It won’t receive a Tony award or any other for that matter, but last Thursday I saw LEAP OF FAITH, the musical at Blank Canvas Theatre, an intimate little place that holds only about 100 people in an old warehouse on W. 78^th Street in Cleveland.  I’ve seen several plays there and have never been disappointed but last Thursday, even though it wasn’t my favorite play seen there, was one I’ll never forget.

Right before the show started, the Artistic Director and Founder of Blank Canvas, Patrick Ciamacco came out and told us that the lead for the show had fallen ill and instead of canceling the show like they had to do the weekend before because of multiple illnesses, that he would be filling the role of the lead actor and apologized that he would be having full script in hand and further apologized that he had just gone over the musical pieces he’d be performing and hoping it wouldn’t take away from the show.
Utt-ohhh didn’t get sighed out loud, but I believe the audience of about 70 people thought this might be one to escape by intermission.  WRONG!

Patrick’s THE SHOW MUST GO ON mentality for me, WAS THE SHOW.

He shared in his Director’s note:

It’s always been my goal for Blank Canvas Theatre to present shows that are rarely, if ever, produced in the Cleveland area.  We strive to give you, our audience, an opportunity to discover something new, whether it be a recently-written piece or a little-known show.  Leap of Faith opened on Broadway on April 26, 2012 but despite its impressive credentials, an all-star createive team, an EGOT winning composer, multiple Drama Desk Award nominations and a Tony Award nomination for Best Musical—it ran for only 20 performances.  That’s just twice the number of performances that Blank Canvas Theatre will present!  While no piece of theatre is ever perfect, Leap of Faith certainly has its flaws.  But it is still a story worth telling and seeing something new is always fun.

I saw the film, Leap of Faith in 1992 and remember being intrigued by Steve Martin’s performance in a very different type of role than he usually played.  Religion was not a crucial part of my life growing up, and while religion and belief in God play a role in Leap of Faith, I find that the story of Jonas Nightingale means much more.  To me, this is a story about faith in all its forms: religious faith, yes, but also the faith we have in the world, the faith we have in our friends and family and most of all, the faith we have in ourselves.  We may sometimes lose faith in those we love because of their actions or our feelings.  We may lose faith in ourselves, doubting every decision and choice we make.  Each of us has flaws, and we all may feel like we are far from being who we want to be, but with faith, we can succeed.

I hope that you share our faith that this show will succeed both as an evening of entertainment and as an opportunity to consider the role of faith in our lives.  Thank you for taking a leap of faith in coming to see a show that is most likely unknown to you—and thank you for supporting live theatre!

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”  Martin Luther King, Jr.
Patrick Ciamacco
Witnessing what Patrick did on stage that night will never be award winning, but more importantly, never forgotten by those of us in attendance.  He not only took a huge Leaf of Faith, he GIFTED  IT, and for then as in right now, (and I believe a part of my ‘forever’) I’m a severely grateful beneficiary
SO.            .            .
what Leap of Faith
have you not only taken recently
but have gifted another.            .          .          ?
THE WORST STEP OF ALL
IS THE ONE
NEVER TAKEN.          .          .

Mary always, gives me, like so many others, the most essential of Moments:

It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

~ Mary Oliver ~

So here’s the thing about
Moments
We wait for just the right ones
so we’ll never miss them
And in the waiting
We miss them the most

So make sure you look both ways
And especially straight ahead
before stepping out
in the multi-lane traffic
of your life
or you’ll have a moment
that won’t miss you
When it comes to 
M O M E N T S
.          .          .take one

Put this under the
TOO FREAKING PRESH
File:
The other day as I was leaving a patient’s house
the husband was walking me out the front door
and he showed me his wedding ring.

“We’ve taken our wedding rings off 639 times…The first of every month celebrating our anniversary. And then we put each others on and say, ‘with this ring I thee wed.’

They’ve been married 53 yrs and 3 months.

DID YOU HEAR THE SOUND OF THE RING

It’s the sound that could never be replicated from
a phone
a bell
a song
a computer generated video.     .     .

