@Hari

@Hari 5 November 2020

Our Daily Devotional REST The God who stretched out the heavens and crafted every endlessly creative detail of the Earth still rested. Rest is a holy practice that our get-up-and-go culture often neglects. How can we be people that are filled with the fruits of the spirit if we are stretched thin and plain tired out? Prioritize rest in your routine. Rest is holy and necessary to be people of salt and light. Let's have a coffee Hari Blessings

@Hari 5 November 2020

Forgiving Our Children Let's put the forgiveness factor in a different setting now, and see what happens when a parent keeps a commitment by forgiving a child In a literal sense a committed parent cannot stop being a parent. A father cannot unfather himself. A mother unmother herself. Parent and child are forever parent and child. And yet sometimes parents need to perform the healing act of forgiving in order to keep their commitment to be a blessing to their children. For a parent trusts a child as much as a wife and husband, and trust can be broken in any family. When a child betrays a parent's trust, it calls for the same remedy as when husband betrays a wife. If a father cannot forgive a son, he cuts his child off from the blessing of his commitment. Let's watch a final scene of Sophocles' tragic drama of King Oedipus, and see Oedipus disown his son, Polyneices. Polyneices had turned against his blinded father and driven him into exile from Thebes, where he had once reigned as king. Now the son, himself exile, is on his knees begging his father to forgive and bless him: Compassion limits even the power of God; So may there be a limit for you, Father! For all that has gone wrong may still be healed... Why are you silent? Speak to me Father! Don't turn away from me! For your own soul's sake, we all implore And beg you to give up your heavy wrath. But the pain of betrayal is too deep, its unfairness too galling, and Oedipus's hate too violent. He can empty himself of bitterness no more than the ocean can empty itself of salt. Oedipus spits his last words: Justice still has a place in the laws of God. Now go! For I abominate and disown you! Condemned by his Father's curse, Polyneices goes. He dies. Oedipus dies too, unreconciled to his son. Another King comes to mind, another son, too, and another betrayal, but another ending to the story. King David of Israel, like Oedipus, is betrayed by his son. Absalom, like Polyneices, drives his father from his royal city. And David, like Oedipus, is sent running from his own child. David sends his army against Absalom. But David cannot curse his son. We hear him say, in the Second Book of Samuel: "Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom." The general knows only military requirements, nothing of fatherly pity, and re runs Absalom through. David hears the horrible news:"And the king was deeply moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept; and as he went, he said, "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son!" A blessing in absentia! Posthumous forgiveness. David could not dam the flow of his committed love The difference between Oedipus and David is, at heart, a difference of faith. Oedipus believe in fate. David believed in God. Fate does not forgive, so Oedipus cursed his son. A heavenly father forgives, so David forgave. There is still another story of a father's committed love, and it shows how forgiving and waiting can get nicely blended in the dynamics of a father's wounded love. It is the story of the prodigal son, the empty -headed ingrate who cashed in what he had coming of his father's estate, and then went off to waste it on wild living. The prodigal son was a fool, but not traitor. He slinked away alone; he did not run his father off his own land. He was not in Absalom's class. Still, he poured contempt on his father's commitment, and went off to a far country as a son who never had a father. When prodigal run out of cash, saw what a mess his life had come to, he swallowed the dried pods of his pride, covered his bets, and crawled home. What could he lose? His father saw him coming in the lengthening shadows of the olive trees, a bent stick slouching homeward. And he went out to meet his son, loping, his robe pulled up over his knees, arms akimbo, and looking like no Hebrew patriarch with a smidgen of dignity should ever have looked. He swallowed his wasted son in his arms before his son got to the estate gate, kissed his road-smudged mouth, and brought him home. And in the Gospel of Luke we hear him say to the servants of the clan: "Bring quickly the best robe and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet; and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry; for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost and is found. The father blessed his wasted son. But did he forgive him the way a man forgives an enemy? Or did he celebrate the ending of a long time of worried waiting? Something like forgiveness was happening. In the father's heart it must have felt like the healing of a hurt he hadn't deserved to feel. More like the joy of tender mercy than the relief of a waiting that was over. I watched a father cope with a similar pain. He loved his seventeen eye are old son, Gerry, more than he loved his own life. But Gerry wasted himself in the far country of his mind, not on wine, but on drugs, not with loose women, but with harmful friends. He didn't betray his father the way Absalom betrayed David, and didn't squander his inheritance the way the prodigal son did, but was the pain any less for it? And what of the lies that every kid on drugs tell his-or her-parents? And what of the times he sneaked into his parents bedroom and snitched cash from their dresser drawers? Is this the stuff of which betrayal is made? Or is it only the desperation of a young person backed against the wall of an expensive delinquency? What did these fine points of morality matter to a wounded father? So he waited. Stuck with terror in his guts, he waited. Against his powerful desire to wring Gerry's neck, against every self-defensive impulse to send him packing, he waited. He never sure how long he should wait. But he stuck with what he was stuck with. And when Gerry came to his rightful mind, his father blessed him. In the muddle and rumpus of family life, the nice distinctions between forgiving and waiting sometimes get fudged. No matter. A parent's commitments are seldom kept for long without a little forgiveness, now and then with massive doses. And sometimes we keep the commitments by just waiting out the bad times. Let's have a Coffee Hari Blessings

@Hari 4 November 2020

Our Daily Devotional: Do you desire to feel God’s presence in your life? Sometimes disciple and a new routine is the best way to grow closer to God. The Psalmist used the morning hours to seek God. When in your day can you make times to seek God’s presence in your life? Let's have a Coffee Hari Blessings

