A sad day in the neighborhood ...

"The greatest gift you can give anyone is your honest self. It's the only unique gift anyone can give. Whatever I did, I would have to be myself, because I believe that is what children respond to. ... It's a privilege to be trusted by children. And I don't take it lightly."

-- Fred Rogers, who died of stomach cancer at the age of 74 on Thursday, February 27th, 2003

How true, Mr. Rogers, how true. And not only do children respond to that, everyone does. Thank you for being such a wonderful guide, minister, role model, and teacher your whole life.
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On a happier note, for those of you who might have wondered what it looked like to be with me at the Rocky footprints at the top of the Art Museum stairs in Philly a few weeks ago on a cold (19-degree and snowy) dawn, here you go. Have a good laugh at the freezing maniac working his way slowly back into shape - yes, my honest self. Also, this morning is my first 5K race of the season, and it will be 50 degrees here in Houston, thank God.

Keeping your integrity puzzle intact

"When everything is in its right place within our lives, we ourselves are in balance with the whole work of God."

-- Henri F. Amiel

And it only takes one of the important pieces of your life to be missing or weakened for everything to feel like it's out of balance and falling apart. That's what makes "keeping your integrity puzzle intact" so important. I put together the attached two slides a while ago to serve as a simple framework for a structured conversation around this topic with clients. I thought I'd share them with you in honor of this quote. I hope you find them both self-explanatory and useful. Today I'm interested in highlighting one particular example of this phenomenon in the area of family relations. I have learned that it is absolutely imperative to have healthy, loving, or at the very least complete (meaning with no lingering issues or resentments) relations with one's family of origin in order to have an effective, happy, and healthy life. Some might argue (although they would only be the ones where those issues or resentments still exist), but I have just seen an overwhelming amount of evidence that this is so. Unresolved family issues tend to bleed into everything else, because it is where we learned (or didn't learn) to love, and the places where we have not completed the past, forgiven those involved, and learned to love again will continually unravel us as we try to build new relationships. The following quote really nails it, and I include it as a special tribute to a particular mother and son I'm working with right now, who will meet with me in the next week or so to begin finding their way back to each other. Here's to you, S. & N. I believe in you completely and know that all either of you really wants is to feel loved by the other.

"Forgiveness of others, especially family members, is a necessary and liberating act of self-love. We are not held back in life by the love we didn't receive in the past, but by the love we refuse to extend in the present."

Understanding the full value of your time

"My time is too valuable to waste it on making money."

-- David Nelson (Papa)

I met an amazing man yesterday afternoon. I was at the beatiful home of some of my newest coaching clients, a pastor and his wife, and I got to meet all four of their kids, and one very special granddad. In fact, their only daughter, Megan, made us some great brownies. Thanks, Megan, I'll remember you on my run this morning. :-) The granddad I met was the wife's Dad, David, a mid-60ish, 8-year retired, long-time IBM-er, and boy, does he know to live these days. He was over the house to tutor one of his grandsons in algebra, which is a regular routine for him, and he was sharing his joy in really leveraging his time to explore, learn, read, relate, serve, travel, etc. In fact, I heard from his daughter that, since he retired, he's let one grandchild per year (he has 11) pick any place that they would like to go in the continental U.S., and then he accompanies them on a trip there, just grandchild and granddad. What a loving gesture (and win-win scenario). After our introduction and a short conversation about his interest in Cicero and Stephen Hawking, he said, "Get your pen and right this down - 'My time is too valuable to waste it on making money.'" Now there's a keeper, and there's so much more to that simple little sentence than meets the eye. I know David is partially making up for lost time with this newfound wisdom, because he acknowledged that he was a busy road-warrior in his IBM career, but he spoke a powerful truth for all of us to ponder, including those of us in the prime of our earning years. This does not mean that "making money" is not important, in fact, we all know it's necessary. It does mean, however, that your time is so valuable, in terms of what it can impact, that using it "primarily" to make money is a horrible waste of a precious gift. There is too much important learning, loving, and sharing to do in this short lifetime to use yourself up in the single-minded pursuit of money, power, security, and success. David gets this while he's still healthy enough to do something about it, and good for him. He's taking full advantage. There is a golden opportunity today for more of us to get this valuable lesson while right in the heart of our careers, and it can dramatically improve the lives of everyone in our world, and we can still make the money we need to care for ourselves and our families, in fact, it becomes easier and more natural to do so. Mother Teresa clearly understood what David is talking about here when she said, "If you want to work for world peace, go home and love your family." That's what David's daughter and son-in-law are focused on in our work together - how to "be" more, create more, love more, ... while "doing" less in the traditional sense. What a privilege to be supporting this wonderful family, where three generations get to bask in the glow of the same life lesson. You really can live your life like you get the profound gift and privilege that it is - and make your time really count. And God will gladly handle the rest.

Life at the edge of chaos

"Chaos often breeds life when order breeds habit.''

-- Henry Brooks Adams

"Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.''