A RING
way too distinct for any of those other
RINGS
but once seen
e     x     p     e     r     i     e     n     c     e     d
YOU NEVER FORGET THE SOUND

The tears in his eyes
ran down my cheeks
as I drove away.           .          .
The Lesson:
HIS LOVE HAS LIFE!
And now.          .           .
so does mine!
(o  u  r  s)

QUESTION:
IF WE ALL NEED IT
IF WE ALL WANT IT
IF WE ALL POSSESS IT
WHY
WHY
WHY
is there a shortage of
E M P A T H Y
?              ?              ?
The World is in need of so very much
right now
and we may well find out
that pandemics
vaccines
boosters
and interventions
come and go
but
e m p a t h y
is still in need
of being
g i v e n
r e c e i v e d

For a More Empathic World,
People Have to Choose Empathy.   .   .
Can it be
that simple.       .       .       ?

Most people know how to feel others’ pain, But they have to be motivated to do it.      .      .

 ELIZABETH SVOBODA a freelance journalist for GREATER GOO, took a deeper look into this EMPATHY phenomena that hopefully, in just a blog post can help us all be a little bit better Caring Catalyst’s JUST BECAUSE!

In the late 1990s, Najah Bazzy, a nurse in Dearborn, Michigan, made a house call to an Iraqi refugee family to check on their premature baby. When she arrived, she was shocked by how barren their home looked. The family had almost nothing: no stove, no fridge. The adults slept on the carpet. The baby—who’d gone home on a ventilator—was in a laundry basket, wrapped up in a towel.

Viscerally feeling the family’s hardship, Bazzy swung into action. She collected her relatives’ extra appliances and household goods and dropped them off that same day. But the impact of her house call lingered much longer. As Bazzy reflected on the widespread poverty in her city, she promised herself she’d work to spare other families the pain she’d witnessed. 

We tend to think about empathy as an automatic response, like a parachute that deploys when we see someone in distress. But a new study suggests that while most of us have the capacity to feel other people’s pain, we are more inclined to exercise that capacity when we have the desire to do so, as Bazzy did.

That means focusing on this desire—our motivation to understand other people’s emotions and perspectives—could be an important way to awaken our own empathy and promote a more empathic society. 

The empathy reflex

Empathy sometimes feels as instinctive and immediate as pulling your hand back from a hot stove. “When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall on the leg or arm of another person,” philosopher Adam Smith wrote in 1790, “we naturally shrink back our own leg or our own arm.” This can seem like a very primal phenomenon. After all, when a child starts crying, others as young as one or two may join in.

But while empathy can activate in hair-trigger fashion, this activation is by no means guaranteed. Your response to a hungry person crouched on the sidewalk, or to a struggling refugee family, depends on a number of factors: What is your own past history? What does the person in need look like? Who else is with you, and how are they reacting to what they see?

In attempting to help people grow their empathy, past empathy training programs have tended to gloss over such situational factors. Instead, they’ve focused on strengthening people’s emotional acumen by teaching skills like “perspective taking”—training students to see things from someone else’s point of view—or how to pick up on others’ emotions. However, follow-up studies of these programs sometimes show that their impact fades over time. 

“The idea that all empathy interventions need to bolster skills is an oversight,” says Harvard University psychologist Erika Weisz. “Most people already have those skills.” 

But she’s noticed that people choose not to use them in certain situations. A Boston Red Sox fan might be capable of empathizing with a New York Yankees jersey-wearer, but in the midst of a three-run Red Sox streak, the Bostonian might not feel inclined to share in the New Yorker’s anguish.

In their new study, Weisz and her colleagues focused on instilling empathy by boosting people’s motivation to identify with others. The results were striking: When researchers fueled students’ desire to empathize, the students were more accurate at pinpointing what others were feeling two months later. Some of them also reported making more close friends.

Amping up motivation 

Weisz and her team, including Stanford University psychologist Jamil Zaki, recruited college freshmen, who naturally have their antennae perked to the social nuances of their environment. “When students get to campus, they have this huge spike in openness to experience,” Weisz says. “We were in a good position to see how motivation works in the wild.”

The team tested three different ways to increase students’ motivation to empathize with others. In one study, participants read a letter that was allegedly from a freshman having a hard time adjusting to high school. They were then advised to write back and tell the freshman that they could work on building up their empathy—and that doing so would help them connect with their classmates. 

