Tag: faith

Back In The Game

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“The difference between winning and losing is most often not quitting.” – Walt Disney

My 83-year-old mom has returned to playing ping pong after her infamous ping pong dive where she admitted her competitive nature got the best of her common sense. When my family came over for dinner the other night, my brother asked if she was making any concessions in her game to be safer. She nodded yes and said she’s trying to keep a hand on the table while she plays for stability.

Apparently the physical therapist who’s been working with her on a sciatic issue asked the same thing. Not really convinced by her reply, he asked, “Have you ever considered just saying, ‘Good shot?’”

We all got a good laugh out of that one. It reminded me that I’ve read and seen a lot of great advice about staying in the game, whatever our game may be, lately.

From An Audience of One, the wisdom that we need to choose the path we are going to travel and stick with it. Not that other forks won’t arise in the future but that nothing good comes from wavering at the decision point too long or mourning the path not chosen.

And from WritingfromtheheartwithBrian a pep talk straight out of the Buffalo Bills locker room to be fully present. Brian rousingly writes an hearty exploration of the Bills saying, “Where else would you rather be, than right here, right now?” that reminded me to love the life I have and the path I’m on.

Finally I watched Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade again recently. In it, Indiana Jones is reading the clues from his father’s grail diary to pass the final challenge to find the grail and save his father’s life. He has to believe as he steps forward into the chasm that a path across the void will unfold. He checks his options one last time, confirms he’s in the right location, and then as he leaps, the path appears.

Decide on the path, commit to being present for it and then have faith to take the leap – it’s about as good as it gets for finding our way through this life.

I’m glad my mom has a strategy to keep safe by keeping a hand on the ping pong table. But equally as relieved she’s still in the game. It just wouldn’t be her if she just watched shots go by!

(featured photo from Pexels)

Peace is Free

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“Peace is not something you wish for; It’s something you make, Something you do, Something you are, And something you give away.” – John Lennon

The other night I made the mistake of working on my taxes before bed. After a night of tossing a turning, mulling over finances, I blearily made my way down to the family room to meditate. As I lit the candles before settling down on the cushion, I thought “At least you have enough money to buy candles.”

None of this is new – not the worrying about money in January which I’ve done every year for the more than 20 years I’ve been in business so I know from the pattern that it all works out but still worry anyway. And not the thought “At least you have enough money to buy candles.”

However, this was the first time I realized the fuller meaning of that phrase. I have always assumed that it was a reflex reminding me how much I have. But I marveled on the morning in question that what my inner voice was also telling me that my path to find peace, meaning and joy is free. It doesn’t cost me anything to stop and meditate at any or every moment.

And it was telling me that I can do that anywhere or everywhere. I can still find the calm within when the life circumstances are hard. As the quote from John Lennon reminds me, it isn’t just wishing that creates peace but it is powerful and transferable sense worth working for.

It brings to mind an Oprah Soul Sunday podcast I heard where she talked about whispers (here it is on a video of Oprah’s lifeclass). That she’s found that God, the Universe, a Higher Power talks to us in whispers. And it’s only when we don’t listen, the voice gets more insistent, a pebble upside the head and then a brick, in Oprah parlance.

So for twenty years I’ve been sweating through January as I handle the not-so-fun tasks of getting my customers to pay their invoices and to nail down commitments for the next year. This is the first where I really listened to that inner voice and was able to find my internal peace while doing so.

I’m hopeful that I’ll remember that the price of peace is free next year. And also, not to do my taxes before bedtime.

Leaps of Faith

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“Sometimes your only available transportation is a leap of faith.” – Margaret Shepard

When I was 6-months-old, and my sister and brother were 4 and 6-years-old respectively, my dad took an offer to be a pastor of the church in Manilla, Philippines. It was 1970, the Vietnam war was raging. Ferdinand Marcos was the President of the Philippines. Six months after our family moved there, there was a phony insurrection and Marcos declared Martial Law. We stayed for almost 6 more years after that.

