Have you ever asked yourself this question? I think a more accurate question might be, “What good do I bring to the world because of my religious beliefs and practices?”

The world is full of people who attend church, read their Bibles, pray, and profess to be Christians. I don’t know much about other religions, so I will focus on Christianity in this blog post.

As spiritual people, we owe it to our Creator and to others to make it count. Ask yourself this question, too: “Why am I a Christian?” I remember once in an adult Sunday school class discussing the concept of grace. We talked about how Christ has done what it takes for us to be free. Christ has taken care of our sin problem. Our part is to stay connected with the Holy Spirit so that we come to emulate Christ on earth. One person in the class suggested that everyone will go to Heaven. They argued that our loving God would not send people to Hell. Another person in the class responded to this by asking, “Well, if Christ has taken care of the sin problem and all of us are going to Heaven, why am I attending church and trying to be good?”

This is a fair question I suppose. Why are we going to church and talking about Christ to others and praying? Is it because we are trying to earn our place in heaven? Is it because we are trying to be good? Is it because we are afraid we will go to hell when we die?It seems that we (humans since the beginning of time) get off track so easily when it comes to spiritual matters. We follow a template that we think is good. We do things that we think are appropriate to demonstrate that we are Christians. But it is necessary to open our hearts and our minds to growth and change. Hopefully you don’t want to stay the same your whole life, do you? It is healthy to remain open to new ideas and remain open to ways that your spiritual beliefs can actually make this world a better place.

I’ve spent many years recovering from alcoholic dysfunction (my own dysfunction and my loved ones’ dysfunction). The experts in addiction recovery all agree that the addict’s development is arrested at whatever age they begin using drugs and/or alcohol regularly. For example, a 35-year-old woman who started using drugs and alcohol when she was 14 years old remains that age mentally and emotionally even though she lives in an adult body. She may have two or three children of her own, but this alone doesn’t make her an adult. She’s actually still operating as a teenager because her emotional growth stopped at age 14 because of her use of drugs and alcohol as a coping mechanism. It will take lots of work in order for her to unlock the ability for maturity and growth in her life. Most likely it will take a combination of things like therapy, working a 12-step program, and the willingness to examine and process painful trauma from the past. Never believe the lie that time will heal your grief. Time alone cannot do this. It takes much work and honesty to recover from the wounds and choices from the past.

As spiritual people, I want to challenge you to ask yourself these questions. Dig deep. What good is your religion?

It is amazing to me that we don’t have more daily conflict than we do considering how much we all view other people based on our own experiences and projections upon others. It is easy to pass judgment on a situation that we THINK we understand but rarely do. We pass judgment on so many things; for example, when we go to the grocery and we notice that the lines are long to check out, we quickly think, “Well, they need to get more cashiers up here ASAP!” Or perhaps we see road construction that is inconvenient for us and we think, “They shouldn’t be doing this right now. They need to do it when people aren’t trying to get to work.” Or we might pass someone in the hallway at school and they don’t smile at us and we think, “She is rude and snobby.”
As humans, we are extremely selfish in so many ways. We tend to make everything about us when, in fact, very little is actually about us. I have worked hard on this very subject and have found that kindness is ALWAYS the right thing. If you are ever wondering how to respond in a situation, do the kind thing and I promise you will NOT be wrong.

I have found that kindness is like a magical invisible force that seems to change the atmosphere of almost anything. I have experimented with it in many situations over the years. It is next to impossible to choose kindness if you are focused on what you think another person SHOULD be doing.

Have you heard the story of the rowdy children on the train? It was a Sunday morning and folks were enjoying a quiet and peaceful commute into the city. Some were reading the newspaper. Others were napping. Some were reading or chatting with a friend. At the next stop, a man and his six children climbed aboard the train and chaos ensued. The man had obviously lost control of these kids. They were running up and down the aisles. Two of the boys were were wrestling in one of the seats. Another child was climbing from one seat to another. The travelers were irritated at the disturbance and the lack of discipline. This scene continued for several more minutes. Finally, one of the passengers could stay silent no more. Her blood pressure was elevated from the rowdy behavior of these awful children. She approached the father and said, “Sir. This is a public train. We would all appreciate it if you would make your children sit quietly like they should be.”

The father looked up at her. He looked somewhat dazed. His eyes were bloodshot and his face looked as if it had not been shaved in a couple of days. After a few seconds, he said, “Oh, you are right. I’m sorry. We just came from the hospital. My wife passed away and we are not quite ourselves right now.”

This new information caused a paradigm shift for the woman. She was no longer judging the situation based on what she THOUGHT was happening. She now knew more about the real situation and was able to cut the family some slack.

Try this: assume the best in every person you encounter today. If someone is rude, try viewing them as shy. If someone is tailgating you in traffic, assume that they are headed to a funeral and they are running late. Do whatever it takes to remove judgment from your view of the person. Kindness will always make your day better. Give it a try.

 

This morning at work, I was all set to eat peanut butter toast for breakfast, but I left the peanut butter at home. I ended up toasting the bread and dunking it in my coffee instead. The aroma and flavor of the coffee and toast triggered a 20-year-old memory. During 1996 and 1997, I saved money for many months to take the biggest trip of my life: a nine-week European trip through The New Czech Republic, Italy, France, and the United Kingdom. To build up savings for the trip, I lived frugally, volunteered for any available overtime at the law firm where I worked, babysat, and did any other odd jobs I could to scrape together dollars.

