Archive for category Say Something Nice

Everyone Needs Encouragement – Day1.org

Wednesday August 17, 2022

Day1
Organization: Alliance for Christian Media
Denomination: n/a

“Everyone needs encouragement.” My friend, Dr. Monty Knight, said as we rode to lunch. Dr. Arthur Caliandro, late pastor of Marble Collegiate Church, said, “Be kinder than you think it necessary to be. The other person needs it more than you know.” The Bible says, “Encourage one another and build each other up just as in fact you are doing” 1Thessalonians 5: 11. (NIV)

Our families, friends and neighbors are hurting. They are struggling. After two years of the Coved virus, isolation, the difficulty of obtaining supplies, school and drive-by shootings and now inflation have converged to take the fight out of so many.

The divisive political climate has had a negative effect on our trust in some of our most cherished institutions. The Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe vs. Wade has only added fuel to the fire. We must find a way to lift each other up.

Decades ago when I was a senior in high school, I was walking home from school. A prominent woman in our small town stopped her car beside me and said, “I like your poem in the school paper today.” Here was encouragement from an unexpected source. Obviously it had an important influence on my life because I remember it all these years later. She could have driven on by, but she didn’t. She stopped and encouraged a young boy.

We never know how far our words will go or the power they carry. For many years I wrote a weekly blog, “Thankful Thursday.” Each week I featured a person for whom I was grateful and encouraged others to thank those who are important to her or him. I could not have predicted the impact. Over and over again the subject of one of those blogs contacted me to say, “How could you have known how badly I needed your words of encouragement?”

Just this morning a sales associate of a major company across the country from me said. “I have had a good day. I haven’t encountered a rude or mean customer all morning.” How sad when we remember the days when someone was not mean or rude to us. Sixty years ago, a priest told my friend that her prayer of confession was unacceptable because, “You forgot the right way to end your prayer.” It was years before she returned to the confessional booth.

Closer to home, my late wife was discouraged from an art career by a father who said, “That’s a hobby not a profession.” She longed for words of encouragement from the minister father she idolized, but they never came. Consequently she would not tell you about her paintings unless you knew to ask. She was the most talented person I have known. I was reminded of her story this week’ There is an art show in my building. All the artists are senior citizens. A retired dentist said to me, “I never told anyone about my paintings. I thought I was not good enough. It is something I did after I got home from the office at night.” His work is magnificent.

In 2002 Marlo Thomas released a wonderful book, The Right Word at the Right Time, in which she recounts the stories of 101 people who were encouraged or discouraged by the words spoken to them. Muhammad Ali was told by his elementary school teacher, “You ain’t never gonna be nuthin’.” What a terrible thing to say to a child.

My second wife grew up under the most horrific circumstances with constant discouragement from her parents. Her seventh grade teacher, in contrast to the one Ali had, took notice of her work and determination. One day she announced to the class, “Carol is going to be a teacher.” That is all the encouragement Carol needed. She retired after 28 years as a very successful teacher. She had three completely new computer labs during her career. She is the only person I know who received more money in a grant than she requested. Scores of young people have a better chance of success because a 7th grade teacher encouraged Carol to become a teacher.

The scriptures are right. “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.”
– Proverbs 25: 11-13.

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So…How Do You Heal? Rev. Susan Sparks: Madison Ave. Baptist Church: NYC

Among many things, I find healing in the stars. And specifically, the spectacular images from the James Webb telescope like the “Cartwheel Galaxy” (above) published just this week. Those images bring me perspective — a sense of belonging to something bigger than our stressful, angst-filled world.

The stars are our old ones, our wise ones, for we as human beings carry their genetic imprint. Joni Mitchell sang the famous lyrics “we are stardust,” and as it turns out, she’s right.
Literally.
Our human bodies are made of remnants of stars and massive explosions in the galaxies. Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, and sulfur—most of the materials that we’re made of—come out of the star dust kicked off by those explosions and scattered across the universe. As Astrophysicist Karel Schrijver explained in National Geographic, “We have stuff in us as old as the universe.”

