No matter how much love or patience or gentleness or forgiveness there may be in a relationship it is impossible to:

• Make someone love you or stay with you who wants to leave you and wants to go. All your attempts will backfire and reinforce the desire to leave. I know it is tough to do but you will save yourself a lot of trauma and pain if you allow him or her the freedom he or she is seeking.
• Make an unfaithful person faithful. His or her indiscretions are purely and uniquely his or her problem and not yours. You make it yours when you think his or her problem with unfaithfulness is something you have caused or you can solve.
• Stop another from abusing alcohol or legal or illegal drugs and substances or squandering resources with gambling. Sex addicitons of all forms may be included in the list. These are unique and personal issues and illnesses that are not “set off” by a partner or are ever a partner’s fault. “You made me do it” is a lie and ought to be treated as such.
• Share your partner with another in an emotional or shared sexual relationship and expect things to go enduringly well in your partnership.

I try to wake in the morning and ask myself, “What kind of person will you be today?” This intimate exchange is crucial to my all-round well-being. It stops me blaming, helps me to be grateful for all I enjoy.

I wish I’d started asking myself this and similar questions years ago. It might have saved others and myself much pain.

I am not always successful living out my ideals but I have to have them. I need railroad tracks to guide me into the new day, week, month, year, decade.

I wonder what you do to keep yourself on track with your goals, values, principles? I’d love to know.

I am grateful for readers who have thanked for this column and told me how much you have learned from my writing. Truth is, I have gained more than I could imagine anyone else may have gained.

The joy of daily writing positions me for the joy of daily living and I detest the thought of writing about living well and then going about my day in a manner contrary to the content of what I write.

Grace is easier to write about than it is to exercise, embody. But, it is essential for healthy living, the building of strong families, the well-being of dynamic churches, places of worship, even the prosperity of healthy businesses. Grace unifies, empowers, inspires, makes people free.

Grace helps me to overlook what I think is my due, my just desert, my rights. It assists me to forgive, to turn the page, the other cheek, and to move on, to let go. To be part of the solution and not the problem.

Grace empowers me to live with an open hand rather than a clenched fist. When under the motivation of divine grace I can forgive others, even if not requested. I can write off debts, offering gifts in place of repayment. A man or woman of Grace seeks to enrich the lives of those who seek to hurt him or her. Grace is evidence of divine intervention, of growth, goodness, and spiritual maturity

Yes, it is easier to write about Grace than it is to extend it at every turn, – which is, of course, all the more reason to try.

My father, EWG Smith, was the most generous man I have ever known. He’d pack boxes of groceries and deliver them to needy families from our grocery shop in Red Hill. “You are supposed to sell stuff, Ernest!” our mother would say. “What if it were us, Mavis?” was his stock reply.

EWG served on the HMS Dorsetshire. Hardly out of his teenage years he survived her sinking. Consequently he was deeply engraved with the shock and the awe of World War II. The war years left him with grace, humor, and an appreciation of the goodness and terror of which all humans are capable. “Nearer my God, to Thee,” was his favorite hymn. He told of hundreds of men singing in harmony while afloat in life-vests hoping for rescue.

He loved music and fancied himself an undiscovered Frank Sinatra. He’d come to the Oyster Box Hotel where my band played and give me a wink as he danced by. I’d announce we had a special guest and invite them to welcome “EWG” onto the bandstand. With great flourish he’d grab the microphone and croon any one of his favorites and glow in the hearty applause.

This was among very few favors I could give him in return for the life-long hard work he’d given me.

Spiritual Abuse (always on a continuum) is occurring when a pastor, leader, or friend:

Hears God for you then alienates or punishes you if you do not adhere to his/her guidance, leadership, or authority. This is often subtle – so it is easy to deny.

Suggests that rejection of his/her higher understanding is done so at your peril. You will hear things like, “Be careful. You will move yourself from God’s protection if you ignore my guidance.”

Rewards your obedience with inclusion, and punishes your questioning with withdrawal. You’re stroked or struck!

Demands cathartic honesty. Unless you spew out every detail of your life you must be hiding something.

Lavishes you with praise, acceptance, and understanding when you are “good” and pushes you away when you are “bad.”

Such leaders leave a trail of cut-off relationships. Usually in the trail are those who refuse to submit to the will of the pastor, the leader or the friend. Such leaders live from a for me/or against me, black/white, all/or nothing platform of relationships. There are usually insiders and outsiders.

A healthy faith is about reconciliation, forgiveness, and freedom. It’s about “space” and room to move to respectfully disagree, there’s no trading in guilt or blame. Healthy leaders, friends increase your freedom, they do not try to restrict it.

