Episode 520: On One Foot

Welcome to Voices in My Head. As always, I am your host, Rick Lee James, and I am coming to you once again from the podcast studio in my car. That's right, we have done this a number of times, haven't we? We are doing it again. Gosh, everything got thrown off schedule again, and I'm so sorry for that because we were supposed to have some wonderful guests coming up. My work schedule changed and I do not have time in my week right now to do podcasts the way I would like to with guests and all, and it's breaking my heart. I love doing interviews and I had a couple really good ones lined up and we we just couldn't make it work out this time and this week. Uh, we'll see what is ahead in the coming days, but as my residency time comes to a close here in the next couple of months, things are just going to get more hectic, I think. Uh, we have new interns at the hospital where I'm doing my chaplaincy at, and I have a few things, um, that, you know, I've got to do just to end out my time as a CPE resident and as a student, there's papers to write, there's things to be done, and work schedules are changing, and I've got longer hours. And yeah, so anyway, you don't need to hear about all the personal stuff going on right now, but I didn't want to let a week go by without presenting another podcast to you. I'm hoping you can hear everything okay, as I am recording from my car, and I know it's probably not the best audio in the world, but I have a long drive to work every day and a long drive back, and it helps me to gather some thoughts And this morning I was thinking about one of the teachings of Judaism, one of the stories anyway. I don't know if they're true, but one rabbi was asked by someone if they could summarize their faith, the Jewish faith, on one foot, if they only had the time that was allowed. As if to say, you can only stand on one foot very briefly before you have to put the other foot down. I suppose if you're one of the Guinness Book of World Records people who practice that kind of thing, you may be able to stay on one foot for a long time. But for most of us, you know, it's a temporary thing. So the idea behind it was, if you had to sum up the most important parts of your faith and do it standing on one foot, what would you say about that? And I heard someone say some wonderful things about it, a person who was not a Christian, Jonathan Rausch, who who I've had on the show, who wrote the wonderful book "The Constitution of Knowledge," and he was saying that he had a friend of his do this thought experiment, and he said it came out beautifully with something like, "Love God, forgive each other, and be like me," you know, if we were summing up the teachings of Jesus standing on one foot. But it got me thinking, well, Jesus kind of does that already in scripture when he actually quotes the Shema, and he says, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart," all your soul, with all your mind, all your strength, and then love your neighbor as yourself, because the second is the like it, and loving your neighbor is just as important. So those things kind of encapsulate, these are the teachings of Jesus, on one foot. But it made me think, as I'm coming to the end of my journey as a chaplain, and I'm sorry if you all are tired of hearing about my chaplaincy journey. I know I talk about it a lot, but it's where I'm at, so it's the voice in my head. I was thinking, how would I describe chaplaincy to someone if they really didn't know about what we do? What would be standing on one foot? How would I describe chaplaincy? And it gave me pause. It was, it was a good thing to think about. Some people might say, well, we offer spiritual care to people and we do it in a non-judgmental present way with people, non-anxiously. We have a non-anxious, non-judgmental presence. But I really like, and this has actually been something that has been forming and shaping me, I talked about it a little bit on last week's podcast when you heard the sermon that I gave in North Vernon, Indiana, the ministry of presence. And Matt Sanders in his book called Chaplaincy: A Ministry of Presence, he talks about 4 different things, and I wonder if I was to adapt what he says, the 4 different things about what it means to be present in the work of a chaplain, I think I would add one more thing to what he says. And this is what he says. So this is sort of Matt Sanders' one-footed stance on what it means to offer presence. So Matt Sanders, he says the chaplaincy The Ministry of Presence is first of all being present to self, then being present to the Presence through spiritual practices, prayer, and the Presence being the Divine Presence that we talk about. And then he says being present to others, and then lastly helping others be present to the Presence. And I think I would like to put in there maybe maybe one right in the middle, if I was to describe the work of chaplaincy, I think I would say helping others be present to self as well, because we start with that way. We often say, well, we have to be present to God first, and the fact is we're always present with God. We may not always be aware of it, but I almost think we really do have to start with self. We have to start with being present to self. We have to start by doing what Peter Schizero did. He talks about it in his book Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, where when he was becoming an emotionally healthy Christian after many years of not being that way, after being a successful pastor, he talks about how he would just sit in the quiet of the morning every morning and begin his day by just becoming aware of who he was and where he was through his emotions and his thoughts. What was I feeling today? What's underneath those feelings? What's underneath those emotions? Matt Sanders also kind of writes about this. He calls it your stuff, your sensations, thoughts, urges, and your feelings. And I did the same thing as I went through this chaplaincy journey. I still do it where I will sit and listen to my stuff. And I think