Sensitivity

/noun/ awareness of the needs and emotions of others.[1]

Yesterday, a friend of mine texted me “Happy Boxing Day!” As you may know, Boxing Day is celebrated by the U.K. and its territories. Historically on this day, poor and working class people received boxed gifts.[2]  Nowadays, the holiday is typically a day of getting good shopping deals of course.[3]

Christmastime in general is identified as the season of giving. We, like the folks who set up the original Boxing Day, look for opportunities to give. We have ministries at MCCGSL where we are intentional about giving to those of us in need throughout the year, including now. And we have an opportunity during this season to tune our awareness to our collective needs even more. 

I present the aforementioned definition of sensitivity, because I believe this word draws us into making our hearts more attune to the hearts of others. Yes, we can feed, clothe, house a loved one. We should. And there are matters of the heart that require tending.

The “heartwork" is first for ourselves and then for others. It is to deepen self-compassion and then offer compassion to others. Self-compassion, the starting point of empathy, helps us to become more aware, more sensitive to my, your, our collective needs beyond what is readily visible. Several Sundays ago, Pastor Lauren invited us to practice compassion through meditation–beginning with self, then for easy people, not so easy people, and finally the world. Isn’t that the work of Christ? 

I share below another contemplative piece in its entirety by Howard Thurman. In this piece, he uses the distinction between pity and compassion to discuss how God enables us to grow our sensitivity regarding matters of the heart healthily. 

_____________

 25. Not Pity, but Compassion[4] 

God is at work enlarging the boundaries of my heart. 

GOD is making room in my heart for compassion. There is already a vast abundance of room for pity. It is often easy to be overcome with self-pity, that sticky substance that ruins everything it touches. My list of excuses is a long list and even as I say it, I know that under closest scrutiny they disappear, one by one. There is pity in me—pity for others. But there is something in it that cannot be trusted; it is mixed with pride, arrogance, cunning. I see this only when I expose myself to the eyes of God in the quiet time. It is now that I see what my pity really is and the sources from which it springs. 

God is making room in my heart for compassion: the awareness that where my life begins is where your life begins; the awareness that the sensitiveness to your needs cannot be separated from the sensitiveness to my needs; the awareness that the joys of my heart are never mine alone—nor are my sorrows. I struggle against the work of God in my heart; I want to be let alone. I want my boundaries to remain fixed, that I may be at rest. But even now, as I turn to [God]  in the quietness, [God’s] work in me is ever the same. 

God is at work enlarging the boundaries of my heart.

_____________

May we allow God to expand our hearts.

[1] “Definition of Sensitivity,” Merriam-Webster, accessed December 26, 2024, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sensitivity.

[2] “Boxing Day,” Britannica: History & Society, December 26, 2024, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Boxing-Day.

[3] “Boxing Day.”

[4] Howard Thurman, “Not Pity, but Compassion,” in Meditations of The Heart, Kindle (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2014), 49.

All My Days Prayer Beads

The tradition of using a string of beads or rope knots in prayer is an ancient tradition and a ritual shared by many faith traditions around the globe. The common connection is the ability to give structure to personal prayer devotion. It offers a way to remind and revisit various areas of focus and concern. Repeated rituals can be powerful as they help shape our habits. Please use the image of the Prayer Beads above and the Guided Meditations below to enhance your prayer life.

Finding the Words by Catherine Kopp

Since 2009, each November I have taken part in National Novel Writing Month. As part of this event, individuals across the United States and around the world strive to write fifty thousand words over the course of thirty days.

Writing is like prayer in that everyone has their own approach to it. Some of us come to the page early in the morning while others can only write late at night; and still others steal a few moments here and there throughout the day to get our words in. Some of us begin with just an idea and let the creativity flow as it will, similar to those of us who approach prayer as a continuing conversation with God. There are also people who require more structure, who plot out every beat of their stories during October so when they sit down at the keyboard in November, they know exactly where they are going. This is what the prayer beads remind me of - having a set outline for what to say next.

That's not saying that one way or another is easier. The words, when they come, aren't perfectly precious little bits of prose that float out onto the page. They are messy and sometimes feel like they are being pulled out of us, but they are part of what we need to say at that moment in time.

The beauty of National Novel Writing Month is that while each of us works on our own story, we have opportunities to come together. Being in a room or a virtual space with twenty other people plugging away on their keyboards is a way to realize that we're not in this alone. Sometimes, one of us is struggling to find a particular word, a character name, or a way out of a scenario that we've painted our characters into. At times like these, we can go to the rest of the group for help. Someone is usually there with an answer that can get us typing again.

When we are struggling to find the words to pray, we can also realize that we're not in this alone. As we come to the last bead in our prayer chain, we are given the opportunity to pray the words that Jesus taught us, simple, yet powerful words, given as a gift to the disciples and passed down through generations. We look to Jesus and we find the words. “Our Creator, who art in Heaven...”