I’ve often wondered if that gutsy move by my parents set up a pattern in us kids. Bigger than any theological belief, did they show us that leaps of faith are possible? It’s the topic of my Heart of the Matter post today. Heart Dreams That Call For Big Leaps

(featured photo from Pexels)

The Coming Radiance

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I’m not sure how many of you also followed Martha Hendricks of the White Hair Grace blog so forgive me for introducing someone you might already know. But for anyone who wasn’t, Martha was an 80-year-old blogger with non-Hodgkins lymphoma and sharing the stories of getting old gracefully. She had a lot of roles in her life. In her words, she was “professional classical singer; a Norwegian rosemaler; a pastor. And now a writer. “

I say “was” because she passed away this past August. But not before penning an incredible post that is as much about living as it is dying. So I’m reblogging this beautiful writing from an lovely woman:

whitehairgrace's avatarwhite hair grace

Dear friends, I am Martha’s eldest son posting these final words that mom felt she needed to share. She wrote this post August 12th, but didn’t publish it. My mom passed away peacefully, surrounded by her family this past Sunday, August 21st. She so loved writing this blog and sharing her life with all of you. Thank you all for the joy you gave her. She is with her beloved Dwight once again.

“Learning to be still, to be really still, and let life happen – that stillness becomes radiance.”

Morgan Freeman

My dear readers and followers – Hello again! Surprise!

When I wrote my last blog in May and closed out my White Hair Grace page, I thought that my work of seeking out the miracles of grace had reached a kind of natural conclusion. Of course, the best of intentions meet up with life’s larger plans, and here…

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The Magic Kingdom

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“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” – W. B. Yeats

I watch a lot of Disney movies these days and I’ve noticed there is always a pause before the magic kicks in and works. Like in Beauty and the Beast, Belle comes back to the castle and the Beast is fighting off Gaston and is gravely injured. Belle goes to him on the terrace and says, “I love you” just as the last petal falls from the flower that held the magic of the curse that turned him into a beast.

Everyone thinks its too late and Belle is crying over his crumpled form…until the magic lifts him up and transforms him into back into a prince.

As I notice the pattern, it makes me think about magic in our lives – and that the pause is of indeterminate length and certainly of a length that we can’t predict. For example, establishing a gratitude practice. My kids and I made gratitude boxes, little boxes to slip the things we are grateful for on a daily basis. But starting that practice and feeling the magical onset of a good mood of the soul isn’t instantaneous.

And the same goes with blogging. It’s not like we write our first blog, and then instantly we’ve perfected our style, know what we want to write about and are surrounded by supportive blogging buddies. It takes time to find our sweet spot and build our WordPress community.

Ditto for passion and love. And everything else where we step forward and then life meets us.

So I know what you’re thinking – none of these examples involves any the special juju as depicted in a Disney movie. There are simply hard work and time.

But I think there is magic involved. It’s magical that we find our way to the things that work for us. And beautiful that we get enough to keep us at it. That we open just long enough for someone else to be open and see us. The magic is in that it can happen in the time between when I open and you close.

It’s magical that when we risk, we open ourselves up to opportunity. When we make ourselves vulnerable enough to be seen, that someone else comes along to hold us is rare and then we tell the stories to inspire others to do the same and we get those tingles all over again.

In The Princess and the Frog, the prince gets turned into a frog by a voodoo man. Then he kisses Tiana because he thinks she is a princess, but she isn’t and they both end up as frogs. [SPOILER ALERT – I’m going to tell the ending here.] After a Disney movie length adventure of making friends and finding out what is truly meaningful, they fall in love, give up their human dreams and get married. Once they do, Tiana becomes a princess because she married a prince, albeit in frog form. The prince kisses her and they both turn back to human.

They stop struggling to be what they thought they wanted and just love each other as they are – only to get it back again. The magic of life.

The secret is in the waiting through the moments where all seems lost, holding the faith for as long as it takes for the magic to work which will likely be longer than the pause in a Disney movie. The magic is in believing it will still happen even as we wait. And then, when it does happen, seeing it as one whole story and telling it to others so they too will last through the wait.

(featured photo from Pexels)

Unlearning My Way Back

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“A child can teach an adult three things: To be happy for no reason, To always be busy with something, and To know how to demand with all his might that which he desires.” – Paulo Coehlo

My sister-in-law recounted a conversation she had this week with my daughter, 7-year-old Miss O while holding hands and walking through an outdoor shopping center near our house.