We have much to learn from the heavens. In fact, the stars actually share the secret to life. (Brace yourself—a liberal arts major is about to explain physics . . .)
There are basically two stages to the life of a star. The first stage is when a star is born. As gravity begins to pull gases towards a center core, the temperature begins to rise, and eventually, the density of the gases causes a nuclear reaction. It’s then that the star begins to shine, drawing energy toward the light, to its core, then radiating that light back out into the galaxy.

This can go on for billions of years until we come to the second stage, when the star’s center can no longer hold. Because the star has too little fuel left to maintain its core temperature, its light goes out and it collapses under its own weight, drawing everything around it into a dark abyss.

Tell me that doesn’t sound familiar. Sometimes we draw our energy toward the light and reflect its warmth to all around us. Other times, we have lost all fuel; our light goes out and we collapse, emotionally or otherwise, into a dark abyss.

These days, it’s easy to find ourselves in that abyss. And like the stars, the only thing between a heart that draws in the light and a heart that collapses into a black hole is a strong center that can hold.

Sadly, we tend to put all kinds of crazy things at our center that weaken our core, such as ego, anger, status, stuff, and other people. Inevitably, there comes a time when these things can’t hold anymore. The latch on your designer purse will eventually break. Human beings let us down. Botox lasts for only three months (or so I’ve heard). Like a dying star, we begin to collapse into the darkness, and our light goes out.

Which brings us to the secret of life—we must find a center that will hold.

We need look no further than the scriptures to locate that strong center. Consider Isaiah 40:31:“But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles.”

What do you have at the center of your life?

Is it strong enough to hold you through the good times and the bad?

If your light is starting to go out, get a little starstruck. Find a place where you can look up into the heavens. Or just Google “Webb telescope” and enjoy the images of those incredible galaxies. Then, remember the creator of those stars — the ultimate center that can hold. It is through that true center that you, too, can hold strong in the hardest times, radiating light and warmth to all creation.

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Begin Retirement with a Year of Jubilee by Rev. Dr. Paul Bailey*

August 3, 2022
I was under the impression that ancient Israel never actually practiced a Year of Jubilee, but I think I just had one. It was the first year of my retirement. After over 40 years of pastoral ministry, a friend suggested that I not jump into any new commitments. I imagined boredom, but I found that the tasks of the Year of Jubilee described in Leviticus 25 overlapped remarkably with the transition to retirement.

The first time I heard the popular concept of life in thirds was from Leonard Sweet at a conference at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School in 2016. The first third of life is growing up. Adult children may come home. Marriage and career goals finally settle in around age 30. The second third of life is adulthood, when you make your mark on the world with career and relationships. You contribute. Then you enter your 60s and you have another third of your life ahead. I suggest that before you jump in, consider a Year of Jubilee.

Leviticus 25 gives the most detailed description of that 50th year when Jubilee, the ram’s horn, is blown and “…you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty…” (25:10). It was intended to be a time of restoration and freedom. Debts were to be canceled. People returned to their ancestral homes. You rested from the work, not to be idle but to be holy. Consider how those tasks correspond with a transition to retirement.

Letting go

In Leviticus 25, we learn that all debts were forgiven. It might be nice to be financially debt free in retirement, but we may carry debts we owe to spouses, families, and even ourselves.

I saw my doctor not long after retiring, and I teased that maybe I should go back to work because I didn’t seem to have these health problems when I was employed. He gently suggested that maybe my work was covering up symptoms I was ignoring. I had health debts to address.

There are spiritual, emotional, and professional debts. My career and work seemed unfinished when I retired. It felt like I had run the race but not completed the course. It took a year of Jubilee to work on getting free of that debt, reviewing and celebrating my life’s journey.