This setup encouraged letter-writers to embrace the concept that empathy can be strengthened, Weisz explains. “When we ask a participant to endorse a statement to another person, they tend to endorse those beliefs themselves.” That, in turn, could boost their motivation to brush up on their empathy, because they believe their efforts will pay off.

In another study, the researchers gave students reading material that promoted empathy as a social norm, including testimonials from other students about the importance of empathy in their lives. Participants then wrote letters to high school freshmen that stressed how empathy was normal, promoted, and expected in their community. A third group of students, the “combined” group, took part in an activity that blended elements of the first two exercises, and a control group simply wrote letters addressing students’ academic challenges.

The results supported Weisz’s hunch that ratcheting up people’s motivation would strengthen their empathy. Participants in each study showed higher accuracy when asked to describe what people who spoke in a video were feeling, compared to the control group. These effects were “sticky,” as Weisz puts it, lasting for at least eight weeks after the studies ended. 

Members of the combined group also reported making more close friends at college, possibly due to their empathic savvy—something Weisz says may set them up for success later in life. “Having that level of social integration is really important. It predicts all sorts of outcomes for well-being,” she says. 

How desire drives empathy

Getting motivated to feel someone’s pain doesn’t necessarily involve thinking to yourself, “My friends understand what this person is feeling, so I’ll try to do so,” or “I can strengthen my own empathy, so I definitely should.” Like other kinds of influence, motivation often operates on an unconscious level, shaping our priorities in profound ways over time. 

Bazzy’s life trajectory illustrates how this can work. Her hometown of Dearborn, near Detroit, was rich with refugees from different countries who were always ready to help one another. “Neighbors sat on the front porch and they shared food. Children would go from house to house,” Bazzy told CNN’s Kathleen Toner. “And just the amount of care that people had for each other—this is where I learned to love my neighbor.” 

Like the people in Weisz’s study, Bazzy absorbed social norms that put a high value on empathy, motivating her to do the same. Other research suggests that social influences, especially early ones, can seamlessly promote this kind of value structure. In a seminal study of Holocaust rescuers, those who saved people from the Nazis often had compassionate role models within their families, which helped awaken their desire to serve others.

When the time was right, that deep-rooted motivation inspired Bazzy to serve her community on a larger scale. Helping the struggling refugee family and their premature baby reminded Bazzy of just how many people were in similar straits, and in 2004, she formally established a nonprofit called Zaman International to serve families in poverty all over metro Detroit. To date, Zaman has delivered essentials like furniture, food, and job training to over 250,000 people. 

How to inspire empathy

Having demonstrated that motivation can influence empathy, Weisz, Zaki, and their colleagues are thinking about how this finding could improve empathy training programs. One of the keys, Weisz says, will be for program designers to take participants’ unique needs and desires into account. An effective workplace empathy course will probably look quite different from one designed for college students; what works will depend on what drives people’s motivations in each case. 

If young employees at a startup are anxious to please their bosses, those bosses could focus on sending the clear message—through actions as well as words—that they value empathy in the workers they oversee. If a group of doctors pride themselves on being the best at what they do, facilitators could point out that patients with empathic doctors have better health, which reflects well on the doctors. And because middle schoolers are so attuned to their friends’ choices, Weisz has experimented with showing seventh-graders videos of their peers talking about the benefits of empathy. 

“This approach holds promise to complement skill-building and create a menu of empathy-enhancing options that are tailored to people’s needs,” says Zaki. 

Weisz’s study results also lend insight into how we can motivate our own empathy in various contexts, from volunteering to rescuing someone in dire straits. When you surround yourself with others who consider empathy a cardinal virtue, that social norm will likely start to rub off on you, as it did on the students in Weisz’s trials. And when you believe you can hone your empathic savvy through effort—a “growth mindset” approach to empathy—you’ll be more inclined to do it. 

“People are excited and invested to increase their empathy if they think they can,” Weisz says. “A lot of people think of empathy as a static trait. Targeting motivations imparts lasting changes.”

TRUE OR FALSE
Pssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssst:
The only way to truly answer this
un-mathematical equation
is to
SHOW YOUR WORK
. . .NOW
is no time to talk of
e m p a t h y
IT IS TIME
to be
EMPATHY
(STAT)

I bet you didn’t wake up this morning and shouted out loud
even before you went to the bathroom:
IT’S A GREAT DAY TO MAKE A MISTAKE
IT’S A GREAT DAY TO ROYALLY SCREW UP
IT’S A GREAT DAY TO BOTCH PLAN A
IT’S A GREAT DAY TO BECOME AN ABSOLUTE FOOL
or
DID YOU.          .          .

