Lessons for Leaders: Joni Eareckson Tada

As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. 4 As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. 5 While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”John 9

Sufferiing
A word that is as foreign to us

as
Abundance and fullness are to countries where shortages abound
Suffering
A word that all of us want to avoid like the plague
We would rather listen to bubblegum music
celebrate over a couple of beers

medicate our pain

with

booze,

drugs

or

select our friendships based on the good feelings they  bring to us

Suffering

a word none of us want to hear

physician assisted suicide

abortion

mercy killings

all words meant to help us avoid needless suffering

yet,

God  reminds us in John 9

Neither this man nor his parents sinned,

"but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him"

By terminating life regardless of the circumstances,

are we merely denying God's greatest work?

new life

saved lives,

redeemed lives

often are the results of watching God's hands on a suffering servant

vision

dreams

are the result of leaning into our pain and

trusting God that he truly knows what he is doing

with our life

As a Christian we mustn't be afraid of those who suffer

Rather than play god and avoid the pain

we ought to

pull up a chair

roll up our sleeves

and

listen to someone's story

by doing so

we just might see angels in their midst

and witness

God's greatest work yet!



A Tribute to Flip Saunders and what it means for me

12-14 I’m not saying that I have this all together, that I have it made. But I am well on my way, reaching out for Christ, who has so wondrously reached out for me. Friends, don’t get me wrong: By no means do I count myself an expert in all of this, but I’ve got my eye on the goal, where God is beckoning us onward—to Jesus. I’m off and running, and I’m not turning back. Philippians 3: 13-14

I was once again reminded of the brevity of life with the passing of Philip 'Flip' Saunders. It reminded me that life is short and in the blink of an eye it ends.

I think we were all taken aback with Flip's passing because we didn't see it coming. We were told that Flip's cancer was a very treatable one and after a brief hiatus he would be back behind the Timberwolves bench. After all, he was leading the young Timberwolves basketball team in what was expected to be the beginning of a winning season, especially after they drafted some outstanding players

Most of us who were born and raised in the great state of Minnesota were looking forward to seeing Flip take this team all the way to the NBA finals with play by play announcer saying in his high pitch throaty voice "Timberwolves win, Timberwolves win Timberwolves are the crowning champions of the NBA!!"

Alas, that will not happen. Life will go on with Sam Mitchel continuing the work of Flip Saunders and the team will find a way of pulling together without him.

Flip's sudden passing is a reminder for me that my faith in Jesus Christ is what pulls me together in the face of loss. In Philippians 3:14 I am reminded of these words: " but I’ve got my eye on the goal, where God is beckoning us onward—to Jesus. I’m off and running, and I’m not turning back."

It seems that when someone we knew dies we have a tendency to look back to see if we can catch a glimpse of our loved one. God reminds me in this passage that his son Jesus Christ has made all things work together for his purpose. Our goal is to seek and to know Jesus Christ and to make him known to others so that one day in the advent of their death they will look into the Savior's eyes and with a smile on their face hear the words of Jesus, 'well done my good and faithful servant.'

Life is filled with loss. People come and people go. Our earthly existence is only for a brief moment in time before our eternal life in heaven begins. Like a bee sting, we feel the pain of our losses, but God wants you to know that the real celebrating begins the moment when the veil that separates us from heaven is opened.

I have found that the secret to surviving the pain of loss is to pick up the Holy bible and begin reading the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and then to place one foot in front of the other and attend a local church nearby, even when you may not feel like going. You can do this while enjoying life like Flip Saunders did coaching basketball.

As you immerse yourself into God's word you will begin to feel the sense of peace just permeate your body. A peace that serves a reminder that God is in control.

Flip Saunder's life has ended, but your's continues. It is up to you how you want to spend the remaining time, but for me I will spend it knowing my Savior and placing one foot in front of and trusting God one day at a time.

The real story behind the making of Mary Poppins

Israel, the Lord who created you says,

“Do not be afraid—I will save you.