@Hari 4 November 2020

If We Forgive, Should We Go Back? The first person to benefit from forgiving is always the person who forgives. We purge our heart of the poison someone meanly put there. We lift ourselves from the bilge of hate and dance to the melody of inner healing. We set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was us. We create a new beginning for ourselves by unlocking the shackles that otherwise would hold us tight inside a painful past. Forgiving is for the offended, first. Later, for the offender. Let us suppose, then, that we have forgiven someone to whom we never committed. The critical question is, should we renew our commitment to someone who betrayed our trust? Or is it better, sometimes, to forgive and say good-bye? Take adultery, for example. Can commitment survive adultery? Adultery slices so fiercely into the tender tissues of trust that we can go on with our commitment only after our injured spirit agrees to the soul surgery we call forgiveness. But even if we forgive, we need not always be reconciled. It may be better, sometimes, to forgive and, having healed ourselves, take our leave. It all depends. For one thing, married people make wayward love for many reasons, and with many motives. So we need to know what he or she was up to. Take Chad, for instance; he was married to an utterly committed woman named Ginger for five years and for three of the five maneuvered himself into three separate love affairs on the side. What is more, he made very little effort to hide his philandering. Why would he leave letters lying open in his dresser drawer? Why would he charge local motel bills to his MasterCard? Did he want Ginger to know? Making love to other women had nothing to do with loving them, and everything to do with hurting Ginger. He never missed a chance to tell her that she was overweight, stupid, and lousy housekeeper, not at all what he had wanted in a wife, and certainly not what he deserved. Naturally, he hinted, with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, anyone stuck with an unsatisfactory woman had the right to look for a little satisfaction outside the bonds. Chad killed both components of personal commitment: he was oinconsistent and he did not care. What Chad told Ginger was basically what she had heard from her own parents anyway. She "knew" early on that she was an unsatisfactory person. She swallowed whole the depressing proposition that she deserved the misery Chad made her feel. Finally, though she went to a counselor recommended by a woman she had met at her hairdresser's. And she harvested enough insight from him to see the truth. The turning point of her illumination was this: Chad was the the culprit of the piece, not she, and she should not let him get away with it anymore. But suppose that Ginger had slowly found the grace to slowly forgive Chad. Would the fact that she forgive him give her reason to renew the lease on her commitment to him? If forgiving obligated Ginger to go back to Chad, then forgiving would not be good idea. But forgiving does not turn forgivers into doormats; if it did, we would be better off leaving it to priests. Forgivers are not fools who suffer gladly. They may forgive but they do not go back to ask for more. Chad killed Ginger's commitment; it is dead. Covenants can be broken so badly in human relationships that they cannot be revived. Not even forgiveness can bring them back to life. And forgiving doesn't obligate us to try. Let's compare Ginger's situation to someone else's, Harry's, for example. Harry's wife, Janice, made love to one another man. But Janice was committed to Harry, and to their marriage. Recently Janice had been hired as a writer for an advertising agency in Des Moines, Iowa, where she and Harry live; Harry himself had urged her to try her writing wings there. After all she had written a column for the Cole College Chimes, and being a lively campus reporter was the first thing about her that had caught Harry's fancy. Then Luke Simmons, over at the agency that ran ads for Harry's Honda dealership, mentioned that he was looking for a commercial writer-Janice chance. Her boss recognized real, if raw, talent when he saw it, and financed a weekend for Janice at a writers workshop in Los Angeles. There she was, alone, where nobody knew her, when at the very first session she met one of the workshop speakers, a professional writer, with wily charms the like of which she had never had to cope with his Des Moines, a man who actually wrote for films in Hollywood, the big time. She saw him again at poolside, accepted his invitation for a little tennis before dinner, after which she sipped a little Chablis with him, which she wasn't used to because she and Harry had never gotten into wine at home. Anyway, before she realized what was happening, she felt a fever rising such as she had now and then fantasized, but with which Harry had never infected her. Ere the workshop had run its course, Janice found herself in bed with a genuine Hollywood screenwriter. Saint Paul once said that people are sometimes "overtaken in a fault," which hints that good people may now and then act out of character; what they do is inconsistent with a commitment, but does not destroy it. Janice fell into a fault because she did not look where she was going. But she is not an honest-to-goodness adulteress any more than a woman who fixes a dripping faucet is a plumber. She was inconsistent, but she still cared. When the Sunday morning sun rose high over the California coast, she recalled how, back home, she and Harry would at that very moment be on their way, hand in hand, to the second service at First Baptist, and she was trodden by the Four Horsemen of guilt. She told her workshop lover to go away and not come back, and vowed then and there to tell Harry what had happened and beg him to forgive her even though she knew she was less worthy of mercy than the chief of sinners. She changed her reservation, packed, and left that morning, before the last plenary session, during which examples of the best workshop writing would be read aloud; she left even though she knew that one of her pieces had been chosen to be read. Once she got home and was settled in, and after Harry had watched "Sixty Minutes," Janice told him, trembling as she went, just what had happened. Harry couldn't believe it was real, but, finally bowing to the truth, he bolted for the bathroom, where he vomited. Then he got in the Accord and drove around Des Moines for an hour, stopped for a cup of coffee, couldn't think of anywhere else to go, drove home, and went to bed alone on the davenport in the study. Next day Harry went back to the Honda dealership, Janice went back to the ad agency. She waited alone in her private emotional wasteland to see what Harry would do. After three weeks of Harry's stiff-upper-lip silence, Janice broke down and begged him to take her back into his life. Actually, Harry had been crawling a yard or two a day down the mercy road of forgiveness anyway. So when Janice begged, he told her he had already forgiven her, confessing that he himself had lusted now and then when he took an attractive woman for a test drive in one of his Hondas. That night Harry and Janice made love with a zeal such as they had not known in the days of Janice's innocence. And they began their love again a few steps farther along on the path of kept commitment. Forgiveness for Harry, was a return-trip ticket back to the commitment he and Janice had made to each other. The forgiving we do to heal the wounds in our memory has no strings attached. But reconciliation does: it needs truthfulness as the fulfillment of our forgiving. Let's learn from the difference of Chad and Ginger; Harry and Janice. Let's have a Coffee Hari Blessings

@Hari 3 November 2020

Our Daily Bread: For my Bones are in Agony Psalms 6:1-10 [1]O  Lord, don’t rebuke me in your anger     or discipline me in your rage. [2]Have compassion on me, Lord, for I am weak.     Heal me, Lord, for my bones are in agony. [3]I am sick at heart.     How long, O  Lord, until you restore me? [4]Return, O  Lord, and rescue me.     Save me because of your unfailing love. [5]For the dead do not remember you.     Who can praise you from the grave? [6]I am worn out from sobbing.     All night I flood my bed with weeping,     drenching it with my tears. [7]My vision is blurred by grief;     my eyes are worn out because of all my enemies. [8]Go away, all you who do evil,     for the Lord has heard my weeping. [9]The Lord has heard my plea;     the lord will answer my prayer. [10]May all my enemies be disgraced and terrified.     May they suddenly turn back in shame. Let's have a coffee Hari Blessings...

@Hari 3 November 2020

When Someone Breaks Our Trust Saints may never let us down. But how often do we commit ourselves to saints? Most of us commit ourselves to ordinary people and, sooner or later, discover that ordinary people let us down. Even decent people hurt each other. Sometimes they hurt each other deeply, and unfairly too. There are pains inside any committed relationship for which there is only one remedy: forgiveness. There are also pains for which forgiveness is not the right remedy. We need to know the Difference. The Sorts Of Things That Need To Be Forgiven To put up with some things, all we need is a little generosity. A sense of humor. Some tolerance. Call it by its classic name: MAGNANIMITY. It means, literally,"a largeness of spirit." A magnanimous person is broadminded enough, generous enough, to live with failings in people. Quirks and cranks in persons we are committed to annoy us, but they don't kill commitment if we keep a modest measure of generosity in our styles. Let's say that your husband has a compulsion to tell wornout, boring, maybe crude, stories that embarrass you when he tells them in the presence of your friends. Or that you are a tidiness buff, and your wife doesn't notice that the house is a mess when you are bringing home a guest for dinner. Or that your friend never shows up on time. These are fender benders in the cross town traffic of a committed relationship, annoying things, but not capital offerses. They are the unwanted annoyances that we can swallow with a spoonful of magnanimity, a little big-mindedness. But we mustn't confuse it with forgiveness. Forgiveness is a more serious mercy. Not for annoyances, but for the deeper wrongs that people do us. We also need a simple grace to accept bad things for which nobody is responsible. Things we didn't expect, don't want, but things people cannot help. We don't forgive people for them, we accept them and adjust to them. They are the shadow side of any committed relationship. If a woman's husband becomes impotent because he has prostate cancer, she may feel cheated, and she may have a problem she devoutly wishes would go away. But she accepts it as a severe handicap and makes the best of it. It is not a problem she can solve by forgiving him. If a man gets married with the dream of having five kids, and he discovers his wife cannot bear a child, he may feel stung by life's unfairness. But he accepts it as a deep disappointment and works around it. One thing he does not do is forgive his wife for what she cannot help. Making accommodations to nature, living with mystery in the will of God, is sometimes what commitment keeping needs in a world that never quite measures up to our expectations. It asks a lot of us sometimes, and it certainly can seem unfair, especially when miracles don't happen for us. But sometimes making accommodations is the only way to play the game of life in commitment. Sometimes people keep commitment in the painful spells simply by waiting them out. Waiting is love's less lyrical art. But, now and then, it's the only song we can sing. It is a way of caring when there is nothing else you can do. Love suffers long. How long? Long. But how long? Just long. Forever? Maybe not forever, but longer than we would wish. Longer than we could wait if we did not care enough. Waiting paid off. The only way to keep commitments to people, sometimes, is by indulging their failings, accommodating to their limits, is by indulging their failings, accommodating to their limits, and waiting out their neuroses. Because caring is the business of commitment. But there are other times when only forgiving can do the tricks. These are the times when someone hurts us deeply with a pain that we did not have coming, someone, is responsible for the sting we feels. Forgiving is a gracious way to cope with deep pain that is unfair and for which someone else is to blame. The toughest pain to heal in a committed relationship is the pain of betrayal-the wound of a broken trust. When trust is broken, we choke on our commitment. Betrayal builds a wall between us that we cannot bridge. It prevents us from keeping our commitment, because it separates us from the person who hurt us. And in our hearts we know why. It is because our very selves are invested in a personal commitment. This illustrates the difference between a commitment and a contract: in a commitment we deal with our selves, in a contract we deal with goods and services. Betraying a commitment is infinitely different from not living up to a contract. If someone breaks a contract, we can go to court to get compensations. But who can compensate for broken trust? When a friend tells our secrets to someone who could hurt us with them, she betrays us. When someone we trust brutalizes us, with his words or with his hands, he betrays us. When a partner demeans us and makes us feel less than any human being should feel, she betrays us. When a child we trust steals from us, lies to us, becomes our enemy, he betrays us. These are the offenses that breaks our trust and threaten our commitment. The deep pain of broken trust has one cure, only one. It is the remedy we call forgiveness. Forgiving is love's way to heal ourselves of pain we did not deserve, cannot overlook, and cannot forget, a pain for which we hold someone responsible, a pain for which we blame someone. Let's have a coffee Hari Blessings