There are some things in life that make the difference between happiness and unhappiness.      .       .

They make the difference between a society of fulfilled
and engaged people.     .     .

And mindless robots who are afraid to be different.     .     .

Who suppress their creativity.     .     .

Who forget their potential.      .      .

Who ask all the wrong questions
or worse
Who don’t ask any questions at all.     .     .

Who don’t understand why the world
doesn’t operate by the rules
it did when they were children.       .       .

YOUR MISSION
should you choose to accept it
is simply this:

LIVE PERFECTLY IMPERFECTLY
with making mistakes
not a mistake
but moments of
majestic manifestations magnificences
(it’ll end hitting the REWIND BUTTON and living in the MOMENTS)

Psssssssssssssssssssssst:
Don’t look now,
but it’s safe
to look in your mailbox
both virtual and literal. . .
Now that the Holidays are safely behind us
we don’t have to worry about
THE PLEA
THE PITCH
that nicely begs
and not-so-nicely guilts us into
G I V I N G
and it happens from
THANKSGIVING
(BLACK FRIDAY/CYBER MONDAY)
all the way through the last second of the
Old Year
(so we might get that much needed tax deduction)
u n t i l
Thursday, December 24, 2020
when I got
THE-FIRST-EVER-OF-IT’S KIND-PLEA
from Frank Ostaseski

‌ Dear Chuck, We have an unusual year-end request.  Please don’t make a contribution to the Metta Institute in 2020. Instead, in the spirit of Metta, which translates as benevolence and loving-kindness, please make a gift to your local food bank, the COVID-19 Resource Fund, or buy a bag of groceries for a neighbor. Those living paycheck to paycheck or experiencing homelessness are hit the hardest when disaster strikes. They can no longer afford food, rent, and childcare. Right now, we need to provide the basic essentials needed for our fellow human beings’ survival. Months of isolation exacerbates the pre-existing crisis of loneliness which poses a grave threat to public health in our country. For many, this gives rise to a distinct yearning for community. Something within each of us cries out for belonging. When we lend a hand, listen generously, or open our hearts to the 10,000 joys and sorrows, we find ourselves in each other. Please try to make kind connections with those who are isolated. Metta Institute will be fine. We have temporarily eliminated all salaries and reduced our operational costs to a bare minimum. We look forward to receiving your support in 2021. In the meantime, we will continue to offer free online programs to support first responders, healthcare workers in crisis, and so many across the globe coping with the pervasive experience of loss. May you live with peace and ease. May you be healthy and safe. May there be kindness in your gaze when you look within. May you be embraced by belonging. With gratefulness, Frank Ostaseski On behalf of our Graduates, Faculty, Staff, and Board of Directors of the Metta Institutewww.mettainstitute.org  ‌  ‌  ‌

My first reaction:
“THIS IS BRILLIANT”
“You make people give by inviting them
NOT TO“
. . .pretty cynical even for a most awesome
Christmas Eve Moment, huh?
But I know Frank:
I’ve heard him speak several times
HIS INTENTION
is always to
give
add
bless
enrich
start a ripple
LIVE A COMPASSIONATE LIFE
BE A HEALING COMPANION
S H A R E

My Response:
I prayerfully donated to
The Greater Cleveland Food Bank
COVID-19 Resource Fund
The City Mission
a n d
The Metta Institute
My deepest Response:
G R A T I T U D E

W         H         E         N.          .          .

when was the last time you were

A           W          E          D

Maybe the better question.          .          .

WHEN        WILL       BE       THE       NEXT       TIME.          .          .          ?

Well.          .          .

H          E          R          E   ‘     S

Eight   Reasons   Why   Awe   Makes

YOUR  LIFE  BETTER

Research suggests that awe can make you happier, healthier, more humble, and more connected to the people around you.

Starting 15 years ago, scientists have been studying the complex and mysterious emotion called awe—one you might have felt if you’ve stood in front of the Taj Mahal, hiked among towering redwoods, or had your mind blown at a concert, play, or ballet.