In “The Gift of Years,” Joan Chittister wrote “…Regret is a temptation. It entices us to lust for what never was in the past rather than to bring new energy to our changing present. It is a misuse of the aging process. One of the functions—one of the gifts—of aging is to become comfortable with the self we are, rather than to mourn what we are not.”[i]

For the ancient Hebrews, the year of Jubilee was not meant to be a long planning session for the future, nor a long break only to return to the past. It was to make them holy. They were different. Their world was different. When retirement comes, take a Year of Jubilee.

During Jubilee, I had to let go of stuff, too. Books needed to go even though I could tell you the story and people connected to each one. I have a cross that a child made for me, a record player that doesn’t work with scores of Christian records that kept my faith alive. Others see junk, but those things are my life. I realized I held on to some of them out of a sense of indebtedness to those who gave them. I can choose to let go of them and do it with respect. M. Craig Barnes, in “A Diary of a Pastor’s Soul,” described creating a Wall of Witnesses, pictures of family and influencers in his Christian life.[i] There are also pictures of stuff on my wall, now.

Ancestral home

The Year of Jubilee was a time to reconnect with your roots. “…you shall return, every one of you to your family.” (25:10) The Hebrew people would unite with family members and share family stories that needed to be passed down, especially from those advanced in years. The act of returning to the ancestral home inevitably would have created times for questions.

Retirement meant I was the repository of the family history. I recorded stories, especially those that told of God’s faithfulness. I asked questions, especially of the elders. And maybe more importantly, the Year of Jubilee was a time to record my story.

Rest

It was a year for the land to rest (25:4), and consequently, for the people too. Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible’s note on Jubilee says, “The Lord frees his people not for unbroken idleness, but for the redirection of life towards [God’s self].”[ii]

Rest may involve keeping a journal for your thoughts, reading, spending time outdoors, trying new things, meeting new people, if and when you want. Better yet, listen to what God wants to tell you rather than what others want you to do. Not doing is a way for the new to enter in.

Spiritual renewal

People in Jubilee also had to depend on the Lord to provide what they needed to live, “…to eat only what the field itself produces” (25:12). The year was a test of faith, for both the Hebrews and me. Parker Palmer refers to functional atheism as “the belief that the ultimate responsibility for everything rests with us.”[iii] Spiritual renewal begins with rejecting that lie. More religious activity had become a way to appear spiritual and avoid God.

I allowed God to speak in someone else’s sermon. My wife and I started waking up to Father Mike’s Bible in a Year podcast, listening to Scripture in new ways. I posted questions for meditation, like Jesus’ healing question: “What do you want me [Jesus] to do for you?” (Mark 10:51). As the year went on, I could finally hear God telling me again what I had heard so personally, so long ago: “I know your name and I love you.” It was how my faith began.

A fresh start

When people ask me about retirement now, I tell them I finished my year of Jubilee and I am open for new things. For the Hebrews, the year was not meant to be a long planning session for the future, nor a long break only to return to the past. It was to make them holy (25:12). They were different. Their world was different. When retirement comes, take a Year of Jubilee.

*Rev. Dr. Paul Bailey retired a year ago from the Eastwood Baptist Church in Syracuse, NY. In addition to over 40 years of pastoral ministry, he was an adjunct instructor in Communications at Onondaga Community College for 15 years.

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Are We Listening? Pat Took” goodfaithmedia

“Hello”, I say, looking down at the bundle in my arms. The baby peers up with squiffy eyes, straining to discern where the sound is coming from and what it might mean. In this overwhelming need to communicate we reflect the image of the God who is Word, the God who speaks life.

Three years later the little girl wakes up chattering and goes to bed without pausing for breath. Listening has become talking in the drive to uncover meaning. And from that early reversal we seem set to find speaking both more congenial and considerably easier than listening. This is not surprising, since what I have to say is already within my head, within my mind, awaiting the opportunity for articulation, whilst what you have to say requires a pause in my thoughts and speech, a journey outwards on my part to discover your meaning. Our instinctive desire to communicate has become problematic. We have become curved in on ourselves and struggle to step generously over our threshold to give proper attention to someone else. We need God’s help to relearn the art of listening, but we must decide to do this, we must make the effort to do this, for the sake of ourselves and of each other, for the sake of the church and of the Kingdom.