@Hari 2 November 2020

Our Daily Bread: Lead me in the Right Path Psalms 5:1-12 [1]O  Lord, hear me as I pray;     pay attention to my groaning. [2]Listen to my cry for help, my King and my God,     for I pray to no one but you. [3]Listen to my voice in the morning, Lord.     Each morning I bring my requests to you and wait expectantly. [4]O God, you take no pleasure in wickedness;     you cannot tolerate the sins of the wicked. [5]Therefore, the proud may not stand in your presence,     for you hate all who do evil. [6]You will destroy those who tell lies.     The Lord detests murderers and deceivers. [7]Because of your unfailing love, I can enter your house;     I will worship at your Temple with deepest awe. [8]Lead me in the right path, O  Lord,     or my enemies will conquer me. Make your way plain for me to follow. [9]My enemies cannot speak a truthful word.     Their deepest desire is to destroy others. Their talk is foul, like the stench from an open grave.     Their tongues are filled with flattery. [10]O God, declare them guilty.     Let them be caught in their own traps. Drive them away because of their many sins,     for they have rebelled against you. [11]But let all who take refuge in you rejoice;     let them sing joyful praises forever. Spread your protection over them,     that all who love your name may be filled with joy. [12]For you bless the godly, O  Lord;     you surround them with your shield of love. Let's have a coffee Hari Blessing

@Hari 2 November 2020

Conflict Of Needs FRANCES: I'm leaving you, Arthur. The only way I can survive is to get away from you. ARTHUR: How can you simply run away? What about the vows you made to me? Doesn't your commitment mean anything to you? FRANCES: Yes, Arthur, I've kept that commitment for twenty-two years. Now I need to keep another commitment. ARTHUR: What commitment? How could you have another commitment? FRANCES: I need to keep a commitment to myself, Arthur, can you understand that? To myself. ARTHUR: How about me, Frances, have you thought of what you owe me? FRANCES: Yes, Arthur, I've thought a lot about what I owe you, but right now I owe myself even more. A lot of people are acting out this script these days. And a lot more fretting about it. It suits the temper of our culture: "I've got to take care of myself." Frances says that she is committed to herself. But what does she have in mind? Is she committed to her needs? Or is she only committed to her desires? And does she really know the difference? There comes a time in every committed relationship when one person has to give up what he wants so that the other person can get what she needs. But he should not give up what he needs so that the other person can get whatever she wants. A commitment is not a blank check drawn on our needs so that another person can satisfy his or her desires. The trick is knowing the difference between our needs and our desires. When we want something badly, we feel as if we truly need it. The more addicted we are to things we desire, the more they feel like needs. A smoker only wants a cigarette, but she feels as if she needs it. A compulsive spender only wants to buy something, but he feels as if he really needs it. We are all in the same boat, one way or the other; we have a hard time seeing the difference between what we need and what we want. Knowing that there is a difference comes with maturity. Knowing it is also crucial to the success of committed relationships. But nobody knows the difference with scientific precision. And we all get confused when our own desires are involved. Let's try a rough definition. Needs are what we require for living an essentially human life. Desires are what we require for living a pleasurable life. Now let's shake our rough definition down to four categories of basic human needs-four things we all need in order to be a functioning human being. Survival needs: What we need to keep body and spirit together. Moral needs: What we need to keep a sense of our personal integrity. Power needs: What we need to take responsibility for our own lives. Spiritual needs: What we need to relate to God in gratitude and love. As for desires, the field is wide open. We can want what is good for us. We can want what is bad for us. We might want what other people think anyone would be crazy for having. We might want what almost everybody else wants. Wanting things is a terrific energy; it makes for exciting relationships. But if we confuse our desires with needs, and if our desires get in the way of the other person's needs, we have a conflict on our hands. Some people sacrifice what they really need to their partners' desires, and put up with the unfairness for years. Then they suddenly discover that its time for keeping their commitment to their own selves, time to tend to their own needs. Which is what happened to Frances. For many years she surrendered two basic needs to Arthur's compulsive desires. She needed self-respect. And she needed integrity in her life. She surrender them both. Arthur had a strong desire to live well beyond their means. He drove a luxury car when he could hardly afford a subcompact. He bought four hundred dollar suits when he could hardly afford a new shirt. He also had a compulsion to let Frances know that she was inferior to him, not as well educated, not as talented, not as smart, and generally not quite in his class. Frances finally decided that it was time to make her move, to keep a commitment to herself. First she tried to persuade Arthur that she had a deep need to respect herself, and that she needed financial honesty in her life. She tried for five years, but he would not change or could not change. Failing to persuade him, she separated from him, to find her self-respect and, in the bargain, to gain some integrity in her life. Arthur appealed to her commitment, and brought God in to support his case. She countered by saying that God had awakened her, as a person aroused from coma, to her commitment to herself, and to what she needed. Frances saw her conflict this way: all the years of their relationship, Arthur had pushed his two desires up against two of her needs, and her needs had always given way. Now she resisted. She had a survival need to respect herself; she bucked this need up against his desire to feel superior. She had a moral need to live with integrity; she bucked this need up against his desire to look rich while they could not pay their bills. And she determined to no longer surrender these needs to Arthur's desires. Of course Arthur felt as if he really needs the things he wanted-to look rich and to feel superior to Frances. Neurotic feelings, yes, but real to him. He was certain that they had a conflict because she pitted her desires against his needs. It might have help had both Frances and Arthur observed four basic ground rules for setting between needs and desires. Desires give way to needs. If getting what I want prevents you from getting what you need, I give up what I want so that you can meet your needs. Needs do not give way to desires. If getting what I need prevents you from getting what you want, I do not give in to your desires. Desires are negotiable. If getting what I want prevents you from getting what you want, we negotiate; neither of us surrender, both of us compromise. Needs are negotiable. If getting what I need prevents you from getting what you need, we negotiate as equals, from strength to strength; we compromise our less basic needs so that both of us can meet our more basic needs. If they had both lived by these rules from the beginning, Arthur would not have expected Frances to surrender her needs. And early on Arthur would have seen his neurotic desires for what they were. In any case, Frances now refused to surrender her needs to Arthur's compulsive desires. Nothing could be negotiated unless Arthur gained a better insight into his own desires. Frances was committed to Arthur. No doubt about that at all. Her conflict had come when she had awaked to a commitment she owed to herself. She had kept faith with Arthur for more than twenty years. But Arthur had never given her permission to be faithful to herself. So she ended the conflict by ending her commitment to Arthur. Who failed to keep the commitment? Did Frances fail her commitment because he refused to honor the most basic term of all personal commitments-the surrender of our desires when what we want prevents another person from getting what he or she needs? Sometimes our conflict is between each other's real needs. Not between your needs and my desires, but between your needs and my needs. The concrete question, then, is this: which need is more basic? Our need to survive is obviously most basic. We need to survive as bodies. But we need to survive as spirits too. If one of us threatens the other's survival, in body or spirit, we may not surrender. Nor may we negotiate. The other person's lesser needs come second to our need to survive. We have no need that presses harder on the core of our beings than our need to be at peace with the still, small voice of our conscience. It is our need to be at home with our deepest selves, whole, one, in unity with the moral core we sometimes call our heart of hearts. To separate our actions from from our hearts is to slice ourselves and others, how we live our lives, they all have to harmonize with the urgings of our hearts. We cannot let ourselves surrender this need to anyone else's desires. Our moral needs are not negotiable. If someone to whom we are committed maneuvers us into a surrender, our inner voice will say, "NEVER," and it urges us to listen. We need to have power, too; for instance, we need the power to make choices that affect our lives. We cannot surrender our power to each other. But power can be negotiated. When your need to be strong gets in the way of my need to be strong, there is nothing for us to do but negotiate from one another's strenghts. We can compromise our desires without surrendering our needs. We can compromise in our lesser needs without surrendering our basic needs. There is no end to negotiation; we have to keep at it as long as we are keeping commitments to one another. No commitment ever deserves total surrender, not of the things we need in order to keep our personal lives intact. But everything else is open ended. We need to care enough to negotiate. And care enough, too, to keep asking ourselves what the difference is between what we really need and what we only want. Let's have a coffee Hari Blessing

@Hari 1 November 2020

Our Daily Devotional: CRY OUT When we call out to the Lord he hears us! When we face difficult circumstances we can become frantic, looking all around for a way to change our situation. The Psalms remind us that when we need help there is one place we can always go to find comfort- the Lord! Cry out to God, telling him about all of your stressors, your fears, your unknowns to the Lord and he will reply! Let's have a coffee Hari Blessings...