Inducing goosebumps and dropped jaws, awe experiences are remarkable in their own right. Moreover, a growing body of research suggests that experiencing awe may lead to a wide range of benefits, from happiness and health to perhaps more unexpected benefits such as generosity, humility, and critical thinking.

In our busy lives, seeking awe may be low on our list of priorities. But we might be underestimating its power. “One simple prescription can have transformative effects: Look for more daily experiences of awe,” writes the Greater Good Science Center’s Dacher Keltner.

The latest research suggests that taking the time to experience awe—whether through engaging with nature, enjoying great art or music, or even bingeing on breathtaking YouTube videos—may be a pathway to improving your life and relationships.

1. Awe may improve your mood and make you more satisfied with your life

Need a mood boost or a stress slayer? Some studies suggest that experiencing awe may help.

And you don’t have to take a trip to the Grand Canyon to get the job done. Just watching awe-inducing slideshows and videos can improve your mood and well-being, according to a few studies. Another study found that people who read a short, awe-evoking story about seeing Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower reported greater life satisfaction in that moment than people who read a story about seeing a plain landscape from up high.

Of course, it’s tough to beat real-world experiences—so in a recent study, researchers took military veterans and youth from underserved communities whitewater rafting. They found that the more awe the participants experienced, the more improvement they saw in their well-being and symptoms of stress one week later. According to a different survey the researchers conducted, undergraduate students reported greater life satisfaction and well-being on days when they spent time in nature, which was attributable to the higher level of awe they felt on those days. This suggests that awe just might be a crucial ingredient in nature’s restorative powers.

2. Awe may be good for your health

Experiencing awe over time could potentially have long-term health benefits, at least according to one study. People with a greater general tendency to experience awe—but not any of the other seven positive emotions studied—had lower levels of interleukin-6 (IL-6), a marker of inflammation (too much inflammation can lead to a host of chronic diseases).

A second part of the study found that participants who reported feeling more “awe, wonder, and amazement that day” had lower levels of IL-6; this was true even after accounting for people’s general tendency to experience awe and be open to new experiences. In other words, all of us—not just people who are prone to experiencing awe frequently—may be able to reap the health benefits of a particularly wondrous day.

However, this study can’t tell us whether awe decreases inflammation or whether people with more inflammation are less likely to experience awe—a question for future research.

3. Awe may help you think more critically

Some studies suggest that awe may be able to sharpen our brains. One study found that when people were induced to feel awe, they were less persuaded by weak arguments than people who did a neutral activity (imagining doing their laundry). In contrast, some other positive emotions—like anticipatory enthusiasm or amusement—made people more susceptible to weak arguments.

Intriguingly, a recent theoretical paper argues that awe may help facilitate scientific learning and reasoning in children. For example, when a child sees an anvil and a feather drop at the same rate in a vacuum, this experience likely violates their intuitive understanding of how gravity works, evoking feelings of awe that lead them to develop a new theory about the relationships between weight, gravity, and motion.

Similarly, a recent study found that people who have a greater disposition to experience awe had a more accurate understanding of the nature of science and were more likely to reject creationism and other scientifically questionable explanations about the world. Importantly, these people didn’t have greater “faith” in science; they just understood better how science works.

4. Awe may decrease materialism

A few studies suggest that experiencing awe may dampen feelings of materialism. The experimentwith the Eiffel Tower story also found that, when given a hypothetical choice between a material good (such as a $50 backpack) or an experiential product (such as a $50 iTunes gift card), people who read the awe-inspiring story chose the experiential product more often than people in the other group did.

In another study, participants who recalled an awe experience placed less value on money than did participants who recalled a happy or neutral experience, and viewing awe-inducing images reduced the effort people were willing to put into getting money (where effort was measured by tolerance for listening to an unpleasant sound).

Why might awe decrease materialism? According to the researchers, the answer may lie in the self-transcendence that awe can inspire. “People in awe start to appreciate their sense of selfhood as less separate and more interrelated to the larger existence,” they write. “The experience of awe elevates people from their mundane concerns, which are bounded by daily experiences such as the desire for money.”

Further evidence for this idea comes from a recent study, suggesting that awe can function as a buffer against negative emotion when you lose material possessions. After time spent marveling at the world around you, misplacing your new sunglasses might not feel so bad.

