade, I take
research very seriously. I like to
base my actions not only on “common sense”, but whenever possible on concrete
evidence as well. Makes for good
therapy…the development of our Feedback Enhanced Therapy has been a direct
example of that. Makes for a good
life too. So about two months ago,
I began a gratitude blog…a private blog. Don’t look for it, you won’t find it. It’s for me. More days than not, I take time in the evening
to reflect on the day, and tap out a half dozen or more things that I am
grateful for that day.
What I find has begun to happen is that as the day goes along, I’ll
notice something, and say to myself…”I’ll have to put that in the blog”, and so, in the moment, I'm finding myself grateful. I put in videos on the blog that I am grateful for,
pictures of events and people that are special to me, but more often than not,
just write out what I’m thankful for. Kindnesses people have extended to me, beauty that has caught my eye,
conversations that were meaningful. Sometimes little silly things….like the cost of cherries being such that I can eat them
everyday, or feeling the cool mist from a sprinkler as I walk by it on a
scorching day. Sometimes things that move me...like on a hard day recently, when I showed up at Starbucks with a gift card that I was wrongly convinced had money on it...I couldn't pay for my drink (and I walked there with no wallet). I asked them not to give it to me, and when they insisted, I told them I would come by the next day to pay. The barista said: "Even if you try to give me the money tomorrow, I won't take it." It was grace extended on a day that begged for a kindness.
Deliberately noting things to be grateful for has been a valuable practice that I intend to continue long
term. Recently, on a difficult
day, I found myself reviewing past entries, and was able to recall experiences I’d
forgotten about…lovely/funny/touching/profound/loving moments of life that grounded
and centred me. Didn’t take away
the troubledness I was feeling…but it fed my soul, giving me energy and
resilience to deal with a present difficult situation.
I want to be in a space that looks at life recognizing that
there is more good than not, more kindness than hatred, more generosity than
stinginess. There is not doubt
much evil in the world…trust me, I’m no Pollyanna. Being a therapist, I hear
the traumatic experiences and broken inner worlds of people daily, and I have my own disappointments and losses. But, as much as possible, I want to choose to come from an inner
perspective of quiet strength, which is calm, confident, capable and centred.
I was listening to CBC yesterday and a person being interviewed said
something to the effect of: “The news headlines tomorrow will be that 1800
people are having their Canadian citizenship revoked because of fraud. It will sound like a big horrible scary
number that will alarm people for a variety of reasons. There will be little or
nothing said about the 498 000 people who became citizens during the same
period who will happily remain Canadian citizens”. Our media and culture focuses disproportionately on
the bad and catastrophic. I choose
to focus proportionately on the good and wholesome.
On Saturday, I had a wicked headache and spent much of the
day very nauseous. I felt
awful. The next day my head was
clear, and I was pretty much back to normal. And, as I wrote in the gratitude blog that day, I was
grateful for not being sick to my stomach. And I realized I hadn’t been consciously mindful of my overall general good health in a
while. The gratitude blog had me
switch my focus away from the “tragedy” of a beautiful summer weekend day spent
ill, to the many days I am able to conduct my day completely unaware of good
health.
I haven’t got this all figured out, and don’t think by this
writing, that I’ve found a way to be eternally “happy”. It’s not at all like that. But I am thankful for the readings and
videos that have put me on the path of gratitude.
Arvid Loewen is one crazy uncle with a grandpa's heart big enough for 2000 kids.
Most of us have an uncle that we might refer to as, ahem, odd or quirky...maybe he has ear hairs inches long, or he wears the ugliest sweaters to family gatherings, or he brings smelly picked fish as his offering to the potluck.
He set off 3.5 days ago from Vancouver to see if he can cycle across Canada beating the world record of 13 days. He's been sleeping an 1.5-2.5 hours per night, and eats constantly...with KFC being a favorite because of its high calorie content that is greasy enough to slide down a throat parched from hours on the bike. He's just crossing the border from Saskatchewan into Manitoba around the time I write this.
Who would do such a thing? Why?
He does it as a fundraiser for Mully Children's Family...an orphanage in Kenya that has some really cool ways of loving kids off the streets, giving them an education and having them learn singing, karate, and trade skills along the way. They do some amazing innovative agricultural stuff that allows it to increasingly move towards a greater percentage of being self sustaining...and hired local underemployed folk to help with these projects, giving employment to the community. They have ongoing needs...and Uncle Arvid is helping fundraise.
He's a grandpa to 3 (almost 4) children...he had a great job in management at a furniture company in town...and gave it up to pursue ultramarathon cycling as a platform to raise awareness of MCF. He has a passion for these kids, and works in all sorts of ways to help fund the orphanage.
I think he's pretty cool.
The "back story" is that Arvid got into cycling cuz his knees were bad from playing soccer and so he couldn't run...cycling was a great alternative. The guy who can't run finished first in his age class in RAAM (Race Across America, the most grueling bike race in the world. I think that's pretty funny.
What's less funny is that Arvid is now having trouble walking...his hip has gone bad because of a variety of circumstances, and will be replaced in September. One leg is 2 inches shorter than the other. The doctor encourages this cycling because it will have him in good shape to recover from the surgery. He cycles in pain.
Crazy Uncle Arvid has chutzpah. Drive to make a difference. Dedication to make it happen.
There were a few themes that developed: 
