While on book tour with my wife recently, we stopped at an elementary school for her to do an author visit. As we were walking to the gym, the wall display pictured above caught my eye. I was impressed with the quality and variety of these simple stress-busting solutions.
So if you’re feeling stressed, try some of these ideas. If you do, you might find some much needed relief, and you’ll take another step toward Becoming Yourself.
The Bible, Song of Solomon 8:6c, New international version
It’s easy to talk about the power of love, but do I live like I really believe it?
When I read the following true story, it reminded me of the actual power of love. It both challenged and encouraged me to live more authentically from a place of love. I want to grow in responding to everyone with love, no matter the hatred they cast toward me. I hope this story gives you the strength to respond with love in your life. If you do, you’ll make a better world, and you’ll take another step toward Becoming Yourself.
At a 1960 lunch counter sit-in protesting segregation in Arlington, Virginia, Quaker peace activist David Hartsough discovered God’s power in the power of nonviolence:
“Love your enemies . . . do good to those who hate you.”
I was meditating on those words when I heard a voice behind me say, “Get out of this store in two seconds, or I’m going to stab this through your heart.” I glanced behind me at a man with the most terrible look of hatred I had ever seen. His eyes blazed, his jaw quivered, and his shaking hand held a switchblade—about half an inch from my heart. . . .
I turned around and tried my best to smile. Looking him in the eye, I said to him, “Friend, do what you believe is right, and I will still try to love you.” Both his jaw and his hand dropped. Miraculously, he turned away and walked out of the store.
That was the most powerful experience of my twenty years of life. It confirmed my belief in the power of love, the power of goodness, the power of God working through us to overcome hatred and violence. I had a profound sense that nonviolence really works. At that moment, nonviolence became much more than a philosophical idea or a tactic that had once made a difference in Gandhi’s India. It became the way I wanted to relate to other human beings, a way of life, a way of working for change.
My response had touched something in my accuser. He had seen me as an enemy. But through my response, I believe I became a human being to him. The humanity in each of us touched.
David Hartsough with Joyce Hollyday, Waging Peace: Global Adventures of a Lifelong Activist (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014), 19, 20. As shared in the Oct 23, 2022 Daily Meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation (cac.org).
When someone who knows suffering speaks about forgiveness, it’s wise to listen.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1931-2021) spent decades fighting against the abject racism of the white ruling class in South Africa’s apartheid system. Working closely with Nelson Mandela, he won the Nobel Peace prize for his efforts. He and his daughter Mpho Tutu van Furth wrote powerfully on how recognizing the good and bad in everyone, including ourselves, can help us find our way to forgiveness:
We are able to forgive because we are able to recognize our shared humanity. We are able to recognize that we are all fragile, vulnerable, flawed human beings capable of thoughtlessness and cruelty. We also recognize that no one is born evil and that we are all more than the worst thing we have done in our lives. A human life is a great mixture of goodness, beauty, cruelty, heartbreak, indifference, love, and so much more. We want to divide the good from the bad, the saints from the sinners, but we cannot. All of us share the core qualities of our human nature, and so sometimes we are generous and sometimes selfish. Sometimes we are thoughtful and other times thoughtless, sometimes we are kind and sometimes cruel. This is not a belief. This is a fact.
If we look at any hurt, we can see a larger context in which the hurt happened. If we look at any perpetrator, we can discover a story that tells us something about what led up to that person causing harm. It doesn’t justify the person’s actions; it does provide some context. . . .
No one is born a liar or a rapist or a terrorist. No one is born full of hatred. No one is born full of violence. No one is born in any less glory or goodness than you or I. But on any given day, in any given situation, in any painful life experience, this glory and goodness can be forgotten, obscured, or lost. We can easily be hurt and broken, and it is good to remember that we can just as easily be the ones who have done the hurting and the breaking.
We are all members of the same human family. . . .
In seeing the many ways we are similar and how our lives are inextricably linked, we can find empathy and compassion. In finding empathy and compassion, we are able to move in the direction of forgiving….
We are, every one of us, so very flawed and so very fragile. I know that, were I born a member of the white ruling class at that time in South Africa’s past, I might easily have treated someone with the same dismissive disdain with which I was treated. I know, given the same pressures and circumstances, I am capable of the same monstrous acts as any other human on this achingly beautiful planet. It is this knowledge of my own frailty that helps me find my compassion, my empathy, my similarity, and my forgiveness for the frailty and cruelty of others.
Desmond Tutu and Mpho A. Tutu, The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World, ed. Douglas C. Abrams (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2014), 125, 126, 127. As shared in the September 12, 2022 Daily Meditation from The Center for Action and Contemplation (cac.org).