Letting Go by Bill Hurst

I may be the least qualified person in our community to write an article on letting go and letting God. When I think of losses I’ve suffered, I don’t remember ever giving those things up easily. I only let go after doing everything I knew to hold on. My losses are pried from my hands, not let go. As for “letting God,” while I am a person of faith and have been for much of my life, I am also a person of control. Why “let God” when I have the ability to do it myself? Don’t I know what I need? Didn’t God give me the intelligence to figure my way through my own problems? I don’t think I’m alone in this. Our society celebrates self-sufficiency. We love stories of people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, overcoming difficulty and pain and making it on their own. We may passingly credit God, but we celebrate the individual effort.

So, what am I to do with this idea of letting go and letting God? I’ve suffered losses, big and small. In every case, my response was to try to hang on and fix the situations myself. If God was involved, it was a begging prayer not an honest willingness to trust. But as I look back, I realize that despite my efforts at control and unwillingness to give things to God, God has been there anyway.

When I gave up my freedom and ability to make many choices for myself and lived in fear of where I would be or what would happen, God showed me Jeremiah 29:5-7. It told me to flourish wherever I was and quit believing that God was limited to a particular place or situation. After my divorce, I was drawn to a new marriage to a person who continues to teach me about unconditional love. Lost family, friends, and relationships gave way to new, often unlikely, friends and the discovery of a family of choice that loves and nurtures me.

During my recent illness, I’ve discovered a new awareness and empathy for others who are suffering. Rather than focusing exclusively on myself, I realize that there are dozens of people in our community who need my prayer and support. Hundreds of people in our area undergo medical treatments and millions in our world face sickness and death daily.

I may not like letting go and letting God, but I realize that without God, I’d be nowhere. God has led me, taught me, shown me, and kept me in ways that I have often failed to see until much later (if at all). In order for me to see God’s actions, though, it requires that I finally let go and recognize that I need help. I can’t fix everything myself. I must let go. I must let God.

You are Fearfully and Wonderfully Made by Christine White

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the broken pieces with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold. The result is a unique work of art made even more beautiful with bands of the precious metal running through it. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as valuable history rather than something to disguise and hide.

Just as Kintsugi makes broken pottery into a unique, one-of-a-kind new piece of pottery, unconditional love takes the broken pieces of our lives and transforms us into someone new. The unconditional love that we receive is the gold that puts us back together. We no longer need to hide our cracks but can recognize them as parts of our history that have been made whole.

I have found this type of unconditional love at MCCGSL. I have seen people broken by the conditional love of family, friends, and churches, transformed when they realize that God loves them as they are, not in spite of who they are. Where do we get the ability to love unconditionally? Accepting the unconditional love offered by God gives us the ability to unconditionally love and forgive both ourselves and others. In the book of Psalms, David writes in chapter 139 verses 13 and 14, “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful. I know that full well.”

Pray Without Ceasing by Wes Shirley

Music will save your life. That’s what choir director James Cleveland told Aretha Franklin as a child and later as an adult when she was struggling with her self-described demons. He encouraged her with the power of prayer to face down those demons and take back her life. Whether you call them life’s unexpected curveballs, challenges, demons or darkness, sometimes we only remember to turn to God in prayer when we need help. I struggle with this as well. My hope is to use our prayer beads to remind me to keep in constant prayer during all times of life. This includes when I feel God’s blessings shining on me as well as the difficult times when I am lost in the darkness.

The idea of praying without ceasing throughout each day can seem overwhelming, so try to remember there are many ways to lift things up to God. Prayer takes many different forms – it can be a song, it can be a kind act or good deed, quiet reflective time, holding a string of beads/prayer knots, or whatever prayer means to you. I’m going to challenge myself, as well as you, to look at prayer in a different way and embark on a commitment to making it part of your daily routine (if it’s not already).

We all know God answers prayers and does so in several different ways. A few days after I’d already submitted my first draft of this article for the eBlast, God provided me with yet another example of how sometimes our prayers are answered unexpectedly. During my Friday morning prayer time (again not always a routine of mine just yet), I asked God to help me say the right things for a work presentation due that day. Within a few minutes, a completely new set of work-related circumstances popped up leaving me panicked and stressed. In the end, God was able to help guide me through the situation and helped me realize God knows what we need and provides that, despite the fact it might be different from what we think we need or from what we might ask for through prayer.

We have some amazing prayer warriors in this church family and whether you know it or not, they’re constantly doing what Aretha Franklin tells us in her hit song, “I Say a Little Prayer (For You).” It reminds us how important prayer is throughout our daily lives, from the moment you wake up until you go to sleep at night. In James Cleveland’s final days battling heart failure, respiratory problems left him unable to sing and made it difficult to talk. On the last Sunday before his death, he told the church, “If I don’t see you again and if I don’t sing again, I’m a witness to the fact the Lord answers prayer. He let my voice come back to me this morning to praise with you all.”