Engage with Grace

In preparing for this post, I was reviewing the Blogs that I routinely follow and on E-patient.net I discovered "Engage with Grace" (www.engagewithgrace.org). They have created a one slide end-of-life discussion starter that they commit to sharing every time they give a talk, and especially around the table at holiday time when families gather. What an interesting and meaningful way to start a conversation about something that will happen to all of us (death), but that we avoid more than going to the doctor! They have created one slide with five questions on end-of-life issues that operate on a 1-5 Likert scale. Very easy and very meaningful.

I'm preparing an end-of-life talk right now that will be presented to faith communities and other interested groups. This slide will be my new lead-in to the discussion. I encourage you all to go to the Engage with Grace website and download the slide so that you can use it in your own discussions over the Holidays. Those of you who give presentations, I encourage you to add the slide to your talks (as they suggest). In this way, a healthy discussion can ensue that could greatly (and positively) affect our lives (and our deaths).

Engaging with grace...such a strong theological idea, such a great opportunity to make a difference in how we all engage with our finitude.

Peace and grace to you all!
Dan

Post Thanksgiving Thoughts...

Today's post is a reflection on issues around poverty and how to make a dent in a world-wide problem. I was involved in a very good discussion earlier this week about the potential to create a new training program for folks. The program graduates would be eligible to earn a salary of $10 to $12/hour plus benefits. One of the participants in the meeting raised the point that this was NOT a living wage in the D.C. metro area. She called out attention to a website (www.epinet.org) that allows one to calculate a living wage based on number of wage earners and number of children. It was eye opening to say the least.

This discernment brings up a really important aspect of changing the poverty equation. That aspect is that we have to rethink how we develop programs for those in poverty so that they can actually earn a living wage. The living wage calculation in the D.C. metro area is about $17/hour for each wage earner (just over $35,000/year). Now, with health insurance reform, this number could drop a little bit, but certainly not below about $15/hour for each wage earner (about $31,000/year). There are not many jobs for untrained people that will pay this much. Thus, there needs to be a reality check for businesses, educational institutions, governments, and individuals who need to be able to pay people this amount in order to live.

How does the faith community (broadly defined) respond to this social justice issue? Is there a mechanism to leverage the people who are pre-disposed to social intervention to address some of these larger societal issues? How do we as individuals use sites such as EPI to help inform ourselves about the broader issues of health, wellness and wholeness (HW2) encompassed in having now 45 million persons living in the U.S. below the poverty line?

There are no easy answers nor are there "one size fits all" solutions to a problem that is many years in the making. The problem deserves our attention and deserves our intervention. I don't know what my faith community will decide on this issue. I do know, however, that we are now better informed on the issue of what constitutes a living wage.

Peace and wisdom,
Dan

Do No Harm...

Sounds easy, doesn't it - just do no harm. Yet daily (multiple times each day) we injure each other with our words and actions. No, it's not just limited to harm in the health care arena (as some would have you believe), rather it is ubiquitous. The real issue is that when we harm each other through words and/or actions, our health, wellness and wholeness (HW2) suffer tremendously. Our communities become less friendly and welcoming, we distrust one another, we look out for ourselves and our families and ignore the needs of others.

This week we celebrate Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving started with one group (Native Americans) looking out for and being friendly to aliens in their land. What would have happened if the natives had treated the "illegal aliens" the way we do today? Not hard to see the likely outcome, is it? Instead, the natives helped the foreigners to settle in and to become successful in their new land. The "Americans" showed those new to the area how to survive and how to make the most of the land that they were living in and on. The "Americans" took a chance on friendship over war and went on to suffer great indignities because of it.

Do no harm...interesting to consider this on this week dedicated to focusing on giving thanks. How can we do no harm to anyone this week? How can we do no harm as individuals, communities, organizations, and a nation this week? When we operate out of a mentality that says I will treat you as well as I treat my own, I will not harm you with my words and/or actions, then we operate on a totally different plane. Our interactions are open and honest, they are warm and welcoming.

So, this week do no harm. Tell people around you what you are doing and enlist them to do the same. If you do, then we will be in a very different place come next Monday than we are today.

May your week be joyous, loving, and harmless.