I have called you by name—you are mine.

2 When you pass through deep waters, I will be with you;

your troubles will not overwhelm you. Isaiah 43

As a   child one of my favorite moviies was of course Mary Poppins. I remember sitting in the theater with my family giggling with delight at the scenes of the animated Penguins.  Last night we watched 'Saving Mr. Banks' and for the first time I   got a glimpse of the life of the writer behind this movie. P. L.Travers, aka Pamela Lyndon Travers, began a series of Poppins books in 1933.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/donotmigrate/3562643/Was-P-L-Travers-the-real-Mary-Poppins.html  What i didn't realize was that the characters were  based   on the people she knew from her life.

P.L. Travers was born and raised   in Australia.  In Saving Mr. Banks P.L. Travers, as a young girl, remembers her family having to move out of a beautiful Victorian home for reasons that were kept from her, but one could assume that it was for her families lack of finances  when her dad  couldn't afford to pay someone to drive them to the train station.  She remembers her dad making it a  game while having the family walk single file singing as they went to the train station.They traveled to the end of the line and then walked   to an abandoned home on the prairie that would become theirs. Like the father in the movie her dad worked at a bank in a nearby  town.

Saving Mr. Banks vacillates between her earliest childhood scenes to the present when her melancholy self interferes with assisting the cast with pulling the script  together. In one scene she became upset when Walt Disney wanted to use animation as part of the movie.P.L Travers remembers rescuing her dad from his drinking by riding with him on his horse. 

In another scene she was mortified to see her dad in the make shift tent at the county fair drinking with the other guys before making a fool of himself giving a speech while representing the bank. A quick glance at her mom told the story of humiliation and embarrassment of her husbands public drunkenness and his fall from the heighten stage. 

Her father eventually loses his job at the bank when the demon drink could no longer be hidden.

P.L. Travers recalls another scene when her mom while in a melancholic state attempts to commit suicide while walking out in the river currents only to be rescued by her daughter with a huge hug in the water. Shortly thereafter  her mom's sister came in to help her family care for and clean their home while her dad was slowly dying from his own alcoholism. The aunt from her memory became the model for the nanny in Mary Poppins. 

In one final flashback her aunt told her it was ok to walk  into the room where her deceased dad laid on his bed. A scene that thousands of others have experienced in the life of the dying.

Tom Hanks did a very good job portraying Walt Disney who was able  in the final analysis able to help Pamela Travers to face those demons from her past and return to the Disney studios with a new commitment to bring this movie to life. While watching Mary Poppins on the big screen on opening night  she cried at the characters she remembers were replicas from  her family and for the first time she was able to process her pain. In so doing she was able to turn bad memories into delightful ones for future generations to see.

I guess Saving Mr. Banks illustrates for me the importance of processing those painful memories. As a Christian I know that I have an adversary who will help me process those bad memories.

 I do not know if she or her family were believers, as the movie makes no reference to that part of her life, but I do know that for me Jesus Christ is very real and relevant since my families personal tragedy.

It  is possible to have both joy and sorrow in life. This film has taught me that when bad things happen do what the father this movie did  and  go fly a kite with the kids  in tow.

Heaven: A New Message from Billy Graham/L Life is awesome until the unexpected happens-a message of hope following loss

"Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever." Revelation 22:1-5

Recently, I learned about the loss of a young person who touched two families.  One was a high school classmate and the other was a friend I met  in college through Campus Crusade for Christ. 

Two families touched by tragedy by the loss of a young person no one thought would die.

I remember  thinking after we  adopted our two children how awesome life is.  I thought that as long as I follow Jesus, took my family to church, got involved in bible study that nothing harmful would ever happen to my family.  I believed that life would continue on the same trajectory where at a certain ripe old age my life would cease  thereby passing the baton to my children who now continue life's path. 

 I never in my right mind ever envision one of my kids dying before me. Never in my right mind did I ever envision having to ever having to deal with my own grief while trying to help my surviving child recover from  their own pain.