@Hari 1 November 2020

Conflict Of Faith His name is Asher Lev. He has a gift, a great gift. But where does his gift come from? Asher Lev is Chaim Potok's Hasidic Jewish prodigy from Brooklyn, the boy with a magnificent gift for painting what he feels and what he sees, the hero of the moving story My Name Is Asher Lev. Hasidic Jews do not paint pictures. They study Torah, they live Torah, the live for the One whom no one can see, and whose face no one can paint. Asher Lev's father lives for the invisible One, the Ribbono She'll Olom. To Asher's father, drawing and painting are foolish games for a Jewish boy to play. Maybe Asher's gift comes from the place of evil. Asher Lev, though, cannot resist his high gift. A pierce power inside of him drives him to paint everything that has shape and form. Two times he paints nude women, and his pictures are hung in public. This offends his father deeply; he does not look at his son's painting, nor accept his son's gift as a gift of God. But there is something worse, much worse almost immeasureably worse. Asher Lev is driven to paint his own family. Especially his mother, who has suffered much because she loves a husband of the forbidding Torah and a son with a forbidden gift. Asher has a need to paint his mother's pain. He goes to Europe, and there he is captivated, obsessed even, by paintings he sees of the Crucifixion. He has never seen suffering expressed expressed with such power. There is nothing like it in the Jewish tradition, nothing that can serve as mold for the anguish and torment that he feels in his mother. He must paint her suffering in the form of a cross. The painting becomes a sensation. Asher's father comes to an art show and sees Asher's work. It is abomination to him. He cannot see it as a painting. He sees a son who has betrayed the Torah, betrayed his people, betrayed his family, betrayed his father, by painting a crucificxion. The talent is from the place of evil; he knows it now. When Asher's father leaves the gallery, he does not look at his son. He closes the door of a cab in Asher's face, but does not look at him. The people of the synagogue also turn their faces away from him. The leader of the synagogue tells him he should go away from his people; he is an offense. Asher moves away, to Europe. His father does not speak to him when he goes. How can a father keep a commitment of love and care for a son who denies a father's deepest faith, his truest life? It is hard for a father and mother to separate themselves from that in which they deeply believe. It is hard for them to see that a child could walk a different path of faith without walking away from them. A man who had a heavy heart because his son did not believe in Christ. He had worried a lot early on when his son had used some drugs and walked an unsteady line at the edge of dropout. But the worry was nothing like the hurt he felt when he learned that his son could not share his faith. He felt that his son's loss of faith must have been his fault. If he had only been a better father, lived more consistently, more attractively, his son would have remained a Christian. He was rejecting himself as a father, and projecting his own self-rejection on to his son. His false guilt led him to feel rejected by his son and his pain tricked him rejecting his son for rejecting him. The conflict was played out entirely within his overloaded conscience. It was healed there as well. With good counsel, and the discovery that even a "failed" father could forgive himself, this man see that what he had hurt him was not simply his son's inability to share his faith. What had hurt most was his wounded pride, his sense of failing at being the perfect father. Once he was free from his guilt, he let his care for his son transcend the conflicts of their faiths. He visited his son, who had taken a job on the West Coast and, for the first time, as two adults, they talked, one about his faith and the other about his inability to share it. And their doubts, yes, their doubts, yes, their doubts. The conflict was not undone, but it was set out more plainly for each to see and feels for what it was. This man took his son's hand and said to him, "I want you to know that your mother and I will always be there for you." The son said, "I know." That was all. No more. It was an illumination; a son could turn away from a father's faith and not turn away from the father. A father could mourn a son's lost faith and mourn his son. Caring between persons can survive conflict between faiths. It isn't as hard on commitments as it used to be when two committed people belong to different sects of the same faith. In the old days Catholic parents would turn their backs on a daughter who married a Protestant boy. A Protestant parents would disown a boy who married a Catholic girl. But we have discovered that conflict of tradition is not the same as a conflict of faith. Debra from Kenya, a white woman, seriously Protestant, European, and the other Joseph, is a black man, conscientiously Catholic, African. How unlikely just a little while ago that two people such as they would make and keep a commitment of lasting love to each other. But they did and they do, though only as they let themselves unite in a mystical reality at the core of their conflict. They had to fumble through dark ditches of shared ignorance; neither of them had realized how little they really knew about each other's culture and faith. They tried at first to be beautifully accommodating; for instance, they would get themselves up on Sunday for early service and then drive across Nairobi to the Presbyterian service. But it was all too contrived. The Protesment larder was bare for Joseph. The Catholic table was too plush for Debra. He wanted Eucharistic drama; she needed Biblical teaching. He was bored by Protestant sobriety; she was leery of Catholic pomp. So on Sunday mornings, Debra and Joself walked their divergent churchy paths; he off to meet Christ in the early morning Church service, and she to meet Christ in the sermon at the indulgent hour of eleven. The church service, became the hinge on which the conflict turned. Joseph had been taught that the Catholic Mass transmitted to him the life blood of divinity. Debra had been taught that the Catholic Mass was a cursed idolatry. Two people, an African black man, a Europian white woman, with cultural gaps ten miles wide between them, found that it was not their races or cultures, but this ritual, in which all people were meant to find their oneness, that separated them. Let's have a coffee Hari Enjoy reading...Blessing

@Hari 31 October 2020

Conflict of Love Walter wept, with deep, gluttural groans. His face was pinched by the pain of a love he could not have. He had fallen in love with a woman. But he was committed to another. And he wasn't bearing up well in the conflict. Walter is a minister, and a good man, a man of sorrows for the sorrows of his people, too sensitive for easy survival in his line of work. He cannot immunize himself against other people's pains; when they are bruised by the slings of fortune, he feels their wounds. And because he is open to their pain he is also open to their love. His wife, Sherry, unlike him, bangs through life with a head of steam heated by fires burning in the belly of a midlife mother making a last-ditch try at making a paying career for herself. So she has little time to give Walter the lingering tenderness a sensitive person needs. He had not been aware of any hankering for last-chance love, but he was certainly ripe for it, and it came to him in the generous affections of Marian, a woman widowed early, and to whose untimely loss Walter ministered. He brought manly compassion to her womanly sorrow; she answered with the gift of woman's affection. He aches for this loving woman. And he is willing to give up everything to be with her, everything except one, his commitment to Sherry. Love can be a terror when it runs head-on against a promised love. Fyodor Dostoyevski, the incomparable Russian novelist, fell totally in love with a married woman, could not have her, and wrote of his pain to a friend. "In all my life, I have never suffered so much...My heart is consumed by deathly despair....Oh! Let God preserve everyone from this terrible, dreadful emotion. Great is the joy of love, but the sufferings are so frightful that it would be better never to be in love." Walter too wished to God he had never known such love. When righteous people judge those unlucky enough to have fallen ill with illicit love, they see it as a vulgar lust. But Walter's love felt to him as pure as it was passionate, and more true than any proper love he had known. He did not feel like a David lusting at the sight of a naked Bathsheba; more like the poet Dante longing for the pious Beatrice. Had it been mere list, he would have stuffed his libido into the gulag of his conscience, and repented of it. His love was beautiful; but it ran a foul of commitment, and the conflict was Walter's sorrow. If I had not believed in commitment, I might have told Walter something like this: Walter, it's a choice between desires; you have to decide what it is that you really want. Do you want the security of a stable marriage, without much fire in it, along with your job in the church? Or do you want your one chance at love? No conflict of commitment, just a choice between what you want more and what you want less. But Walter knows he has a conflict. He has a conflict because he believes in commitment and he wants love. He takes the only cure consistent with his commitment. He breaks with desiring love and sticks with promised love. Spiritual surgery, severence, awesome pain for Walter, of course, maybe even more for the woman he loves. There is no anesthesia in spiritual surgery. Commitment does not inoculate people against the pain of competing loves. Commitment often has to surmount and survive the conflict. Meanwhile, let him-or her-scorn the scans who never felt love's wounds. Let's have a coffee Hari Enjoy reading...Blessing

@Hari 30 October 2020

Our Daily Devotional: Some days can be a bit lackluster or uninspiring. If you're having too many of those days, maybe it's time to be inspired to do great things. It's possible if you believe. However, this belief is not in your capabilities but rather in God who can provide for you something far greater than what you're thinking now. Use your imagination then trust God! Let's have a coffee Hari Enjoy reading...Blessing