5. Awe makes you feel smaller and more humble

One of the most profound effects of awe is how it can change our perception of ourselves relative to the larger world. In particular, multiple studies have shown that awe can make us feel small, diminished, or insignificant—what researchers call the “small self” effect.

In one particularly interesting study, researchers asked visitors to Yosemite National Park and Fisherman’s Wharf (a tourist area in San Francisco) about their feelings of awe and other emotions, as well as their sense of self. Tourists at Yosemite reported experiencing significantly more awe, represented their current self with smaller circles (when given a choice of sizes), and drew self-portraits that were nearly 33 percent smaller than tourists at Fisherman’s Wharf.

Besides making people feel physically smaller, awe may also make people more humble. One recent study found that people who are more naturally prone to experiencing awe felt more humility and were rated as more humble by their friends. Experimentally inducing participants to feel awe led them to acknowledge their strengths and weaknesses in a more balanced way and to better recognize how outside forces contributed to their successes.

6. Awe can make you feel like you have more time

Awe may also expand our perception of time. One study found that people induced to feel awe felt less impatient and agreed more strongly with statements suggesting that time is plentiful and expansive than people induced to feel happiness. The researchers speculate that by immersing us in the moment, awe may allow us to savor the here and now.

“Awe-eliciting experiences might offer one effective way of alleviating the feeling of time starvation that plagues so many people in modern life,” the researchers write.

With more time on their hands, people feeling awe reported a greater willingness to offer that time to others—to volunteer their time, but not their money, to help a charity—compared to people feeling happy.

7. Awe can make you more generous and cooperative

In fact, multiple studies have found that experiencing awe may make people more kind and generous. For example, one study found that people with a greater tendency for awe were more generous in laboratory tasks like distributing raffle tickets between themselves and an unknown participant. And people who stood among awe-inspiring eucalyptus trees picked up more pens for an experimenter who had “accidentally” dropped them than people who stared up at a not-so-inspiring large building.

Together, these studies suggest that awe may prompt us to help others and to be more generous, perhaps because of the way it encourages us to focus less on ourselves and expands our perception of available time.

8. Awe can make you feel more connected to other people and humanity

Awe has an amazing capacity to bring people together. Research suggests that awe helps us feel more connected to the people in our lives and to humanity as a whole.

In one study, participants spent time near an awe-inducing Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton or in a regular hallway. When asked to describe themselves, the dinosaur viewers were more likely use universal descriptors (such as “a person” or “an inhabitant of the Earth”) rather than more specific descriptors (such as “tall,” “friendly,” or “a student”) than the other people, suggesting that awe increases our sense that we are part of a greater whole.

Another study found that people experiencing awe reported feeling more one with their community compared with people feeling neutral (an effect that may only hold for people with high self-esteem). Interestingly, another part of this study found evidence that culture may also influence awe’s effects, leading people from individualistic cultures to feel as if their social network has expanded (they feel closer to more people) and people from collectivistic cultures to feel closer to those already in their network.

As a 15-year-old science, awe research is literally in its adolescence. This means that many of the findings discussed in this article are based on very few studies (and thus should be taken with a grain of salt). What researchers don’t know about awe far eclipses what they do know. For example, we don’t know much about how awe affects children throughout development, how awe is related to religious and spiritual experiences, and how awe can be used therapeutically. And researchers are just beginning to explore the neuroscience of awe.

But with increasing interest among psychologists and the public in the topic, the future of this research looks bright—maybe even awesome.          .          .

well.          .          .

one  thing  might  be  as  certain  as  morning  and  more  real  than  night:

before you can share

a            w            e

you’ve got to be

a              w              e              d

A  W  E  D
t  o
A     W     E

(repeat   often)

DID  YOU  SEE  THE  MOVIE  YET.        .       .

It really doesn’t matter.     .     .

I think it should be mandatory.       .       .

It really doesn’t matter.      .     .

The reason I am sharing the clip is because

of the SPONTANEOUS REACTION

that Hugh Jackman and the Cast had

when the song,

F R O M    N O W    O N

over took them.          .          .

THEY HAD NO CONTROL;

Q     U     I     C     K:

what reaction did you have seeing this?

Don’t watch it again.          .          .

What is your REACTION:

Mine?

