The desire for AUTONOMY is a powerful instinct within you. It is the craving to be self-directed and separate. It is the “you” who wants to be free of all ties, all responsibilities. It is the “you” that fears absorption; the “you” who wants to let your hair blow in the wind, feel the sun on your back and live a carefree life. This is the lone-ranger and pioneer spirit within you. This desire is a necessary part of your survival and growth – don’t reject it.
The desire for INTIMACY is a powerful instinct within you. It is the craving to be close and connected. It is the “you” that wants to belong, be known and be part of a family, a team. It is the “you” that fears abandonment and desertion; the you who longs for a unified journey with others, the you that wakes up at night and wonders with horror, what it would be like to be totally alone. This is the nest-making part of you, the part who longs for a shared life. This desire is a necessary part of your survival and growth – don’t reject it.
Healthy adults acknowledge these desires in themselves, and then in others – and never feed the one at the ruin of the other. This is wisdom!
When weekday mornings roll around the validity of whatever form of worship we participate in on the weekend is tested.
Synagogue, temple, church, wide-open spaces; conservative, modern, orthodox, mainline, fire and brimstone, or new age, our religious and faith traditions are tested for the rest of the week.
We can sing and dance all we desire and then nullify its validity with gossip and cheating.
Piousness is easy to fake.
It’s tax returns that challenge our respect for what’s good and right and wholesome.
Are you kind, merciful, generous and forgiving?
I’d suggest these are pivotal values in all faith and religious traditions.
Does your weekend faith tradition translate into open and honest trading and communicating with those who are “outside” your religious family? Are you open and kind and forgiving to your blood relatives?
Again, pivotal concepts in all traditions.
Be assured, I ask myself these questions, very regularly. There are times I wish I was a little more ready to let myself off the hook.
Hypocrisy doesn’t sit easily with me — especially when it is I who is the hypocrite.
Thank you to the people who have already responded to my request for help with the Birth Mothers Acknowledgement Dinner. Please email Shirley@ShirleyWilliams.co.za for more information.
Soon several nations, including South Africa, will celebrate Mothers Day.
In affluent areas restaurants will have table reservations for several generations of mothers. In modest settings a bowl of flowers may be arranged for mom.
As a dad to adopted sons I ache for the millions of women (and who sometimes sit silent at the same tables) whose Mothers Day is tainted with shame, loneliness, disconnection, for having made the tough choice for adoption.
Many women have expressed Mothers Day is not for them, that it’s among the most painful days they endure.
If that’s you or almost you, and are in KZN, and your adoption was recent or decades ago, I have an invitation for you:
Please join me for lunch or an early dinner on May 11, 2024. Come alone of bring a friend. Expenses for your lunch will be fully covered. The venue will be beautiful and private and safe —- details still unfolding.
Please email Shirley@ShirleyWilliams.co.za so we can get you — and a friend — onto the list and get details to you as they unfold.
Happy Birth Mothers Day, brave woman.
Generous readers, restaurateurs, sponsors, gift bag creators, please email Shirley you’d like to pay for a meal or sponsor a table or assist in any manner.
A little headstart for NEXT Sunday — as published previously in The Indianapolis Star……… pastors in preparation….. you’re welcome. No acknowledgment sought or required:
Easter’s Challenge Remains
Buy it or not, the New Testament’s account of what occurred over what we call Easter, two millennia ago, is dramatic. It is at least as dramatic as the Christmas story with the baby, the crib and the procession of worshippers who came to greet the Christ child.
Easter places the baby – now a guileless but powerful miracle-performing 33-year-old man – on the executioner’s cross, the the electric chair, the hangman’s noose of the day.
There’s every element of drama in the brutal saga that unfolds. Love, betrayal and denial. Unprecedented cooperation between superpowers of government and temple.
This man, who says he is God’s son, is paraded before the rich and powerful, then mocked and scorned. At the zenith of his need, a friend walks away, claiming Jesus to be a stranger to him.
Then, he who healed the masses and raised the dead is himself dragged through the city for public humiliation and execution.
His death on “Good” Friday is grueling and gruesome.
Yet, at the moment of his greatest pain, he considers his mother and makes plans for her care. He provides comfort to a common criminal also facing public execution. While fixed to the cross with nails through his limbs, he prays forgiveness upon his executioners, then yells out in pain because the God and Father he has loved since before the beginning of time is absent, has abandoned him. He breathes a final breath, and it is finished.
On the Saturday, his followers confront the reality of his death, the death of their dream and the end of a shared vision. Men and women who had ventured all on his behalf are now abandoned, leaderless. They have lost all. They who had forsaken all are now the forsaken. The leader of the sometimes unruly and diverse mob is dead, entombed with the door to the tomb sealed shut with a rock of considerable size.
Sunday comes and the tomb is open and empty.
A crucified man is up and walking.
He appears suddenly here and there presenting himself, sometimes in private to individuals and also to masses of people. Within days, he’s making breakfast on a beach, calling the one who ran away from him and denied him to join him for a meal that he has already prepared, having made the fire himself.
What landed Jesus in trouble was that he lived a life that supported and endorsed his claims.
His life, not only his words and his teaching, challenged the ruling religious order. Few religions enjoy being challenged, let alone do they tolerate when a person making the challenge so completely “walks the talk.”
My faith doesn’t land me in hot water like Jesus’ faith did for him. This is not because I am not sometimes zealous about my faith, but because I am a hypocrite. I am not always who I say I am. I’m often not myself. I often fail to display integrity.
Jesus was always who he claimed to be.
He was thoroughly authentic, and it was this authenticity, this integrity, that angered people and upset governing powers. It rocked the status quo at places of worship and made him a sufficient threat so that his critics would take his life in the most barbaric manner their righteous minds could conceive.