@Hari 30 October 2020

Commitments Collide We get caught, sometimes, in a commitment squeeze. Two commitments claim us at the same time, when we can keep only one of them. Commitments bring conflict into our lives. We can't get away from it. For one thing, we are limited; our supply of energy is limited, our time is limited, and God knows our understanding is limited. So we may be forced into a conflict between what we should do and what we can do. For another thing, we make commitments to more than one person. Different sorts of commitments, for different sorts of relationships. And sometimes we are caught in the middle of them. We will look at some typical conflicts committed people get into, and see how-or whether-they can be resolved. Conflict Of Circumstances We can get into conflict simply because we make too many commitments. We can be heedless, even compulsive, about commitments; we can make them without regard to our own limitations, and without asking ourselves whether we have the time and the ability to do justice to any one of them. I have an acquaintance who is the most committed person I know-if you gauge commitment by numbers. He is usually a little Muddleheaded about them, and as a result he let's people down. But he expects them to let him off the hook because, after all he is so terribly committed. In fact, he intimidates people with his prodigious ability to make commitments. He does not let people down because he is too committed; he lets people down because he is not responsible. He makes too many commitments to too many people. But there are also times when two reasonable commitments made by a responsible person simply get each other's way. We can't keep both of them, at least not the way both people expect us to keep them. Circumstances force the conflict. Here is a doctor utterly committed to his daughter, and certainly committed to be at her wedding. But he is also committed to a patient who has heart attack two hours before the wedding. He has to decide between keeping his commitment to his daughter and keeping his commitment to his patient. Whatever he does will let one of them down. He doesn't give up his commitment to either of them; but he has to say NO to what one of them expects from him at this moment. The doctor is not overcommitted. He has made reasonable commitments, but he is paying the price for being a limited person trying to keep commitments in a world where things can happen at the wrong time. Whichever person he chooses to be with, he will have to trust the other to understand, and if she cannot understand, to forgive. Commitment Keepers Commitments keepers need to be tough. We cannot meet everybody's needs all of the time. And if we try to meet them all, we probably will not meet any of them well. I am committed to my students, But I sometimes have to say not to lone student who needs my help at an hour when I need to get ready to deliver a lecture to a room full of other students. On the other hand, that individual student's need may be so urgent that I will give him or her all of my attention even if I have to stumble through my lecture. My limits force me to choose between specific claims that people have on me at a moment when their claims conflict with each other. I did not create my limits. Nor did I create the conflict. So, while I may regret having to make the choice, I feel no guilt for the choice I make. Let's have a coffee Hari Enjoy reading...Blessing

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@Hari 29 October 2020

Our Daily Devotional: SHARE YOUR BURDEN: Life was not meant to be done alone. We are communal creatures. We were created both to be in community with one another but also to be in a relationship with God. When we go through tough times, we need a tribe of trusted others to rely on. Be willing to share your burdens with others and be open to help others when they are in need of a friend to lean on too! Let's have a coffee Hari Enjoy life today

@Hari 29 October 2020

Parents Are Committed To Their Children's Freedom From Their Commitment Here is the paradox of parental commitments. By making their commitment, parents control a child's life. But they are, by the same act, committed to free the child from their control. Personal freedom is power. An inner power for writing one's own story. It is the power to write our own real story out of the raw material we were given without being asked. We are all a little scared when we set our children free to write their own stories. For they may use their freedom to walk a road we never walked, nor wanted them to walk. Their story may not be at all like our stories, or stories we ever dreamed of writing for ourselves. But when they write it responsibly, and honestly, out of the raw material we gave them, we can be thankful that we have kept our commitment to them. Some parents have to push a child into freedom. A kid sometimes wants the freedom of options, consumer's freedom, but doesn't dare take on the freedom of inner power, the responsible person's freedom. So in order to keep our commitment to our child, we may have to shove him or her into freedom, the way a mother bear, at the right moment, pushes her cubs away. A father suffer through this apparent contradiction in commitment. He felt stuck with an older child, and wanted him out of the house. But the son was afraid of freedom; the prospect of being responsible for himself immobilized him. But he did want a consumer's freedom, the choice of things to own and enjoy. So he climbed the walls to get freedom of choice, and he burrowed himself inside the family to escape freedom for responsibility. Meanwhile, he hated his own dependence and hated his father for pushing him toward freedom. Pushing children away from our controlling commitment is not a failure of commitment; it is the final step in commitment keeping. We don't stop caring, God knows. But we start caring in a style that matches their readiness for freedom. Ideally, we shun the special grace God has for imperfect parents committed to imperfect children in an imperfect world. Let's have a coffee Hari Enjoy reading...Blessing

@Hari 28 October 2020

Our Daily Devotional: It's almost expected for our friends to be loyal and our family to help but there is a precursor to this that we don't always think about. These relationships need to be nurtured. Have you reached out to a friend lately to offer some help or simply meet for lunch? Make an effort to engage in an activity together with a friend or family member. Building your relationships will not go unnoticed over time. Let's have a coffee Hari Enjoy life today

@Hari 28 October 2020

Parents Are Committed To Tell Their Children What Is Worth Dying For Children have a right to know what their parents believe is worth living for. And dying for. Parents are committed to telling them. It's not as though parents always know what is worth dying for. God knows, we give our children a lot of wrongheaded notions. But if we do not tell our children what we believe matters most of all, we tell them that nothing in life matters much more than anything else. We are talking about character here, for one thing, about being a good person, not looking good, not feeling good, but being good, which is something else again. Character is about being a person who can spot the difference between honesty and hype even when experts tell us a lie for a good cause. It is about being a person who can smell a seduction for what it is even when it comes as an offer nobody could refuse. It is about being a person who has a feel for when something is wrong even when it's legal. And above all, it is about being a person who knows what the real difference is between loving people and using people. Where the nuts and bolts of right and wrong fall into place inside the complicated issues that bedevil modern times is really not all that important here; we will forever dispute about them. What counts most is character, becoming a person with an ingrained sense for what is fair and what is helpful in the ways people treat each other. Let us say that a child asks whether she is permitted to do this or that. The parent says "NO." The child asks, "Why not?." The parent says, "Because it isn't right." That's all. Explanations can come later. So can the arguments. Repeat the theme in any of its boundless variations, and the child will get to know one thing for sure: her parents believe that being right is more important than being rich, and that doing right is all about being the sort of person other people can count on to keep some decency and fairness and kindness alive in a world where, when people are not good, life goes to the dogs. That being settled, a child is free to go on to write her own story, but whatever her story turns out to be, it will have a thread of decency and fairness that will tie together the loose pieces of the plot. We are also talking about faith, about our restless heart seeking its peace with a personal power of love beyond what anybody can manage on earth. Everybody believes in something. Our children have a right to know what we believe and every parent is committed to telling them. Before we put fork to plate at any meal in the house, we folded our hands, closed our eyes, bowed our heads, and say: Lord bless this food, Amen. It is our daily practise, that really matters to all of us. We were being given the raw material for our story, we were learning who we were; and however our stories would end one day, they would have to come to terms with every meal time when we put our scrawny heads down to pray. My mother believed that her life and ours were nestled in the unseen arms of the Lord, that every good thing in life came from him, that whatever we took from him needed his Blessing it it was going to do us any real good, and that we should be ever thankful for whatever gifts his tender mercies assigned to us. What matters was that it was not only what she believed in her own private soul, but what her family believed before her, to the third and fourth generation, the family in whose line we located our being. What mattered is that in those prayers we were learning who we were, where we came from, and where we were going. Let's have a coffee Hari Enjoy reading...Blessing

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@Hari 28 October 2020

Parents Are Committed To Their Children's Survival Needs Committed love goes into overdrive when it comes to things children need. How many good nights' sleep have we surrendered? How many dinners out, how many new cars, how many luring investments, how many unworried hours-things we wanted badly, things we figured we had a right to-how many have we surrendered to what we thought were our children's needs? But it is not always easy to tell the difference between a Child's desires and a child's needs. What does every ordinary child need? Special children need special things: a handicapped child needs things to compensate for nature's oversight, a gifted child needs special special things to exploit nature's Blessing. But there are some things-call them survival needs-all children must have. Survival needs are what every child requires to keep body and soul together: food, liquid, elimination, warmth, and medication, and education. But the heart has survival needs too: the comfort of another's voice, a song, a snuggle, a holding, a cuddling, and, above all, a reassuringly dependable presence. We do not have to dwell on survival needs; we all know that any parent is committed to meeting them. Some parents are not able to keep this minimal commitment. They are too poor. They don't have enough food to give their children. They don't have a house in which their children can live. So when we talk about personal commitments on this primal level, we are also talking about politics and economics. Some parents need a lot of help. Commitment keeping in the family ultimately becomes a political issue. But children need more than sheer survival. They need what it takes to get them started on their path of growth. Growth is not an optional luxury. When we stop growing we stop living-at least we stop living as human beings with a life's call to become what God has put it in us to be. So growth needs are, after all, survival needs. And every parent takes on a commitment to get a child growing. How much and how far? Nobody can say for sure. It depends on a child's potential, on the family money tree, on the needs of all the other kids in the family. We cannot be specific. Growth is a matter of degree; every child has his or her own limits. Let's have a coffee Hari Enjoy reading...Blessing