It took me to a Wednesday Night

A funeral home

5 year old boy

allegedly killed by his mother

buried in his backyard

private service

family minister not comfortable doing the service

 a small group of people

wanting an answer to the questions of

W H Y

W H A T    F O R

H O W      C O M E

I answered by asking a question:

WHAT’S  YOUR  FAVORITE  STORY

Several were told

T E A R S

L A U G H T E R

S I L E N C E

A STANDING OVATION

for a boy who could only speak 3-4 words.      .      .

for a boy who probably never heard a

‘That’a  boy’

.          .          .I was in the car riding home

and I heard this song

FROM    NOW    ON

from THE  GREATEST  SHOWMAN 

and when it got to the part of:

FROM   NOW   ON
THESE   EYES   WILL   NOT   BE   BLINDED   BY   THE   LIGHTS
FROM   NOW   ON
WHAT’S   WAITED   FOR   TOMORROW   STARTS
TONIGHT
LET   THIS   PROMISE   IN   ME   START
LIKE   AN   ANTHEM   IN   MY   HEART
FROM   NOW   ON
FROM   NOW   ON

I   began   to   weep

but   when   it   got   to:

AND   WE   WILL   COME   BACK   HOME
AND   WE   WILL   COME   BACK   HOME
H   O   M   E         A   G   A   I   N

I pulled the car over and

sobbed

shook

shuddered

and I cried for this young boy

I cried for past funerals conducted

I cried for current patients and their families

I cried for past hurts

I cried for lost opportunities

I cried for Erin

I cried for my children

I cried for grandchildren

I cried for friends hurts and disappointments

I        C    R    I    E    D

and healed

.         .         .music does that

S      P      O      N      T      A      N      E      O      U      S      L     Y

Y  O  U ?

I shared the video with a colleague of mine

and we both cried.     .     .

She had not seen the movie

but told me the clip took her to her mother’s bedside

who had just recently died.        .         .

I told her of the young boy.         .         .

I’m interested.        .        .

what did the spontaneity

spontaneously bring out in

Y  O  U ?

Did it open a door

that’s been safely locked

maybe even hidden

never knocked on

peeked behind

noticed.          .          .

what KEY

opens THAT door

for you?

Sometimes you go to Church

without ever actually going

T     H     E     R     E

(and those are the most holy of times)

There are times when

You might feel aimless

And can’t see the places

Where you belong

But you will find that

There is a a purpose

It’s been there within you

All along

And when you’re near it

You can almost heart it

It’s like a symphony

Just keep listening

And pretty soon you’ll start

To figure out your part

Everyone plays a piece

And there are melodies

In each one of us

Ohhhhh it’s   G L O R I O U S

And you will know how

To let it ring out

As you discover

Who you are

Others around you

Will start to wake up

To the sounds that are

In their hearts

It’s so amazing

What we’re all creating

It’s like a Symphony

Just keep listening

And pretty soon you’ll start

To figure out your part

Everyone plays a piece

And there are melodies

in each one of us

Ohhhhh it’s  G L O R I O U S

And as you feel

The notes built

H I G H E R

You will see

It’s like a Symphony

Just keep listening

And pretty soon you’ll start

To figure out your part

Everyone plays a piece

And there are melodies

In each one of us

Ohhhhh it’s  G L O R I O U S

Sometimes you go to Church

without stepping into the front door

of even the most magnificent of

all sanctuaries.       .       .

on a brand new,

f   r  e  s  h

Monday Morning.          .          .

B E

T  H  A  T

S          A          N          C          T          U          A          R          Y

that simply

a  c  c  e  n  t  u  a  t  e  s 

another’s part

in the

s     y     m     p     h     o     n     y

and listen to how it

plays

inspires

motivates

new notes in you

that have yet to be

c     o     n     d     u     c     t     e     d

I  T ‘ S      

G     L     O     R     I     O     U     S

I’m Amazed

I’m Inspired

I’m Motivated

I’m Impressed

I’m Awed

I’m Shocked

I’m Intrigued

I’m Mesmerized

I’m Astounded

I’m Stunned

I’m Astonished

I’m Impelled

I’m Enlivened

I’m Invigorated

I’m Moved

I’m Incited

I’m Ashamed

I’m______________

I’m______________

I’m______________

I’m______________

I     C A N