It was the sudden loss   in my life that brought my faith into focus.  

Until that loss I was one of those who thought that 'life was awesome'.  Life still is awesome, but when we lose a young person or any person for that matter God brings the picture of heaven into proper focus. Whereas, that picture was fuzzy, out of focus before the loss I clearly began to see the realities of heaven after my loss. Whatever tragedy occurs in this life  that claims a member of your family I learned that Jesus is there   to help pick up those pieces and recover. 

The same Jesus that brought your loved one home with the uttered words 'well done my faithful servant' is the same Jesus who weeps with you after the loss.

Many months following our loss I was lamenting over the 'what if's'  What if.I had just done  this my child would still be alive?  After one of my lamenting sessions my son saying to me " Dad, do you think Maria would want to come back after experiencing every thing she had experienced in heaven?  I pondered that thought for a moment and concluded that it would make no sense wishing her return with all she had experienced   in heaven.

That assurance doesn't take the pain of our grief away, but it assures me that my Savior, Jesus Christ, the one who died for me and the one that I made a confession of faith at 18 is the same Jesus who walked with me each and every painful day following my loss. 

I learned that to recover from this pain  I need to lean into my grief and let the tears flow freely until their are no more to give. I got   involved  in support  groups, kept a journal of my feelings and any God moment reflections.  In time I sought God's direction to eventually develop www.soaringonwingsofeagles.org to help others heal from their pain.

Life is definitely worth living following tragedy, especially when the once fuzzy picture of heaven comes into greater focus and you can picture  your loved one enjoying all the joys that heaven can offer. Enjoy life with those who are still with you while hanging onto the memories of the one who died   and have as your  hope the trajectory of your loved one's life  continuing on in heaven.

 Life is indeed awesome.

Every day there is pain; yet, despite the pain God is walking with you and helping you to write your redemption story!

Praise the Lord! He is good.
God’s love never fails.
2 Praise the God of all gods.
God’s love never fails.
3 Praise the Lord of lords.
God’s love never fails. Psalm 136

Every day there is pain. 

A  cancer diagnosis,

a tumor

inoperable or operable

A sudden death by

drowning,

car accident,

workplace fall

heart attack or a cardiovascular stroke

sudden death of a child

Whatever the tragedy God is there with you

He weeps when bad things happen

He weeps when sudden tragedies happen

He weeps because you weep

As you crumble to the ground God extends his hand

and helps you up

to guide you

to hold you

to help you get through the day

until you are well enough to stand on your own

and he writes your story  that brings others  into 

God's Kingdom

What's your story?

Oh those heavy metal boxes we all carry: lessons from the Holocaust

For you are a holy people, who belong to the LORD your God. Of all the people on earth, the LORD your God has chosen you to be his own special treasure. Deuteronomy 7:6

As a child I grew up in an area of the Twin Cities that had the highest concentration of Jewish Holocaust survivors.  I remember through my parents of a lady who was married to one. I remembered that he was disabled and had the concentration camp number on him; the number that all who were sent to those camps received. Across the street was another Jewish family. They were much younger than the other family who had two boys and a daughter. I remember the oldest boy being picked  on presumably because they Jew's. Our families had little in common for we attended the Lutheran church and they did not.  I remember watching from my parents kitchen window whenever the Talmud Tora school bus would pick up them  up to bring them for their Hebrew studies.

As  I read  the book by Helen Epstein, Children of the Holocaust, conversations with sons and daughters of survivors I began to see these Jewish neighbors   through the lens of what it must have been like to be in a new country while grieving who families who perished  n World war 11. 

The stories that were shared with this author illustrated for me that no one can ever run from their trauma simply by moving the images, the pain, into the subconscious mind. This story  are  reminders for all of us of the importance of working through whatever pain we are having by talking to someone about it.

 In the first  chapter she shares her experiences of growing up in a family who experienced the atrocities  under Hitler.