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@Hari 27 October 2020

Our Daily Devotional Life is serious enough we need to be reminded to laugh together to help ease the tension that tends to build up in our lives. Laughter is a great reminder of the joy that is hidden in our day-to-day lives. In the Bible, Nehemiah, encourages the people by telling them that the joy of the Lord is their strength. Strength is not found in being so busy or so put together that you don’t have time to crack a smile. Strength comes when we slow down long enough to experience God’s joy in our lives. If you are at your brink, pause and remember the last time you laughed. Commit to doing things that will help put a smile on your face! Let's have a coffee Hari Enjoy Life Today

@Hari 27 October 2020

Our Daily Devotional Life is serious enough we need to be reminded to laugh together to help ease the tension that tends to build up in our lives. Laughter is a great reminder of the joy that is hidden in our day-to-day lives. In the Bible, Nehemiah, encourages the people by telling them that the joy of the Lord is their strength. Strength is not found in being so busy or so put together that you don’t have time to crack a smile. Strength comes when we slow down long enough to experience God’s joy in our lives. If you are at your brink, pause and remember the last time you laughed. Commit to doing things that will help put a smile on your face! Let's have a coffee Hari Enjoy Life Today

@Hari 27 October 2020

Commitment Parents Make Are Self-Interested Parents tend to congratulate themselves, maybe pity themselves, for their committed love, as if a parent's commitment were pure self-giving devotion. But if isn't. We slip a goodly dose of self-serving into our caring commitment. There is song in the church that goes: I gave, I gave my life for thee. What hast thou given for me, for me? I gave, I gave my life for thee. What hast thou given for me? It was about God's commitment to us. But it made us feel that God might have been asking too much in return, wanting more from us than we could give. How could we ever pay him back? Can anyone ever get even with God? Some parents have their own version of the gospel song: I gave, I gave the best years of my life for thee. What have you given to me, to me? What have you given to me? Not even a phone call! The tone of it is, when parents commit themselves to their children, they give and give and give, all for their kids, only for them. Why can't they see how much they owe us? But in our hearts we know the truth. We know that when we make our commitments to our children, we expect a good return on our investment. But the time we hold the red, wrinkled creature in our arms, we are dreaming dreams we know will make us happy. And some of us let them know too soon and too often that we don't want to be disappointed. Now and then, seduced by pious illusion, what we were doing was what every parent on God's procreative planet does: we were following an inner nudge to give our marriage, and our lives, a deeper meaning and richer love than we could give it by ourselves. I can't remember doing much of anything for my children that wasn't embroidered with a selfish stitch. From the first day they got inside my range, they were expected to bring me my fair share of fatherly gladness. When I pushed them to do well, I wanted to enjoy being the father of children who did well for themselves. Some parents expect their children to provide them with immortality. Be their life beyond the grave. Every parent keeps a self-serving dream in the shadows of his or her unconditional commitment. No shame in it. And if we know that our free will offerings to the kids are investments in our own Blessing, we can keep a sense of humor should the Blessing ever be shrouded in sorrows. Parents commitments to their children are unlike any other commitment we make. No free commitment we make to any other person, is so caring and so controlling as a parent's commitment to a child. No other commitment is so self-serving and so self-giving than a parents. Let's have a coffee Hari Enjoy reading...Blessing

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@Hari 27 October 2020

Commitments Parents Make Are Unconditional People inside the family circle make unconditional commitments to be there for each other, no matter what. I am talking about a real family. I am talking about the family feeling that managers whip at the office. The way they do, for instance, at Delta Airlines, where the Delta Family Feeling is a corporate slogan meant to stimulate a chummy attitude among the people who work there. In her book DIVORCING THE CORPORATION, Jacqueline Plumez cites managers of fortunes 500 companies as saying things such as this: "I love my company. They are the family I turn to when I'm in trouble." And she notes that one of the keys to getting on Fortune's list of the One Hundred Best Companies to Work For is to "make people feel that they are part of a...family." The quickest way to tell the difference between the boss at Delta and a parent at home is to imagine this scenario. A man gets a form letter telling him that his services to the family are no longer needed. Good-bye, enjoy your severance pay. But he takes the letter to his supervisor and tearfully whines "You can't do this to me; I'm family." The supervisor pats him on the shoulder in fatherly fashion, but answers,"No, you used to be a family. Now you are fired." In committed families nobody gets fired. Mothers and fathers cannot unparent themselves. Not the way a husband can unhusband himself. Or the way a friend can stop being a friend. A father may chuck his daughter out of the house, he might dispossess a child of an inheritance, he can refuse to accept phone calls from a wandering rebel. But he cannot make the child into a nonchild of his. The bonding is permanent. And the commitment is meant to match. Not everyone who helps to make a child can make a parent's commitment. Now and then two people are led by tragic necessity to allow other people to make the commitment, to be the parents of their child. Real life does not always fit the mold of nature. But the exception only highlights the basic reality about every family: a family is created when a commitment is made, not when a baby is born. Blood does not make a family. Nobody in my immediate family is blood kin to any of the others. But we are a family. It is unconditional commitment that turns us into a family. What do I mean by unconditional? I mean that no child needs to meet a certain standard to qualify for his parent's commitment. When a new parent says to a baby, "I am the person who will be there for you," there is no fine print that qualifies the promises. No committed parent ever say, "I'll be there for you as long as you measure up to my expectations." When we accept a child as ours, we say, in effect, "Nothing you could ever do and nothing you could ever become could disqualify you from my commitment." There is no other commitment like this one for unconditional. It is truly a "no matter what" relationship, as close to God's commitment as we can get-and what a gift it is! The "no matter what" No deductibles. No matter that he or she is destined to be a pain in the neck. No matter that the best of parents sometimes end up murmuring that their children are not exactly what they had in mind when they prayed for some fruit from the family tree. Our daughters may choose values we despise and may despise values we cherish. Our sons may worship strange deities, of whom we have never heard. They may fail at most things they try or not try much of anything. One may fall deep into depression and one may fly high on drugs. We may almost die of fear for them, choke on our anger at them, weep at the pain they suffer, and go broke trying to pay their way. No matter. Our commitment is for the kind of forever that gives a child permanent membership in our caring ensemble of people we call a family. Let's have a coffee Hari Enjoy reading...Blessing

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@Hari 26 October 2020

Our Daily Devotional: The second part is the challenge to all. Being loving is good but is your action the result of giving or getting? One way of showing your love is by encouragement. Encourage her in her good deeds even if it diminishes your pride. Put her first always like God did for us. Let's have a coffee Hari Enjoy life today

@Hari 26 October 2020

The Promises We Make to Our Children Fred Fergusen is getting along in years, is a father of three fine grown-up children, and has a lot of reasons to feel good about the job he did fathering them. But every now and then he gets smitten by a notion that he has let his children down. It is hard for him to put his finger on what it was he failed at. He remembers moments when he lost his temper, like the time in the station wagon, after a long, hot day of driving: he couldn't find the camping site where the Auto Club map said one was supposed to be, the kids got silly and he blew up. Mostly, though, he just remembers personal qualities he didn't have, and wished he had had, like a sense of humor, or more patience and understanding, or enough character to inspire his children to look up to him and want to be like him. He knows his feelings are out of line with reality. Whatever it was he failed at, his failures look like the marks of ordinary humanity, and they could not have hurt his children much. All three of them are really doing OK, not stars, but responsible adults, plowing their own furrows through the fields they either choose for themselves or drifted into, holding down steady jobs and, all in all, doing all the right at being decent human beings in a world that is not as decent as they. And yet he has this stubborn sense that he failed to keep his commitment to the people in his life who needed him most. I think I can understand Fred, because I have had the same feelings he has, unspecific, blurred disquiet at not having done as a job at being a father as I ought to have done. Other parents tell me they have the same feelings. In fact, the more serious they are about their commitment to their children, the harder they seem to judge themselves. Not much wonder either; taking on the job of bringing up children is a huge, lumpy commitment that has few precise terms. How could we expect to feel sure we have kept our commitment well? The object of this chapter is to put parental commitment into simple, elemental terms: what kind of commitment does a parent make to a child? I am not talking about the promises that some privileged parents make to their privileged children. College tuition in the bank by the time the child is seventeen. A trust fund, divided equally. A nice spot in the family business. These are options; you can choose them if you happen to be well enough off to commit yourself to them. I am talking about the commitment that comes as standard equipment with parenting. The kind that matches the job description that comes with taking a child into our care and calling her-or- him-our own, no matter how the child happens to arrive. I will be unwrapping, one by one, the essential components lie in the minds and hearts of the parents who make the commitment. Then come five things that parents commit themselves to do for their children. Any thought's? Hari Enjoy reading...Blessing