Peace,
Dan

The Paradigm of Hurry

Today's post comes from the book "Good and Beautiful God" by James Bryan Smith. In the last chapter of the book, the author writes of a conversation between Dallas Willard and John Ortberg. The latter was asking the former what he should do about a new and challenging opportunity. The answer from Mr. Willard was, "ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life." Wow, I had never thought of "hurry" being such a barrier to getting things accomplished, or to my relationship with God and others.

The phrase has continued to work in me (as truth so often does to us) and I have found that much of my life (both present and past) has been spent in a state of hurry. As an ICU practitioner, I was always in a state of accelerated pace, and early on I learned that in order to be effective in that environment I had to be calm while all around me the world was falling apart. Thus, I could be moving quickly but not in a rush - so to speak. I think this is where the admonishment, "haste makes waste" comes from. "Keeping your head while all about you are losing theirs" is a quality of the most effective ICU practitioners - and other leaders.

The peaceful center did not emerge in my spiritual life until just recently. The concept of quiet contemplation leading to directed and purposeful action is now a focus of what I do in my role as Founder and EVP of Possibilities Journey, Inc (www.possjrny.org). If I'm not spending time in prayer and preparation, in discernment about focus and path, then I will be pushed around by the capricious worldly winds. If I can not find the place to trust that the spiritual "nudge" I'm feeling is of God, then I can not trust that "all manner of things shall be well" (Julian of Norwich).

So, for the rest of the week, and for the upcoming season of Advent, I wish for you the ability to "ruthlessly elminate hurry from your life". Don't rush from one party and event to another or from buffet to buffet. Don't rush to be the first one to the open bar or to the car after drinking too much. Don't rush around the shopping malls or internet spending without a purpose and a plan. Eliminate all sense of hurry - cultivate peace in your center and move outward from there. Spend time at the beginning and end of each day in prayer and thanksgiving.

May you move purposefully without hurry.

Peace,
Dan

It's Time

So I've been musing on any different aspects of our health, wellness and wholeness (HW2) both communal and personal. This musing has not just been in this Blog, but in my "day job" as well as in my spiritual life. One aspect of our dis-ease as humans keeps coming to the forefront - that of our view of time. I was reading an interesting chapter in James Bryan Smith's book "Good and Beautiful God". Did you know that the clock was invented by monks who were dutifully trying to keep track of both their work time and their worship time? It wasn't until a few centuries later that the clock began to take over our lives and we started to live by it rather than by the amount of daylight (the electric light bulb furthered this process).

I find it fascinating that an invention which fostered better worship by those dedicated to it was, over time, used against just such a practice. How we humans can mess things up! Efficiency versus meaning all over again - we have to produce so much in a given amount of time or else we fail and suffer consequences. But what does all that devotion to an idol (a clock) get us? We get stressed out, we become more anxious than we ever were, we focus on tasks rather than relstionships, we beocme human do-ings rather than human be-ings. A spiritual axiom is that idol worship always demands blood sacrifice - and we have been bled almost dry by this idol!

It is a delicate balance to hold this tension between being and doing, between efficiency and meaning. However, we have gotten too far out on the efficiency side of life and have forgotten the meaning side. What does it mean that we are engaged in a certain activity? What does it mean for us to be spiritual people in a secular world? What does it mean that as a society we allow 45 million human beings (just in the U.S.) to live below the poverty line? What does it mean when we are so busy doing stuff that we haven't time to develop meaningful relationships with those around us?

All of this lack of meaning plays havoc with our HW2. When we don't take the time for meaningful relstionships, the health and wellness that we seek are impossible to find. We seek ever faster ways to prepare ever less healthy foods to eat "on the run" while we cram ever more activity into our lives. Mr. James Bryan Smith states, "It's no wonder that we have the attention span of a ferret on a triple cappucino." (Nice imagery, huh?)

So, slow down and take a deep breath, find some quiet in your busy day, don't answer the phone or your Blackberry e-mails for a few minutes. Focus on a beautiful tree, or scene; focus on a favorite memory; read some scripture; listen to some soothing music, etc. Try every day this week to just "be" in the midst of all of your "do".

I wish you much peace,
Dan

Decisons, decisions, decisions...

Sorry I'm a day late on this posting, but I had to make a lot of chili yesterday for a church-wide yard sale that kicks off tonight. Being an inclusive faith community, we made 3 different kinds of chili - meat, vegan and gluten-free vegan. Yes, no animals were injured in the making of our vegetable chili (in case you were wondering). All that having been said, I wasn't able to sit down with two thoughts to rub together until now.