"Sometimes I thought I carried a terrible bomb. I had caught a glimpse of destruction. In school, when I had finished a test before time was up or was daydreaming on my way home, the safe world fell away and I saw things I know no little girl should see. Blood and shattered glass, piles of skeletons and blackened barb wire with bits flesh  stuck to it the way flies stick to walls after they are swatted dead. Hills of suitcases, mountains of children's shoes. Whips,. pistols,boots, knives and needles. At night when my parents went out   and my younger brother and  I sat watching  television, our room, our very lives seemed unsafe and unguarded. Burglars and murderers might enter our apartment at any time and catch us unprepared."

Helen went on and described her family tree, " Our family tree had been burnt to a stump. Whole branches, great networks of leaves had disappeared into the sky and ground....all that was    left were the fading photographs that my father kept in a yellow envelop underneath his desk."

How many times has anyone  of us who survive personal tragedy will look at  our family  tree  and see the cut off  branch of a loved one who once occupied it and wonder why this had to happen?  

I wondered as I  read these stories,"If I were living in Poland around the time of the Nazi invasion where  would I be sent?  Would SS Dr. Josef Mengele see me as weak and point me   to the left  and certain death, or to the right because of some unique skill  I possessed? 

The facts of the holocaust were  clear. Just before the outbreak of World war 2 there were nearly 9 million Jews living in country villages and large metropolitan areas of Europe but 7 years later 90% of them had   disappeared. The  victims of the Nazi  regime included: 5 million were political prisoners, dissidents, anti-Fascists of   various nationalities, homosexuals, and gypsies, and those who were physically and emotionally impaired  who became victims of Hitler's attempt to create the 'perfect race'. 

Helen described this unresolved pain from her past as "the box that became a  vault, collecting in darkness, always collecting pictures,words , my parents glances, becoming loaded with weight. It sank deeper as I  grew older, so packed  with undigested things that finally it became impossible to ignore. I knew the iron box would become impossible to ignore. I knew the iron box would some day have to be dredged up into the light, opened, its contents sorted out, but I had built such fortifications that it had become inaccessible."

How many of us when tragic events occur that are so painful try to bury those memories   in  a little box and push it deeper   into our subconscious hoping it would be forgotten?  

Before she  embarked on the journey of interviewing Holocaust survivors she admitted, " I did not like talking about my parents or the  war, because talk meant accepting that the war had happened and more than anything else in the world, I wished  it had not.....the idea that my mother and father had been forced out of their homes and made to live like animals---worse than animals---was too shameful to admit."

 Before her journey a friend of hers, another child of survivor over the years,had tried to talk her out of her plan to write about others like them, had told her that she was engaged in "stirring up shit  to no purpose."

That response seems to  be the universal idea that we have when  processing the significant grief in out lives.

 In one family she discovered    that they did not  believe  in talking   to the children about the war. Some of the kids in that family still  don't know anything about it and their parents feel this is a good thing. They say, why should they find out? It has nothing to do with them. 

Their children grew up feeling unloved by their parents because their father spent 16 hours every day working. just has he did when he was in the concentration camp. One older Jewish father said he worked hard and long hours so that he didn't have any time to dwell on the images from those concentration camp years, or the family he lost.

One holocaust survivor was described by the son has someone who still doesn't talk about the war...then he added 'he gets jumpy, very edgy, when my mother starts talking about it.'

One person she interviewed had questions about how a merciful, beneficent God could allow millions of innocent men, woman and children to perish. That was the question that never came up in the religious high school she attended. It was taboo. In Yeshiva, the religious high school she attended where the emphasis  was on the rabbinic texts. If you spend all of your waking hours absorbed in them, you  don't have any energy left worrying about troublesome questions.   

"We  never touched upon the Holocaust in yeshiva. No one  was  competent;everyone was afraid it could lead you into dangerous territory" 

Despite the resistance she got from those around her she believed that she always wanted to talk about it with someone. "Talking about your experiences legitimizes it in a way. It lets you know that you are normal"

For all of us who experience tragedy don't we all want to be normal?