Miss O said, “I love this place. Fun stores, good food, no BS”

My sister-in-law paused for a beat, wondering if she should ask, hoping Miss O didn’t know what it meant, and then asked, “Do you know what BS is?”

Miss O replied brightly, “Of course! Bad Service!”

After I stopped laughing, I wondered why it is that we think it’s bad for 7-year-olds to know swear words. Other than the fact that their executive brain function isn’t fully developed and they might deploy them inappropriately, indiscriminately or both. I landed on the fact that it feels like a loss of innocence.

I heard an interview once with singer and songwriter Billy Bragg where he posited that the opposite of faith isn’t doubt – but cynicism. If I think of Miss O using bad language, it feels cynical as if some beliefs of childhood would have had to have suffer in the process.

At their age, Miss O and Mr D believe that:

They are loved beyond measure and worthy of love

If you pray, those prayers will be answered

There is magic in the air so that sometimes fortunes found in fortune cookies will reveal the next fun thing

Potential new friends are everywhere

If you cry and show your vulnerability, you will be taken care of

Looking through this list I’ve typed, I think that I need to unlearn my way back to those beliefs. Because my cynical self might have been feeding me a lot of BS instead – and by that I mean bad service, of course. 😉

My Book Baby

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“The inner life of any great thing will be incomprehensible to me until I develop and deepen an inner life of my own.” – Parker J. Palmer

The death of my dad and the birth of my daughter are forever tied together in my mind. The day that I finished all the plans and paperwork to try to get pregnant via IVF, I sat at my desk and thought, “Wow, my world is about to change.” And the next day my dad suddenly died in a bike accident and I thought, “No, not like that!”

Then I spent 9 months taking the recordings I’d made of my dad and the effort I’d begun to write about his life and creating a book about him. On a night in August, at the end of the day I’d finished the very last line edits for the book, I went into labor with Miss O.

The birth of my baby right after I’d put my metaphorical book baby, Finding My Father’s Faith, to bed has meant that I haven’t thought much about the book in the last seven years. Until someone like the wonderful and insightful Vicki Atkinson of the Victoria Ponders blog comes along and reminds me of my book baby and I revisit the delight in the midst of grief of writing that for my dear dad.

Oops – I buried the lede – a podcast episode about my book

And I recently talked about the book, being a pastor’s daughter and the value of recording our loved ones with Troy Headrick in this Wise & Shine podcast. Here’s a link if you want to listen: Wynne Leon on Finding My Father’s Faith.

Pushing the Wrong Buttons

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“If what you believe in does not impact how you behave then what you believe in is not important.” – Shaykh Yassir Fazaga

My friend, Eric, told me that his 87-year-old mom has been leaving him really long voice mail messages. She records her message and then thinks she has hung up but the voice mail then records her going about her business.

So he was on the phone with her the other day and told her that she hasn’t been hanging up. “Well” she replied, “I hit the button.” After they finished talking, he stayed on the line and sure enough, heard her puttering around.

He got her attention by yelling her name into the phone and when she put it to her ear he asked, “WHAT button have you been pushing?” She replied something that made him realize she’d been pushing a volume button instead of the power button.

After we finished laughing about that, I mused about all the times I’ve pushed the wrong button. It reminded me of the old tech support joke when one tech asked another how he fixed the user’s problem, and the tech replied, “The On/Off selector was in the wrong position.”

I think of the time I was giving my friend, Jill, a compliment on her pants and said, “Those are so cute. My mom has a pair.” Turns out I offended her greatly because who wants to look like someone’s mom? Oops, wrong button.

But mostly it makes me think of all the times I’ve tried to do something without plugging into the Source and feeling the surge of power in my solar plexus. Like the tech joke, I have often tried things with the on/off selector in the wrong position, and without the power of belief, just relegated myself to futilely tapping at the keyboard with no results.

From rock climbs to bids for work in my professional field, there has been a huge difference between doing it with the power on or off, with my beliefs and values intact or lost somewhere in the dimness. Sometimes when I plug in to a Higher Power, I realize that I’m pursuing the wrong things but I find out the course correction is much easier with the power on.