• expose you to several new perspectives and the experience may lead to significant change.
• have sufficient guts to show you your victim thinking and behaving.
• strip you of God-talk and handy clichés to the point where you meet yourself and encounter the divine.
• show you your position in your network of family and friends and how you may be resisting your legitimate place in that network.
• ignore your focus on weaknesses and help you capitalize upon your strengths.
• insist you create new orbits to escape your entrenched ways.
• help you stop the endless task of trying to make unhappy people happy.
• stir your inner-lion until you see the fruitlessness of accommodating poor treatment from anyone.
• expose you to the joy of being out of control while keeping the rules.
• show you it’s possible to have a brighter future than your past if you embrace the courage to plan and implement what you really want.

Your spiritual maturity is not affirmed by how much you read the Holy Scriptures, sing hymns, pray, clap hands, dance to contemporary religious music. It’s not determined by how much you visit your place of worship or how much money you donate to its causes.

It’s not affirmed by your title (if you have one) or the ornate design of your robe (if you wear one) or your the position in the hierarchy of your faith (if you have one).

It is affirmed by your willingness to take responsibility for your life, your choices, the good use of your skills, talents. It’s measured by how you treat people, especially loved-ones, strangers; how you love your enemies, offer hospitality, respect, regard, love those who reject your beliefs.

Are you generous to a fault? Do you love those who are different from you, whose lives might be in direct conflict with what you believe? Do you love by listening?

If you take full responsibility for yourself, become extraordinarily generous, embrace diversity, and love others by listening, you will fast-forward your “spiritual” growth. It’s not your title, the reach of your authority, or the crowds who respect and adore you. It’s how you respect and love those who don’t.

Our mother died 41 years ago today on the fifth floor of Addington Hospital.

At times I feel I never knew her. There are times it is as if she is still with us. This one of many paradoxes of dying and living. We make our mark then go away. We live on in hearts, memories, values of those who knew and loved us.

Mavis Iona Smith is as alive as ever and has been gone too long to remember. There’s hardly a morning when I dress that I don’t hear her voice telling me anything is possible today but do you really want to wear that shirt. There’s hardly a meal I prepare that I don’t hear her just suggesting I’m adding too much of whatever. I adventure into the city and Mother points out strangers, tells me they’re friends I just don’t know.

I’m making it sound like mother is spending her eternity sitting on my shoulder. Not so. I’m just very aware of her values, commitment to hospitality, some of her cautions, many of which I still ignore. The reality of at least one aspect of eternal life is most tangible when you realize people who loved you unconditionally are living inside you, making their mark, urging you to pass the baton of goodness from generation to generation.

Loss, grief, mourning 

• Grief can go into hiding and emerge months, years later, as something quite unexpected like anger, disappointment or cynicism, and/or kindness, joy, softness, and appreciation. • Time itself doesn’t heal, not usually. Some grief is never “healed” and some losses never find “closure” but the lack of both does not mean survivors cannot live full, productive, beautiful lives. • Replacing a loss with another person “too quickly” may be unwise, unfair, irresponsible. It doesn’t feel that way for the one who has suffered. Insisting on it is usually alienating and counterproductive and can rip already suffering families apart. • Mourning has a wild life of its own, at least initially, and it’s best not tamed by the untrained. • When a person who had suffered loss declares he or she’d rather not talk about “it” the desire is best respected. • Our uniqueness as individuals is also reflected in how people respond to difficulties associated with significant loss. It’s ridiculous to approach a grieving person with a step-by-step generic packaged formula. • Non-possessive warmth, listening ears, and a hot cups of tea may be the most powerful gifts a person can offer one who has suffered.

Congratulations Graduate: Your high school career soon ends. Brace yourself. A new dimension of your education will soon begin. Thank parents, teachers, coaches, especially those who taught you when you were very young since you didn’t get to your cap-and-gown ceremony alone. Your parents are perfectly designed to help shape you so stay with whatever they are trying to teach you. Then, learn about Money. Think of Money as a Being (thus the capital). You can work for Money, or, Money will work for you. Choose. If you let Money know you are in charge you’ll get Money’s respect and it will begin to cooperate. You gain its respect by saving one-third of every dollar you earn. Here’s a rough guide: ⅓ gets saved, ⅓ goes to accomodation, ⅓ goes to everything else. You don’t have to choose the “right” university, apprenticeship, or job. You’ll never get everything right. But, be sincere. Time is not wasted when you are sincere. Before you take “road less traveled” you may, for a while, have to take the road most traveled. “Too much too soon” in any area of your life will almost always hurt and haunt you.