@Hari 25 October 2020

Our Daily Devotional When we are facing the heartache of failure in our lives; fear can easily become our companion. We can begin to fear the future, we can become afraid of continuing to get things wrong, and the list goes on. The simple truth that when we are afraid, we should trust God can help give us proper perspective in these difficult moments. God is with you in this trial and will not leave or forsake you- no matter what the future holds! Let's have a coffee Hari Enjoy your day

@Hari 25 October 2020

How Do We Know if it's Right To Quit? How do we know when it is right to leave our commitment? When it has become impossible to go on? When going on has lost its point? How we know? The answer is, If our hearts are right, we will know. Ah, our hearts, yes, but our hearts pull the wool over our eyes. We cannot count on our hearts; our hearts are sneaky things. And yet they are the best we have. So the important thing is to keep them tuned to caring. To begin with, we could change the mood of the question, make it more positive. Instead of asking how we know when we cannot keep our commitment any longer, we could ask how we know that we should keep on trying. One thing that helps is to get close to honest people who have faced up to and worked through tougher problems than ours, close enough so that we can see into their secrets for successful caring and coping. Its a little like knowing how to tell great art from fakery; if you look at real art often enough, you will see the difference, and your heart will not trick you. In the same way, if we know enough people who have learned to swim together through seas of trouble, we will have a better eye for hints of possibilities within our own troubled waters. But if we are to learn by looking at examples of the art of commitment keeping, we need people around us who will let us look into their lives and see the truth about them. We need to get inside a community of real people, honest people, who are willing to let us see how they struggled against the odds to keep their commitments. Who keep hope alive because they keep on caring enough to want to be hopeful. Or people too who were once defeated, divorced, and are now doing better at it the second time. Our hearts learn the truth from honest strugglers who dare to reveal their own struggles, including their failures as well as successes. I don't mean a group where people at their fortieth anniversary muse-in a fuzzy, nostalgic way-that it has not always been easy for them to achieve their graying bliss. I mean a group in which people dare to talk in the present tense, and say something like, "Jane and I are having a very devil of a time of it these days, and we're not sure we can stay together, but we don't want to quit trying, not yet. " I mean a community in which struggles dare to ask other strugglers how they are doing it. If we are going to help each other in the challenge of commitment keeping, we will have to risk being transparent to each other. The only people who were ever truly helpful to Che and me were the ones who let us see and feel the inside story of their struggles, including their defeats and their compromises, and how they turned commitment keeping into an adventure of imperfect, but caring, love. They helped us in two ways: and second, by letting us know that we were not alone in our efforts to turn commitment keeping into creative partnership. In short, one way to explore the possibilities that our situation is not as hopeless as we may think it is, in to get into a commitment keepers. An honest community. A transparent community. Only a community of transparent strugglers can keep our hearts honest when we wonder whether the time has come to fold our cards and walk away from commitment. A simple summary of this chapter will do: commitment to marriage is meant to be forever, but what is meant to be cannot always be. Not in the real world of weak and needy and faulty folk. Unconditional commitments can be undone by incurable conditions. We weave the tapestry of out commitments with the threads of our wobbly wills. And in this vale of vile winds, our most beautiful tapestries can be torn to shreads. We are all flawed people trying to keep our commitments to flawed people. And sometimes it gets too much for some of us. The more reason, then, to remember that when we want to know where we are going, it helps to go back to where we began. Back to commitment-to the hopeful proposition that, with care, we may be able to make things better than they are, good enough to up with, at least, and maybe even good enough to translate the rigors of commitment into a modest harvest of happiness. Let's have a coffee Hari Enjoy reading...Blessing

@Hari 24 October 2020

When Do We Know We Made An Unwise Choice? A lifetime commitment is often scuttled at the launching because we are not smart about the person to whom we make it. A person doesn't release himself or herself from a lifetime commitment simply because he or she has no grit, fidelity, no character. People often leave a commitment because the person they made a commitment to was the sort of person doomed to be trouble. I said before that we don't know what we are doing when we make a lifetime commitment. It is just as true that few of us know who we really are when we make one. Or who the other person is. Two people fall in love. Crazily, wondrously, insanely, beautifully. Blind to who each other really is. How can they know? They are lunatics-for the time being. They come from different schools of life. They have different parents, had different childhoods. They have developed diffirent levels of tolerance to pain. They have different religious and different morals, different ways of coping with disappointment, different talents for hurting each other, different sets of neuroses. The message in all this is that we need to be wiser, more careful, more understanding, when making a lifetime commitment. Neil Warren, a psychologist with twenty of I very ears experience in counseling people whose commitments are in trouble, gave me a list of the most common mistakes people make when they make lifetime commitments: They commit too quickly. They commit before they are mature. They have unrealistic expectations. They commit while drunk on romantic love. They have a wretched self-image. They don't know how to communicate. They don't share the same faith or values. Unwise choice, dubious commitment. We do make commitment keeping hard for ourselves later by the choices we make earlier. In fact, we can make it next to impossible in the end by making bad commitments at the start. But there is something else worth thinking about: a mistake at the start does not have to mean failure at the finish. None of us marries the one perfect person for us; to be honest, there is no such person. But most of us can accommodate ourselves to the less-than-perfect person we did marry, even if we were not swing straight when we married him-or her. Often when two people decide that they married the wrong person, they are really refusing to let each other be the special individuals they are. They hold the thoroughly wrongheaded notion that two committed people ought to be totally alike. And they also believe that if people remain very different from each other, they have cause to split. When I think of people I know who have not only kept their commitment, but who have developed an unusually good relationship over the years, my mind gets a fix on two friends who are as different from one another as two people could possibly be. He is spiritual; she is earthly. He is detached; she loves to be intimate with people. He is dependent; she could manage almost anything by herself. He is offended by vulgarity; she laughs at anything that is funny. He is always careful; she likes to take risks. He sees life in blacks and whites; she embraces all the grays and shadows of life. He hates conflict; she dares take on anyone. They are very different. What has kept their commitment alive in spite of all the stress of their differences? It has been the creative power of the care they have nourished for each other even when their differences have pushed them apart. But they do not choke each other with care. Just the opposite. They care by giving each other permission to be the different sort of person each of them is. They care enough to leave each other alone, enough to celebrate the gifts each brings within his or her character. These two people have turned commitment into joy, mostly because they have gradually learned how to set each other free. It took me long too discover the difference between active caring and permissive caring. In active caring we do things to help someone. In permissive caring we let people be who they are and do what they need to do. Active caring was easy for me, I was prepared to do just about anything for Che. In anybody's league I was a devoted husband. If she went away for a few days, I would clean the room for her while she was gone because I knew she hated the job. But there was a cheap, selfish hook in this kind of caring. I was really proving to myself-and to her- that I was a caring husband. An ancient gambit, boring, and silly, too. But in my heart I failed at the most critical challenge of caring-giving Che permission to be who she was, and permission to give me the gifts that she had to give. She had a lighthearted gift for smiling the roses, whenever and whatever she found them, even if it meant putting off some chores. I had a gift of plowing through obstacles and getting things done. Quickly, now. I thought, early on, that I had a calling to convert Che to my kind of work ethic. But my missionary efforts made us both miserable. Then she gradually taught me the secret of permissive caring-the thoughest kind of caring for a work-obsessed person such as myself. But as I learned the freedom of permissive caring, I was ready for a more interesting partnership between two very different sorts of characters. Permissive caring is one way of living with the fact that we chose the wrong person. A creative way. It is the way of permitting our partner to be the very person we didn't know we were marrying. And of discovering that what looks like incompatibility can become a duet of differences. I do not mean to say, of course, that everyone who makes a bad choice of commitment can survive the original mistake. Sometimes living together is destructive as, for instance, when one person is incurably brutal. In that case the sooner the commitment is undone the better. Let's have a coffee Hari Enjoy reading...Blessing.