Of course, like Eric’s mom, I continue to push the wrong buttons at times. Sooner or later, I find my way back to the small insistent God voice at my core asking, “WHAT button have you been pushing?”

(featured photo from Pexels)

Generationally Speaking

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“You can never really live anyone else’s life, not even your child’s. The influence you exert is through your own life and what you’ve become yourself.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

Back when I was interviewing my dad about his faith, I came across a passage in psychiatrist and author Dr. Scott Peck’s book Further Along the Road Less Traveled that described four stages of faith. He described an experience of what can happen generationally when kids grow up in stable, religious homes:

What happens to a child raised in such a stable, loving home and treated with dignity and importance? That child will absorb his parents’ religious principles – be they Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, or Jewish – like mother’s milk. By the time the child reaches adolescence, these principles will have become virtually engraved on his heart or ”internalized,” to use the psychiatric term. But once this happens, they will no longer need to depend upon an institution for their governance. It is at this time, which in healthy human development is usually at adolescence, that they start saying, “Who needs these silly myths and superstitions and this fuddy-duddy old institution?” They will then begin – often to their parents’ utterly unnecessary horror and chagrin – to fall away from the church, having become doubters or agnostics or atheists. At this point they have begun to convert to Stage Three, which I call “skeptic/individual.”

Further Along the Road Less Traveled by Scott Peck

I’ve heard this progression described in other contexts as well. From social psychologist Jonathan Haidt who described kids who grow up as beneficiaries of capitalist wealth demanding more socially and environmentally responsible policies as they come of age.

And from therapist Jacob Ham who talks about first generation survivors of war being primarily focused on physical and financial security with little capacity to talk about their emotions. It isn’t until the next generation comes along that they start to unpack emotional intelligence.

How life changes between generations is the topic of my latest post on Wise & Shine: Enough is Enough.

Freestanding and In Charge — Or Not

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“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” – Ernest Hemingway

I often think of myself as freestanding and in charge – only to repeatedly learn I’m not. I say that even as I know my best decisions, like the ones to have my beautiful children as a single person, came from a calling that was far beyond me. I read an amazing piece on that subject this week from Mark Nepo that I am posting here in case anyone else needs to hear the same thing.

Teachers Are Everywhere

Teachers arise from somewhere within me that is beyond me, the way the dark soil that is not the root holds the root and feeds the flower.

So often we think of ourselves as freestanding and in charge, because we have the simple blessing of being able to go where we want. But we are as rooted as shrubs and trees and flowers, in an unseeable soil that is everywhere. It’s just that our roots move.

Certainly, we make our own decisions, dozens every day, but we are nourished in those decisions by the very ground we walk, by the quiet teachers we encounter everywhere. Yes, in our pride and confusion, in our self-centeredness and fear, we often miss the teachers and feel burdened and alone.

In trying to hear those quiet teachers, I am reminded of the great poet Stanley Kunitz, who as a young man struggling darkly with how to proceed with his life, heard geese cross a night sky and somehow he knew what he had to do. Or how a man I know was slowly extinguishing himself, sorely depressed, when, finally exhausted of his endless considerations, he heard small birds in snow in unexpected song. He realized he was a musician who needed to find and learn the instrument he was supposed to play.

From the logic of being freestanding and in charge, experiences of this sort seem crazy-making and untrustworthy. But the soil of life in which we grow speaks a different language than we are taught in school. In actuality, truth and love and the spirit of eternity are rarely foreseeable, and clarity of being seldom comes through words.

In my brief time on Earth, I have felt the light of ageless spirit fill me unexpectedly when I thought I would die, and as water pumps its way up a slim root making that plant leaf out toward the light, I have found myself, against all fear and will, flushed with possibility in the direction of dreams I had hardly imagined.

Whether through birds in snow, or geese honking in the dark, the brilliant wet leaf that hits your face the moment you are questioning your worth, the quiet teachers are everywhere. When we think we are in charge, their lessons dissolve as accidents or coincidence. But when brave enough to listen, the glass that breaks across the room is offering us direction that can only be heard in the roots of how we feel and think.

The Book of Awakening by Mark Nepo