Health, wellness and wholeness are often (always?) characterized by our decisions. We decide where to live, how to live, whom to live with, where to work, what to eat, etc. Myriad decisions make up our daily life, no matter what age we are. These decisions lead to our health and to our individual and collective dis-ease. Yet, we are living in a time where both personal and communal "wisdom" suggest that we are not to be held accountable for these decisions nor their very preditable outcomes. Thus, the fact that I might choose to drink alcohol to excess, eat every meal at a fast food franchise, smoke nicotine, watch endless T.V. (NCIS is compelling) is not really my fault, nor the result of my world view, rather I'm being acted upon by forces beyond my control and therefore I am a victim.

Interesting isn't it? I've worked my whole adult life with folks who suffer from mental illness - to a greater or lesser extent. One of the definitions of mental illness that I've found useful in being in relationship with people is that mental illness is the act of doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results! Hmmm, maybe we as a culture and people are all a bit mentally ill employing this definition. This is not meant in any way to demean the mentally ill, or to lessen the burden of mental illness or the suffering of those afflicted and their families, rather it is a means of broadening the reach to show that all of us suffer from our decision making when it comes to our health, wellness and wholeness (HW2).

We find ourselves bemoaning the fact that we don't have a very good health system, yet when someone tries to think outside the box to revamp it, we over-react and vote them out of office to maintain the status quo. We find every reason in the book to not change the approach to our HW2, because we don't want to have to change. Every day 2400 Americans die (1 every 37 seconds) from the complications of cardiovascular disease (Circulation, 1/27/2009 issue), yet we don't look at this as an emergency because no one writes about it in the newspaper, or in a Blog that we follow, or states it from a talking head on the evening news. Most of the leading causes of cardiovascular disease are modifiable through increased moderate exercise, change in diet, etc. In fact, if those decisions were modified and the leading causes eliminated, every American's life would be extended an average of 7 years!!!

Continuing the same old thinking and expecting different results is not working. Maybe out HW2 will improve when our ability to make decisions improves? Here's hoping for that wisdom to come and transform us.

Peace,
Dan

Healthy for Life

Today's post is brought to you by my reading of a book of the same title, "Healthy for Life" by Dr. Ray Strand. I was struck not only by the engaging way that the book was written, but also by the common sense, scientifically-based, even handed approach the author took to a very difficult subject. The title though, has been resonating with me even more than all the good information contained therein. BTW, I highly recommend you pick up a copy and read and discern about whether you are called to the life-style changes in this approach to eating and living healthy. I'm embarking on this process as we speak - I'll keep you updated.

Health for life is a great concept as it takes our tendancy to live episodically (from meal to isolated meal) rather than to see life as an integrated whole. Thus, what we learn at a young age about eating habits does indeed follow us through the rest of our lives. Our culture which promotes everything quicker and larger is killing us (statistics abound). The knee jerk response to an ever increasing busy-ness is to package our food into ever easier and quicker preparation, which diminishes nutritive value and promotes overeating. Thus, it is not just what we are eating that is the problem, it is how we are living.

I encounter this scenario a couple of times a week (at least during busier times of the year). It goes like this: my wife is out of pocket at meetings or on travel, the boys have activities, the dog needs to be walked and fed, I have work and activities, and what gets lost is the time to actually cook. What do I do? I default to fast food, pizza, Chinese take-out, etc. It gets something into bellies and we are off and running with a minimum of wasted time. Sound familiar? What I need to do is to off-load some of the activities and find my way back to living - instead of doing.

Many of my activities revolve around my church comunity and the public charity that I founded and now run. All good things mind you, but combined with teenaged sons and a busy spouse, life easily gets out of balance. The for-profit world of fast food and diet plans ($30 billion a year for the latter in the U.S.) understands our lifestyles and creates things to meet them - thus promoting a cycle that only serves to make us all less healthy and well, and certainly less whole.

My sincere wish and prayer for all of you is that you will take a moment before the holiday season to evaluate what you are doing in all aspects of your life. How is it that you are deciding to "live", and what effects are those choices having on your health, your relationships, your mind, your soul, all of the things that make you, you? Find the path to peace - we at Possibilities Journey, Inc (www.possjrny.org) are engaged in this right now. Come along with us, let us know how we can support you in your search for health, wellness and wholeness.

