Author / Michael
Shameless Plug
My Blog: Prayer for the Week
There is so much we see. Most of it overwhelms us when we don’t guard our eyes, when we take it all in without discriminating for our own good.
Excite us over tomorrow when today’s words and events have felt forced or tiring or dispiriting.
When we try but don’t quite finish, give us the skills associated with gratitude. Form us into thankful people, people who are grateful for life and its gifts.
Make us fearless. Grant that we might see you in the blankness of what’s next.
Press into us faith and imagination because today requires both. And may we, in some way, offer you all we do and are. And may our offerings entertain and please you.
Amen.
Join Me in Moving the Blog
Thanks for being here. While I’ll keep this blog as an archive, I’d love to have you get my posts on my new site. I’ve been working on the blog and I hope you find the posts there interesting. Visit me, follow me, here on the new site.
Join Me in Moving the Blog
Thanks for being here. And while I’ll keep this blog as an archive, I’d love to have you get my posts on my new site. I’ve been working on the blog and I hope you find the posts there interesting. The blog can be found here.
My Blog: Getting to Know You
People only know what’s offensive to you if they’ve taken time to learn about you and preferably from you. The gesture that’s wrong. The label that’s even worse. The joke, the oversight, the sarcasm, or the innuendo.
If a person possesses good intentions and they still hurt you, it may be because they don’t know you. Spend some time revealing yourself.
Give them room to figure you out, to get to know you and not the image that they came with. If they neglect who you present yourself to be, perhaps they won’t be a good friend to you. If they stay, you can say that they already know who they’ll get. If they don’t use the information you gave them, you know what they think about you.
My Blog: Humility
I’ve often heard people say after getting a compliment that they were humbled. I wonder about that.
A compliment is humbling when it brings you down or back or close to your humanness. A compliment is humbling when it makes you see what you brought to an event and what you didn’t. A compliment is humbling when it helps you see who you really are vs. who you aren’t.
If those pieces aren’t a part of a compliment, it isn’t humbling but congratulatory. Nothing’s wrong with congratulatory words because we need those. We need to be praised, validated, and affirmed. But we also need to call something humbling when it really is.
“I am humbled” is reserved when a person says something that really brings you to your truest nature. Of course, when you come to your truest nature, you may not be pleased. But keep looking. There’s something divine in that soul of yours. There’s the stuff of God there, in my way of seeing the world. Look at your real self, seeing the ugly but looking for the wondrous, too.
My Blog: Open for Surprises
The day may not go as you planned, and that can be a great gift. Surprises abound when you loosen your hand around your schedule, your time, your to-do list, your hopes. You don’t know what you’ll get, and you can approach that unknowing with anticipation rather than fear, curiosity not apprehension.
Someone once asked me what happened to my pastoral care when I couldn’t control things. It was a rich question. It helped me think about the essential way any pastoral practice is unknown, how it’s an act of faith to serve people as a minister.
The question also helped me remember to pray for surprises in my work. To ask God to open me to surprises. To make me sensitive, like some of my best teachers of ministry have, to the interruptions.
The surprises are the ways I keep wondering into a world of faith and excitement. How poor I’d be if everything went the way I thought–or even hoped–it would. I hope you can embrace the surprises today.
My Blog: Prayer for the Week
Track the meanings of all our unwritten words. Hear our untold stories. Hold them gently. Keep them in front of us.
Make sense, especially when we can’t, of why writing, speaking, and listening matter. Enable us to hear ourselves. Enable us to attend to our own words, to choose our selves.
Make us unafraid of words, to you and to others. May we be patient with what we hear. May we make judgments slowly and carefully.
Help us to imagine words used well. Help us to use them well today. Amen.
Becoming Wise
I read Krista Tippett’s book over the last month, and think Becoming Wise is such a wonderful book. Here is an interview she gave about the book. Read it or listen to it. Either way, get it.
My Blog: Forgivable Errors
My oldest son was looking at a picture on my bookshelf. He incorrectly said that his grandmother had changed. She looks different, he said.
I told him that he was looking at my aunt, not my mother. They favor one another if you look at certain pictures from certain times, but they don’t look alike really.
Bryce made a small error. His brain is learning how to size things up, how to take shortcuts, how to see things that are there even when they’re not altogether present. His error was forgivable.
You’ll always name the wrong person if they’re not the one in the picture. You’ll always see something through the eyes you’ve seen them. Until you learn how to observe, how to envision, and how to see.
My Blog: While Sleep-Deprived
I was groggy, unrested, and driving the other day. It had been a wearying night that ended an even longer few days.
I attempted to change lanes on my way to work and upon hearing a car honking, I swerved to my original lane. No one was hurt. No accident happened. It was my reaction time that was suspect.
The horn was from another car in an entirely different lane. But I reacted, thinking I veered. Of course, then, I did veer. Afterward, I kept thinking that there are things to refrain from when you’re sleep deprived. There are things to do more slowly when you’re sleep deprived.
When I’m unrested, I’m subject to reacting. When I’m tired, I’m subject to the short terseness that doesn’t help. If I want to help, if I want to be kind, I need to rest so that I’m not flinching and jerking at horns even when they come from people in my face.
Michael Washington 