@Hari 23 October 2020

Our Daily Devotional The bible teaches we have one place to go when we have a complaint, concern or need. We aren’t told to complain to strangers or tell everyone close to you how bad things are for you. We are to bring our concerns to our Creator. He is our sustenance. Bring your worries to Him and let Him work in mighty ways on your behalf. Let's have a coffee Hari Enjoy the day

@Hari 22 October 2020

When A Marriage Cannot Be Forever When a young Rose Kennedy had had her bellyfull of Joe's playing around with other women and wanted to leave him, her father told her she couldn't go back on a lifetime commitment: it was forever. Many years later Rose's daughter Kathleen fell in love with a divorced Englishman, Lord Peter Fitzwilliam, and wanted to marry him. But, when she heard about it, Rose Kennedy's deepest beliefs took hold of her. If you marry this man, she told Kathleen, you will be cast out of the Kennedy Family, disowned, regarded as dead. Not long afterward a private plane Kathleen and Peter were Flying in crashed into a German mountain and both died. Why did Rose Kennedy treat her own daughter so cruelly, Kathleen, the favorite sister of all the Kennedy women, she who had already lost a husband to the war? The reason was that Rose's father had taught her that Lord Peter was still married to his ex-wife, that if Kathleen married Lord Peter, she would be marrying a married man. Rose believed that once a person made a lifetime commitment to marriage, that person is married forever. Rose believed that there was no exit from marriage. She believed, just as many other people have believed, that marriage was a kind of invisible house that two people got locked into whenever they were properly wed. They were wedlocked inside the holy estate of matrimony. This what Rose Kennedy believed; it was a belief that gave her the courage to stick with her husband and made her capable of disowning her daughter. The status of divorced people, in this view, is something like the status of escaped convicts. Prisoners on the run may walk around town as if they were free people, but they are convicts in the "eyes of God." If we are married forever in the eyes of God, there is no escape from our commitment. Once in, always in. My problem with this theory of marriage is that it does not make sense. When two people determine to leave each other for good, and get a court to declare them unmarried in the eyes of the law, their marriage is dead and gone, a memory, a sad memory perhaps, but only a memory, nothing more. Any marriage can die. We may with all our hearts intend it to last for life. And we may believe that it should last for life. But if can die. There are exits. Now let's look at marriage commitment from another point of view, one that puts up exit signs whenever we may want to get off. This view lies at the other end of the world from all that Rose Kennedy believes about commitment to marriage. We pick it up in what Ralph Karsten learned from his therapist. Two months after he got a divorce, Ralph was walloped by remorse for having failed to keep his commitment. In the old days he would have gone to a minister with his problem, maybe for help in seeking forgiveness. But being a thoroughly modern person, Ralph went to an expensive therapist in Santa Barbara to seek a cure. This is what his therapist told him: you should be grateful. You have completed an important stage on your of self-discovery. Your ex-wife has traveled with you up to this point, and she has helped you along as far as she has been able to go with you. So be thankful for her gift, and take it with you as you leave. If she has any style at all, she will return the compliment. Ralph's therapist made good sense- given her idea of what a commitment to marriage was all about. For her, a person's commitment to marriage is an investment in his or her own growth. Growth, that is, toward the happier, the better, the more satisfied, person he or she is capable of becoming. It stands to reason, then, that when a person's investment in a relationship has not yielded any growth for a while, it's time to get out of it, and to seek another relationship with greater potential for personal profit. Look at this way, a marriage commitment is an initmate version of "Let's Make a Deal." There is something in it for you, something in it for me. When there is not enough in it for either one of us, one of us should call the deal off. No hard feelings. Exits from commitment? You can find one at every intersection of your marriage. Whenever you get low on growth, it's time to look for one. The "growth for me" theory of commitment is businesslike, hard-nosed practical, therapeutic-and eminently self-centered. My proplem with this theory is that when it is put into practice, it stifles real growth. Real growth is healthiest when we put commitment to another person ahead of growth for ourself. There is such a thing as growing into maturity, becoming strong enough to stick with a relationship because we care about the other person too much to leave it. And maybe we grow a notch too, when we learn to accommodate ourself to the fact that no relationship brings us everything we want. The right planter's mix for personal growth is a blend of realism with commitment. We don't grow into mature persons by chasing fantasies. And one fact about marriage in general is that every marriage in particular is imperfect. No one marries exactly the right person; we all marry someone who is only more or less right for us. We are all flawed partners. And if we accept this regrettable but invigorating fact of life, we may be ready for real growth. We do not give ourself a good chance for growing personally if we keep hangaring after our fantasy of the ideal woman. Or man. We grow when we keep renewing our commitment to the only spouse we've got. We grow when we stop dreaming of a perfect marriage, and adjust caringly to the one we have. Our best growth comes when we forget about our own growth, and focus on caring instead. Here's a nice twist: instead of giving us a good reason for giving up a lifetime commitment, our need to grow is a prime reason for keeping it. Let's recapitulate. Rose Kennedy believed in lifetime commitment, but she closed her eyes to the reality that sometimes we need an exit from commitment. Ralph's therapist saw exits anywhere we want to leave. But she did not believe in lifetime commitment. Common sense lands us in the middle. Now I must say that it makes sense, sad sense, but real sense, to say that some people who make a life commitment cannot keep it for life. There must be an exit for them. When is it right to exit from commitment? I'll put some possibilities on the table, and we can discuss them in turn. When Is It Not Possible To Keep A Commitment? Ask Becky why she finally cut loose and left Frank after sticking with him for fifteen years. She will tell you that she left because it was impossible for her to stay. She had to go. It became obvious about a dozen years ago that Frank was an alcoholic; he needed help, but raged like a lanced bull whenever Becky or anyone else urged him to get it. Frank was not an amiable drunk: he ravaged Becky with hate when he was in his cups, whipped her with barbed words and, now and then, when the torrent of his rage broke the dam of his fears, with bare hands. Had she stayed, her life, like her love, would have been as good as finished. One way to look at it is that Becky did not go back on commitment when she left Frank. She came to the conclusion that Frank had killed her commitment by making it impossible for her to keep it. Other people feel choked within a marriage to a a fine person who would kill himself or herself before abusing the other. Their partners are not cruel, or unfaithful, or insane. It's just that their two characters are so dreadfully incompatible with each other that one or both of them feel smothered by the combination. Karen, a friend of mine, still admires the man she divorced a couple of years ago. He is generous, faithful, and has all sorts of other moral qualities that she was taught to admire in a person. But, as she tells it and as she feels it, he doesn't have what she needs most. He doesn't have the power to communicate care for her in a message she can hear. He stays detached and gives her the feeling a spy must get when she is caught and her government washes its hands of her, leaves her out in the cold with no hope that anybody will be in touch. Maybe it's partly her own doing; she doesn't have the ears to hear what he really wants her to hear or the eyes to see what he wants her to see. I don't know. Nobody knows, except her. And I can't be sure that even she knows. But when I ask her why she doesn't go back to him, she says, "To go back to that marriage would kill me." Somehow, for her, it was impossible to keep her commitment even though when she made it she meant with all her heart to keep it. Everything I believe about commitment wants me to remind Che that people give up hope too soon, see their problems too quickly as catastrophes. I want to talk to her about hope, because I suspect she decided too soon that staying was impossible. But I also believe Che when she tells me that for her it is not possible to keep commitment she made and meant for life. When Does Keeping A Commitment Lose Its point? Ask Bruce why he is getting a divorce from Samantha. He will tell you that this marriage has lost its point. No point in staying, he says, when the point of staying is gone. TRUE? Consider his story and decide for yourself. Samantha was a religious lady, sober as a nun, and just about as chaste. She was committed to decency, even as her mother was before her, she loved decency perhaps more than life, certainly more than love, and as her decency heated up her passion cooled down. She thought she was chaste, but what she really was was mean. She could take a bead on Bruce's soul, smack him with her contempt, and slice him apart the way a fisherman fillets a halibut. To her, Bruce's gift of passion was only a male's disguise for animal list. And she made him understand quite clearly that she was not willing to be sacrificed on the pagan altar of his degraded desires. For Bruce, keeping commitment was a long-term lease on humiliation. He felt like a puppy being spanked for being in heat. Keeping commitment became a euphemism for dying alone on the dry sands of Samantha's savage decency. Samantha claimed that she was committed. But she had only one-half of the equation. She had consistency but no care. She was predictable but refused to be present. And sometimes half a commitment is worse than no commitment at all. Was there any point in keeping it? Did Bruce's commitment have any point when Samantha rejected his gift of sexual love and could not give him the gift of care? Let's admit it: a lifetime commitment to stay together "no matter what" can run up against some conditions that make keeping it impossible or, if not impossible, then pointless. In a world where married people can abuse each other, demean each other, be disloyal to each other, and be generally destructive to each other and their children, it is not realistic to assume that everyone who makes a lifetime commitment can keep it for life. Let's have a coffee Hari Enjoy reading...Blessing

@Hari 21 October 2020

Daily Devotional: When we are faithful to do the work God calls us to, beauty unfolds. Our efforts are meaningful, they bless our families, workplaces and communities. God’s hand is on the lives of His godly people. Do work that grows God’s goodness, today! Let's have a coffee Hari Enjoy life today