I left in September and I brought only the bare minimum – packing everything in a large backpack. My biggest investments were the backpack itself and a good pair of hiking boots. Looking back on it now, I realize that I needed to prove to myself that I was capable of independence and autonomy. I was 33 at the time. The European adventure was the best decision I’ve ever made.

In one of the many youth hostels where I stayed in Europe, I had arrived after dinner time the night before and had showered and laid down in the lower bunk of my assigned sleeping quarters. Towers of bunk beds full of young women from Australia, Germany, France, and Spain filled the large room. I was tired and didn’t talk to anyone. I drifted off to sleep listening to George Michael on my Walkman headphones.

The next morning, we all packed up our gear and went through the breakfast line in the hostel’s kitchen/dining hall . Imagine a no-frills cafeteria line where you push your tray along metal bars and view the food from behind glass. This particular breakfast was a baguette and hot chocolate/coffee. The milky coffee was steaming and was served in a huge mug that looked more like a cereal bowl than a coffee mug. We all sat around dunking our bread into the mugs of steaming milky coffee and discussed our travel adventures. It was such a simple thing, but it’s one of my favorite memories.

It’s natural to want to escape the pain of something uncomfortable: a headache, housework, an angry co-worker, an unpleasant customer. We might try to avoid these things by putting them out of our minds or avoiding them. We do the same thing with uncomfortable emotions. To escape emotional pain we do things like smoke cigarettes, eat too much, shop outside of what we can afford, drink too much, and a number of other things in an attempt to escape the pain. The problem with this is that the unprocessed emotional pain is just that: unprocessed. And so it sits there and waits for just the right moment to grab our attention. Emotional pain is not going away just because we ignore it or just because we say things like, “Just focus on the positive,” or “Be happy.” I’m not saying we shouldn’t focus on the positive. We definitely need to count our blessings and be grateful for the good things in our lives every single day. What I’m saying is that doing so should never take the place of proper grieving or processing of painful events. Maybe it is a very old pain from when you were a small child. Maybe it is a pain from last year when you were fired from a job. Maybe your life-long dream of becoming a professional baseball player is now out of your reach and you are forced to face the reality that you will not get to have the thing you have dreamed of your whole life.

Life is painful. I don’t like the fact very much that I don’t get to be a rock star like Katy Perry. That’s not a joke. My entire life I thought that I would end up on stage, touring the world singing most every night and living on a tour bus. The problem with my dream is that I didn’t set specific goals for it. I was naive. I thought “it would just happen.” And this realization was and is painful for me.

Anyway, that’s not the point of this blog post. The point of this blog post is that we all have hurt. The hurt will never lessen or become a non-issue until we look at it, sit with it, and process it. Sometimes it takes months or years in therapy to process pain. Some events may be able to be processed in as little as a few visits with a therapist. You may also learn techniques and coping skills to process future pain. There is no “normal” for the timing. Another person might find himself or herself in jail because they’ve wrecked their car and are facing DUI charges because they drink to “medicate” emotional pain. Maybe divorce is the catalyst that propels a person into therapy or into a 12-step recovery program.

Depending on how emotionally sensitive you are, some things may bother you that don’t bother others. I sometimes have to give myself permission to feel unhappy when I’m trying to process disappointments. I find emotional pain extremely uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s hard to breath and my chest feels heavy with emotion yuckiness. I hate the feeling! It hurts! But I have to remind myself that I cannot avoid the pain. I tried that for many years and it didn’t work. I have to remind myself that I must feel my feelings. I must process them. I must sit in them and move through them and them through me. It cannot be avoided. Emotional pain does not go away simply because we think we are ignoring it.

Whatever your hurt, don’t try to quiet it by saying, “Well, I’m just going to try to be positive.” You can’t suffocate unprocessed grief or trauma. If you have unprocessed pain, please take it seriously and contact a therapist you trust to help you through the unpacking process of facing the pain and making some kind of peace with it. If you love someone who drinks too much, get yourself to an Al-Anon meeting. If you drink too much, get yourself to an AA meeting. Don’t ignore your wounded self. She/he needs you.

I love this article! Enjoy. Let me know what you think.

Decisions We Regret

As a writer, I do a lot of quiet observing. There’s a gentleman I call Tupperware Man who works at the local grocery in my town. He may end up as a future character in a story I write. He’s probably in his 50s. He brings his own Tupperware container to the high school basketball games. He buys food at the concession stand, but then he puts it in his Tupperware container and heads back to the stands where he eats his meal and watches the game. I noticed him about five years ago and I always check to see if he has his container when I see him at the games. He always does. You can’t make these types of observations if you’re always talking. Here are some thought-provoking quotes about quiet.

• Quiet people notice everything.
• Speak only if it improves the silence.
• The quieter you become, the more you can hear.
• Never assume that loud is strong and quiet is weak.
• Quiet the mind and the soul will speak.
• Everything in your head doesn’t need to be said.
• Just because I am quiet does not mean I am not a force to be reckoned with.