We must listen for our own sake. No-one’s life is long enough to acquire, simply by our own discovery, the knowledge and experience we need – we depend on the wisdom of those who have gone before. Our wellbeing, perhaps our survival, depends on our paying attention to accumulated and inherited knowledge. This requires a degree of humility in those who grow up so much more technically skilled than their elders. They have to discern that age brings a different kind of wisdom – a wisdom worth listening to. It also carries a responsibility to courtesy and love in those who are older, to listen to and learn the shape and pattern of life as it is experienced by this generation, which is so different from that which shaped us, and to discover new knowledge and new wisdom. What if that new wisdom challenges, undermines ideas we have held sacred, principles we hold dear? Perhaps at that point the shutters come down. But thoughtful discussion with those who think differently enables our own perspective to be clarified, or changed. To be genuinely open to the new and the different we need not just humility but also courage, generosity and confidence. The conversation among us on issues of gender has demonstrated the difficulty and the fruitfulness of this. In the voyage into understanding I need to listen to all the voices, the dissonant ones, the strange ones, the harmonious ones, allowing myself to glean truth wherever it is to be found, to be enriched, to have my heart expanded and my mind broadened by them all.

And then there is you. To listen seriously to you is a proper honouring of the debt I owe to love and to humanity. It requires that I should set myself aside, my opinions, my experiences, and pay attention to what you have to say, to who you are.  When this self-forgetting does not take place, conversation becomes a fraud, communication self-enclosed, impervious, fruitless as two people talk past each other in a kind of concurrent monologue – two voices speaking and no-one listening.

And just as we are called to speak the truth in love, so listening for the truth also requires love, to look for the kernel of what the other is attempting to convey – to look for the best within that. Simply as a human being I am obliged to pay attention to you because you need to be heard. And I too, needing to be heard, have a right to expect you to listen, as a matter of humanity and love. And very occasionally, with a proper reticence and care, we may be called to speak for God into the situation of someone else’s life. Within the Christian community we have the gift of intentional and holy listening: confession. Many of us have known what it is to hear someone pour out the grief and distress, the regrets and hopes of their life, and listening with the greatest care to gather up those broken fragments before God in prayer. And we have seen that person go on their way liberated and restored simply for having been heard – heard by God – heard by us. The therapeutic power of being heard is widely appreciated: the awareness of the presence of God brings hope and power to such conversations.

Above all, for the sake of the Kingdom, we need to listen for the voice of God. And those most careful in listening to each other will have the greatest facility for hearing God. That God speaks, and that his speech is personal, is the testimony of all the faithful. Most often we hear him in the words, the voice, perhaps the action of another person. Frequently it is through those who are closest, family, colleagues and friends. We must pay attention even to the most familiar because it may be God who is speaking in this familiar tone. The one who speaks in Scripture and preaching and worship, through mentors and spiritual friendships and all the wealth of the Christian tradition speaks also through the nine-to-five mundane experiences of our daily lives. But are we listening?

The difficulty we have in listening is a particular problem for Baptists who are governed by community discernment. We aim to discern together the mind of Christ. Pointless for those who come to the meeting already knowing Christ’s mind, fixed already in their own opinion. Difficult when our agendas of self-aggrandisement and success run counter to the teachings of Christ, when fundamentally we do not want to know his will. Only by listening to each other within the company of pilgrims will we learn what tones are recognisably his – those that call us forward out of ourselves into demonstrations of love, into that which is generous, grace-full, hopeful. Every church meeting opens up the possibility of further conversion to the ways and priorities of Christ, provided we are listening – listening to the least significant, the least articulate, the least sane, in the knowledge that they too might be speaking with the voice of Christ.

In the stillness of the night,
I listen.
Only footsteps and shouts of the guards,…
Brother, we seek and call for thee!
Brother, do you hear me?

Voices in the Night  Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1945

*Pat Took is a former Team Leader of the London Baptist Association, and was Baptist Union President 2011-12

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