-- Henry Miller

"I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''

-- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Over the last few weeks I have felt repeatedly drawn into more and more seemingly chaotic human dramas, and I've wondered why. Why would I find myself consistently getting more deeply involved in situations that appear so hopeless on the surface, and that are so dramatic and hurtful? Am I a glutton for punishment? Do I have a savior complex? Am I re-creating old wounds of my own in order to heal them? I've asked myself all of these questions and many more, tormenting myself with the question, "What's 'wrong' with me that this is happening?" Yesterday morning, in the midst of several powerful conversations, - one with a client/friend in Austin who I seem to both intrigue and trouble in some way, another with the grandfather of my Little Brother, Brandon, about some of his most recent antics, and one with a client/friend in The Woodlands who called me for real-time coaching in the midst of a particularly troubling interpersonal crisis - God revealed the answer, and it was so simple, and it's left me with such a warm feeling of peace. I am doing this work, which involves confronting what might seem like chaos, because He has prepared me for that and has brought these situations to me to for me to serve His purpose. In doing so, He has not fully explained that purpose, nor has He waited until I was "ready" for it; He has used me, "flaws and all." In fact, I suspect that my flaws and weaknesses have been particularly useful. :-) I am learning that Life, and God, come more fully alive and real right out there on the edge of this chaos, those places I've always been encouraged to avoid at all costs because, "you can die out there." I've learned that the opposite is really true - that Divine Order lives in the very midst of this chaos - that you can experience Life out there on the edge and see things that you completely lose sight of in the artificial comfort and habit of what only seems orderly. Is this not what you were talking about in your Vietnam story, B.E.? And is this not what those of you who have had near-death experiences have told me about recently?

Just as I was writing the above, and while on the phone with the third of the two men I referred to above, he mentioned to me that he had just read two chapters of The Message (a modern-day translation of the Bible) that had particularly moved him. They were chapters 58 & 59 of Isaiah. I opened my copy of the book (a gift he gave me so that I could keep up with his progress) and turned to chapter 58, and my eyes landed immediately on the following passage:

"If you get rid of unfair practices, ... quit blaming others, ... quit gossiping about others' sins,
If you are generous with the hungry and start giving yourself to the down and out,
Your lives will begin to glow in the darkness, your shadowed lives will be bathed in sunlight.
I will always show you where to go. I'll give you a full life in the emptiest of places - firm muscles, strong bones.
You'll be like a well-watered garden, a gurgling spring that never runs dry.
You'll use the old rubble of past lives to build anew, rebuilding the foundations from out of your past.
You'll be known as those who can fix anything, restore old ruins, rebuild and renovate,
Make the community livable again."

That's the work I'm being called to do - to step outside of my own comfort zone (without "going over" the edge), to meet life (and its "chaos") head-on, doing my part, even in my human frailty and weakness, to help make the world livable again, by helping Divine Order be more visible to more human beings just like me every day, always starting with myself.

Don't misread the signals.

"Don't be surprised that quite often people will push you away when they need you the most."

-- Boy Meets World

Whether it's in an organizational setting between managers and employees, or in a family setting between parents & children, or husbands & wives, or between siblings, or even in the case of clients and coaches, it is often the case that people will run away from you, push you away, or lash out at you when they really need you the most. I witnessed this several times over the last week in all of the above scenarios. If you don't misread the signals and over-react, you can often be there to make a profound difference in a life that really matters to you. When we're hurting, we rarely have the capacity to act in our own (or others') best interests. In fact, we will usually sabotage ourselves in dramatic fashion. It takes a kind heart to know that and remain open and loving. When that happens, everyone wins.

Powerful beginnings

"There will be times when you believe everything is destroyed, finished. Those will be your most powerful beginnings."

-- Louis L'Amour

I offer this quote this morning in honor of the more than a few of you out there who find yourselves in the midst of what feels like total devastation. There is a lot of pain in the world right now, and sometimes your own personal burden can get so big it feels like you're going to explode. If it's a new experience, or if you're young and haven't had enough evidence of the above, it can be quite scary, as if the whole world is coming to an end. With the utmost compassion and love, I want to assure you that it's not. In fact, quite the contrary - something new and truly magnificent is about to be born, a new version of you that is fresh and clean and unencumbered by your heavy burden - full of experience and wisdom. The pathway to the other side of this seemingly endless pain, consistent with any birth experience, is often accompanied by crying and screams of agony, bliss, ... a form of catharsis. If you can, relax and let it be. Feel what you feel ... and float. It is how God designed the process. And to those of you who are quite sure that I'm writing this personally just to you, the answer is, "Yes, I am."

Forgiving your own insanity

"It is very easy to forgive others their mistakes; it takes more grit and gumption to forgive them for having witnessed your own."

-- Jessamyn West

How true. I think the main reason that marriage is so difficult is that we keep embarrassing ourselves with our naked humanity in front of one person so often that we don't know how to forgive them for witnessing so much of our lunacy. Forgive me once again, Anne, would you please, and make it as painless as possible, would you?