When the first plans for the rehabilitation of Europe's surviving Jews were  outlined, the psychiatric  aspect of the problem was overlooked entirely..".everyone engaged in directing the relief work  thought solely in terms of material assistance, wrote Paul Friedman in the American journal of Psychiatry in 1949. It was thought that whatever problems existed were of a transitory nature that would resolve themselves  once the Jewish people were resettled.

Isn't that what we do with modern day tragedies? We set up fundraising arms thinking that material is all they need to get back on their feet while neglecting the things of the soul? One only needs to look back to September 11,   2001 and the  outpouring of monetary gifts that went to those most directly  impacted by that date. 

The inability for people to recover on a emotional level sets the stage for fear/flight/response to be forever ingrained in that person so that there is  one  continuous adrenaline  rush  whenever a perceived   threat appears.  

"One common problem in the survivors of the Holocaust", noted Israel psychiatrist Hillel Klein, " is a profound fear of getting to love someone. Having lost most, if not all of  their early love objects, they now fear that to love anyone means to lose them and go through the pain all over again." He then noted,  " since    they have not been able to work through  their losses, such a  situation threatens  with overwhelming depression."

What  these  researchers found was that as the survivors began to raise families, their problems did not work themselves out. On the contrary, as  the children of survivors began to reach their teens coming closer to the age  at which their parents were imprisoned, new problems appeared.

" We   now see increasing numbers of children of survivors suffering from problems of depression and inhibition of their own function" reported Dr. Henry Krystal in  Detroit. "This is a  clear example of social pathology being transmitted   to the next generation.

One person Helen Epstein interviewed was a Vietnam war veteran who was a child of Jewish Holocaust survivors. He said that he never knew his father  like his friends knew theirs:

"I barely remember my father being alive.The only reason I remembered him because I use   to have to beg  him to play ball with me. Just to  toss the ball back and forth!. He paused  before continuing, " He used to just sit there and fall out. He'd sit there like a fixture,staring at nothing. He read the paper-he read  The Forward in Yiddish-and then he's go to sleep. I use to yell at him, 'You're not my father! You never act like a father to me!'.

Secrets long kept sealed in our metal vaults buried deep within us have a tendency to come  out  in all kinds of ways.  Only when we get the courage of unlocking those metal vaults buried deep  and talking about the pain of those losses does true healing begin. I was reminded   in our recent Life group of such a significant loss and the impact it had on this person many years later.

As  I read this book I remembered the holocaust survivors  from my old neighborhood and for the first time began began to see these people through the lens of trauma. The disability of the older gentlemen might had been the result of the constant beatings he received from the concentration camp guards and the sadness the result of memories long since buried.

Two thing are for certain after reading this book: (1)  none of us will escape this life without  tragedy at some point in our lives, (2) and all of us have this metal box  where we place the stuff  to painful to talk about. We have a choice. We can learn to bury our sorrow, lock and throw away the key to our losses, as they occur, or we can trust God that he knows how to help us to slowly bring the contents of our losses to the surface asking God to reveal to us a trusted listener to help us process those losses as they occur. 

Every person Helen Epstein interviewed were better off sharing their story  which resulted  in true healing. Our  stories were meant to be told. Lessons that God wants to use to help others new to he grief process.

Every immigrant group new to this country go through the grief process. Everything is new to them. Nothing is familiar;     yet one thing Helen Epstein highlighted was the love for the outdoors her parents had with other holocaust survivors. It was the times when they would get in the car and drive to a scenic park somewhere in  upstate New York where they would gather  with other  Jewish families when she would notice her father being filled with laughter, happiness and joy because the forest would remind him of home. She was most happiest when she saw new life in her parents. Sometimes we need to get out and enjoy the nature that God has given to us to help us breath in new life in the midst of grieving