The world can deal with my claims about myself.
They are as fragile and empty as most people’s claims about themselves.
Most of us, zealous or not, can tolerate the dreams of the guy next door.
But it was not empty claims that got Jesus in trouble. Many had come claiming to know, be, or represent God.
His life, his deeds gave profound evidence to the fact that he was who he said he was. It was this that authorities could not stomach.
At every Easter, we are each challenged to take the time to answer the question posed by Jesus to his outspoken friend: “Who do you say that I am?”
Words (sentiments) I’ve never heard uttered in decades of counseling, marrying, burying, teaching, traveling, hearing confessions, and responding to groups large and small in 50+ nations…..
“I started saving too early. Managing accumulated resources is tough. It’s an uphill battle trying to dig myself out of wealth.”
“I wish I’d held more grudges. My life is meaningless without bitterness and blame.”
“I laughed too much. I’ve been too generous; given too much away. Spent too much time outdoors.”
“I read too many books.”
“I settled too many differences and have given the benefit of the doubt to too many people.”
“When people have betrayed me I used it to learn about love, forgiveness, grace.”
“I spent too much time investing in others.”
“I wish I had more stuff to fill a few more plastic tubs in my storage units.”
“I’m glad I rejected people who disagreed with me, who lived in ways I labeled unbiblical — especially family.”
“Regretfully, my spouse and I kept our marriage vows until death did us part.”
“I discovered google too late in life.”
“People see me as a softie.”
“I spent whole days without using my cellphone.”
“I affirmed my children and told them I loved them much too often. I should have withheld my love and focused more on their faults.”
When receiving texts — except texts of a purely perfunctory nature — do you read between, behind the lines?
We offer affirming eye contact during face-to-face conversations.
Timing, tone, cadence, clarify meaning in voice calls.
Are we listening to texts?
You may engage with the person who responds to texts as if anxiously awaiting, even aching for human contact. Prior knowledge may inform your understanding of your quick-to-reply friend.
I find it helpful, early in any text exchange, to declare my level of availability. I am unlikely to ignore a verbal approach and I try to acknowledge texts.
Apparent indifference can be cruel.
Respond in kind: words for words, sentences for sentences, emojis for emojis. One who composes a paragraph deserves a like-response. A thumbs up emoji or hand clapping butterflies may come off as dismissive when a friend just spilled his guts.
Grammar rules and sound spelling seem widely ignored with texting. While pedantic perfectionism may reek pretentiousness, effort reveals respect.
Avoid alarm —- can’t wait to tell you something terribly important to you and your future when we meet next month — is hardly fair.
Read between and behind the lines.
Friends might be telling you something of crucial importance (to them) and selected you to be their audience.
Arrived in the USA late last evening from Malaysia.
Leadership will always be strongest, most effective when the leader sees and regards herself or himself as a servant to those in her or his care.
This is not for effect or for greater impact, it is simply how authentic leadership works.
If you are the leader then you will be a servant who seeks to serve those whom she or he leads. You will do so with all your heart, mind, soul and you will love those in your care. You will love them to such a degree that they will end up even unknowingly tapping into the very best of who they are because that’s how people behave when they are loved.
If you think of yourself as elevated, deserving of being served by others, afforded status by your role, you are not a leader no matter what you think you are. What you are is one who is capitalizing on those whom you are really called to serve.
Your leadership function must benefit others, not you.
When you are the true leader there is nothing you will not do within the bounds of law and the boundaries of sound ethics to enhance the lives of those whom you lead.
It’s enjoying face-to-face conversations, really listening to each other, responding, asking relevant, respectful questions. It’s encouraging people to talk about things they find interesting, important.
It’s sharing, refusing to dominate or set the agenda for every conversation.
Meals with friends, unhurried times, occasions when talk leads to laughter and may also lead to tears simply (and profoundly) because shared history is being re-lived.
Pain – revisited.
It’s simple meals that transform into events because hearts are healed even though a shared meal was the only intention.
It’s welcoming others, people known and unknown. It’s genuine openness, radical hospitality. It’s wild generosity. It’s sincere interest expressed.
It’s the simple things.
And, no cell-phones are required or necessary.
————
Two personal matters:
I will be in KZN from May 5 to May 15, 2024. Best selling author Terry Angelos (WHITE TRASH) and I will host a public seminar. During my visit I will, at your invitation, meet with groups, schools, churches, businesses, and individuals. Please contact Shirley@ShirleyWilliams.co.za to find out more about the Angelos/Smith event or schedule events with me.
This column appeared first in The Mercury on March 20, 2001 and has been published every weekday for 23 years. Thank you for your readership.
Listen to people for long enough – some people need very little time – and you will “see” into their hearts, their souls, and have a measure of the fear and pain that is theirs.
The things we talk about and the way we talk, the things we find funny, offer a glimpse into the very depths of who we are and into what is hurting within us.
Every time I open my mouth to speak I am offering clues to the state of my emotional health.
While it would be foolish to jump to conclusions based on a few uttered sentences and we ought to give one another the benefit of any doubt, some topics and obvious attitudes are unmistakable, unavoidable, and announce who people are and the pain and fear that is theirs.
When listening, racial slurs and racial jokes get my attention.
I think they indicate fear, fear that parades as superiority.
Swearing, especially blasphemy, suggests deep cynicism, the very antithesis of faith and hope.
Men ridiculing women, anyone expressing rudeness toward waiters, showing off with wealth, one-upmanship, I believe all indicate a persistent lack of self-acceptance and self-worth.
What can be so painful about living that anyone has to employ such defenses?
May we be agents of grace and kindness – both to others, and to ourselves.
difficultrelationships.com 