Peace and wholeness,
Dan

Rights of Passage

A little play on words in entitling this "rights" instead of "rites", but I hope you'll stick with me on it. Now that the elections are done and the phone calls exhorting me to vote for this person or that person (or amendment) are finished, it's time to weigh what has occurred. The GOP has the House, but the Senate has really not changed all that much. My 17 year old wondered this morning what all the fuss was about, so I gave him Civics 101 at the breakfast table.

It was a good teaching moment, and it allowed us to look at the reality versus the hype. Aren't we in the U.S. all about hype right now? Whether it is professional ball players talking "smack" or professional politicos doing the same, we're surrounded by opinion which is more "heat than light". I found it interesting that one "talking head" last night suggested that because the American people are in a place of financial instability, that the election pendulum that we saw last night will not be the last one. He suggested that we should look for this type of voting for the next 3 election cycles. What a terrible waste should that occur!

If that is true, and it feels right in my gut, then what will we be left with once all the contrary voting and election are finished? I suspect that what we'll be left with is a whole lot of wasted time and money without significant progress on any major issue. Of note, the Christian Century magazine's current issue stated that none of the political parties or party nominees said one word about the 45 million poor people in the U.S. Nor did anyone say anything about how in 2009 we as a Country created more people below the poverty line than we have had since the 1950's!

Iniquity, in updated language inequity, in monetary allocation is rampant and we as a nation are doing nothing about it. It wouldn't take a huge amount of resources from the U.S. to eliminate poverty. However, our elected officials both locally and nationally will now spend all their time messing with healthcare to the detriment of all other problems.

Is this really what the founders of the country envisioned when they fashioned a democracy? Are the rights of the people really being championed by those who are elected to serve? Do the passage of bills aimed to foster iniquity of a minority over a majority really promote life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Friends, it's time to get off the rhetoric bandwagon, stop listening to the talking heads, roll up our sleeves, and create the Country that we want to live in. It will be a messy process, but it is clear that nothing short of this will get us healthier, more well and certainly will not fix our brokenness.

The only way to succeed is to rebuild dialogue and relationship, to care for neighbor as self, to realize that there is only one planet and that the resources of it were created for all to share in equally. Now, that's a platform that I can get behind.

Peace,
Dan

Nurturing Wholeness

Today's post is a reflection stimulated by my oldest son's 17th birthday and on the role of nurturing in the development of an environment which supports his growth and development. In other words, his movement towards wholeness.

Now, since he is a teenager, his world is pretty toxic. He's surrounded by people only interested in themselves, who are looking for the next "big" thing, who just want the newest technology, and who could care less about something like identifying their brokenness and working to heal that; and then there are all the issues with his peer group! ;-) How difficult it is to counteract the messages that bombard him. To show him that there is something more to the world than the news about sports (particularly professional football for him).

The process of nuturing allows for young entities to develop in a space that has been thoughtfully prepared. A space that provides them with what they need to become what they're intended to be. Now, this is a bit easier with vegetables or trees, as we "know" what they are to become - it is far more challenging with people - and not exclusively the young. Though we have a death denying culture that focuses almost exclusively on the young, the elders among us have a need to continue to grow and develop into what they will become as well. We often forget that none of us is through growing until we die, and that all are in need of a nurturing environment.

I think that is why I was so taken by the information on the Eden Alternative and the Green House Project. These two examples (and there are others) give me hope for my future as an elder. I also interact weekly with persons well into their 90's in a Sunday School. Though they are moving slower and have the physical limitations of aging, their minds and their need to feel valued and involved are are engaged as they were when they were "in their prime". Their wisdom and life experience are invaluable to me, and are a great gift, as I traverse this time in my life. They help to re-orient me when I lose my way as a man of faith and as a parent. Together each week, we create a loving, compassionate and nurturing environment where all can contribute, can decide direction for the class, and can feel welcomed and cared for - can feel loved unconditionally.

This is how nurturing can lead to wholeness. Nurturing an environment where all are valued, where all have input and where all are loved unconditionally heals our broken areas - in fact, it allows for that brokenness to be brought to light so that it can be healed. Without this tyoe of environment, brokenness remains hidden and we become less and less whole, healthy and well.

My prayer for you this week is that you would discover a nurturing environment for yourselves and for those that you love. May it heal those areas that are broken and lead you into abundant life!

Peace,
Dan