Leaving the Land of the Numb

Leaving the Land of the Numb

Guest Writer: Don Follis

In my memoir Leaving The Land of Numb—A Journey To Connect My Emotional And Spiritual Lives (Mountain Ash Press, 2023), I tell the story of how, at age 14, my first boss told me I was the only person who ever worked for him that he couldn’t teach how to do the job. To make matters worse, he was a man in our church and friends with my Dad and Mom. Neither of them ever intervened to help me make sense of what happened. For the rest of my growing-up years, I mostly avoided the man.

Years later, following seminary, I spoke at my home church one Sunday. My old boss was there, and he shook my hand afterward. “Congratulations,” he said. “I never thought you could do it.”

I went on to serve 25 years as a campus pastor at the University of Illinois and now have served 46 years in the ministry. One Sunday, as a young campus pastor, I spoke at a rural church an hour from my home. Returning home, I started smiling from ear to ear. It suddenly occurred to me that I had forgiven my first boss. As I drove through the countryside, I thought about my hurt from years ago. I began empathizing with the old fellow, whose life had been hard. He had lost his wife, and my parents told me he was in poor health. He needed my love way more than my derision.

Though I thought I had forgiven him, alone in my car that day, I felt it as never before and said, “I forgive you, old boy, and wish you all the best. May the peace of Jesus be with you.” I told the Lord I wanted to be a man committed to forgiveness for the long term, come what may in my life. 

Over decades of ministry, I have seen how forgiveness challenges seeking revenge and the need for reciprocity. Forgiveness is the one force in the world that invites us to approach people with love, giving us a desire for their well-being. That means giving up our natural inclination to protect ourselves and seeking justice on our terms. As we have received forgiveness from God, we extend the same forgiveness to others, even when it’s difficult or painful.

 Don  Follis

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Don’s memoir, available on Amazon, tells how he learned to feel his emotions, both painful and joyous. His journey took him through a teenage marriage and divorce, rejection by the church because of that divorce, the death of his son, and a new vision of the richness of the emotional life of Jesus.

Joanna https://www.joannaseibert.com/

 

Responding to the News of the Day

Buechner, Ignatius: News of the Day

“When the evening news comes on, hundreds of thousands of people all over the earth are watching it on their TV screens. There is also the news that rarely gets into the media, which is the news of each particular day of each particular one of us. Maybe there’s nothing on earth more important for us to do than sit down every evening and think it over, try to figure it out, or at least try to come to terms with it. The news of our day. It is, if nothing else, a way of saying our prayers.”—Frederick Buechner.

Buechner challenges us to spend even a fraction of the time we listen to the world news of the day dealing with the news in our own lives. 12-step groups and short courses in Christianity, such as Cursillo and Ignatian spirituality, all suggest methods for reviewing the day, giving thanks, making gratitude lists, remembering back to when we encountered God, when we harmed ourselves or others, asking for forgiveness, planning to make amends, and in essence turning our life and our will over to God one more time each evening. Those in recovery call it the 10th step. St. Ignatius calls it the Examen.  

Buechner reminds us that we should consider these exercises as prayer. It is our news of the day for God, nighttime news, and nighttime prayers.

  These nighttime prayers are more needed now than perhaps at any other time in our lives.

In due course, answers will come regarding how we will respond to the world news of the day.

                      Joanna. https://www.joannaseibert.com/

 

 

 

Trees, Roots, and Needing Praise

Nouwen: Trees, Roots, and Needing Praise

“Trees that grow tall have deep roots. Great height without great depth is dangerous. The great leaders of this world—like St. Francis, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—were all people who could live with public notoriety, influence, and power in a humble way because of their deep spiritual rootedness. Those who are deeply rooted in the love of God can enjoy human praise without being attached to it.”—Henri Nouwen in Bread for the Journey (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997).

Nouwen gives us a remarkable sign of when our connection to God is thin. When we need the praise and adoration of others, we are not “rooted” in God. Living off the recognition of others is living on the surface. Needing the favorable opinion of others is like a “stop sign.”

Stop! We are going in the wrong direction. Turn around. Go and sit or walk outdoors. Recognize that there dwells in nature something greater than ourselves. Remember that a loving God has our welfare so completely in mind that God created all this for us to care for and enjoy.

Talk to a spiritual friend. Do one of the many spiritual exercises we most often practice to reconnect to God. Reexamine your rule of life.

Reach out in love to someone else, especially someone in need. Make eye contact. Look for the light of Christ in that person. Connect the Christ in us to the Christ in the other person. These are ways our souls will extend and enlarge to nurture deeper roots.

As our roots grow in our spiritual community, we receive an extra bonus. Note in this last image how other roots begin to connect to each other and share nourishment. And so with us. As our roots grow, we connect to others in our community who support and nourish us as we do with them.

Joanna. https://www.joannaseibert.com/