when we talk about that one-legged, one-footed view of trying to describe what chaplains do, we are present to self, we are present to the presence. But then I would add in, we help others be present to self so that then we move into the next one, that we can help others, so that we can be present to others and then so that we can help others be present to the Presence. I think I said that a little bit out of order. Let me try it one more time. Sorry, this is what you get when I'm driving and I don't have notes in front of me. Being present to self, being present to the Presence, the Divine Presence, being present to others, helping others be present to self and then helping others be present to the Presence. Because I think we have to get to know ourselves, who God made us to be, in order to really commune with God. If we can't be honest with who we are, our true selves, then we can't be the person that God sees us to be. Brandon Manning Rick Lee James used to talk about the true self and the false self and the way that the false self was that person that doesn't exist, that Jesus can't see because he's not there, or she is not there, or they are not there. I think that when we come into the presence of God, only the true person exists, the true self that God made us to be. We are so covered up by all the things that we think we are supposed to be. That sometimes we are hiding our true self from ourself. There's a lot of reasons for that. But I think it's so essential that we get in touch with self and what that means to be present to ourselves. Maybe try sometime if you've never done this, download what's called— I think it's called the Wheel of Emotion or Wheel of Feelings, something like that. You can look it up. There'll be several images that post up and there's several different illustrations. But you'll see in the middle of the wheel all of your major emotions. You'll have things like happiness. You'll have on one side, you'll have sadness on the other. You'll have surprise. You'll have anger. You'll have, you know, feelings of fear. Different things like that. And then those all branch out into other feelings that are based on those. And one really powerful way to be present to self is to sit down with that wheel of emotion sometime and find yourself in that wheel. And these emotions will change throughout the day. Your feelings, where you're at, will change sometimes from encounter to encounter. But if you could start your day by pinpointing where you are on that wheel of emotion. I'm feeling bad today. And I'm feeling bad and I can see what bad feeling I'm having. Well, I'm having anxiousness about something. And what is that anxiousness? Anxiousness leading to? Is that showing up as nervousness? Is it showing up as being apprehensive? And you kind of trace that out and you say, what is underneath all that? What's causing that today? Why am I feeling that way? Maybe you wake up and you find that you're angry and you're frustrated, and you, and, and you need to look at what is underneath that anger and what's underneath that frustration, because you may not even be aware of it yourself. Or if you're feeling happy and you have all this joy and you feel a sense of gratitude and thankfulness and you wonder, "What's behind that? Why am I feeling that way today?" It's just as interesting, I think, to lift up that rock and uncover what's underneath the rock. You know, why are we the way we are? And becoming present to self in that way enables the work of the Holy Spirit to do what the Holy Spirit does, I believe. It's not like the Holy Spirit needs us to do the work, but we need it. We need to kind of uncover that rock as a way of inviting the Holy Spirit into our lives and saying, "Here I am, all of me. This is the true self as I come before you today, God. This is where I am, and I'm being as honest as I know how to be. I'm mad, I'm happy, I'm sad, I'm fearful, I'm anxious, all those things I'm feeling, whatever I'm feeling in that moment, Lord, I bring you that true self this morning, and I'm not hiding it." because you desire truth in the inmost places. And so as I bring myself to you today, Lord, I trust that you will also bring yourself to me. And so when I talk about what it means to be present to self, present to the presence, and then being present to others, helping others be present to self, and then helping others be present to the presence, that's what I'm talking about. And that's kind of my, my one-footed view of chaplaincy as I was thinking about it today. I don't know if that's a help to you or not. I think it's helpful even outside of chaplaincy. That's what we do as chaplains. That's what we do offering a ministry of presence to people when we're in hospital rooms. I know there's a lot of confusion about what chaplains do. It's— we don't go in to convert people. We don't evangelize. We help people become present. And becoming present to self, we can become present to the other. And it's amazing to see the the resources that God gives through that to people. And the way that we have these God-given things inside of us through our emotions and thoughts and feelings that help us to become present to God just by listening to who God made us to be. Well, that's it for today. I want to encourage you, if you have not, please continue to listen to my music, listen to these podcasts, share them with a friend. That's how the podcast grows. That's how my music grows. Actually, it could be that in the next couple months I'm going to have some more opportunity to begin playing out and doing concerts again, which is great. I've been doing a little bit of that already, but as I've said, as the residency winds down, things are just getting busier. So maybe as I move out of the residency into a new stage of life, maybe part of that is going to be making some room for doing concerts again. So if you're interested in having me out to your venue, whether it be a church or, I don't know, a restaurant or even your home, wherever you would like. I'd love to come share music and stories and maybe talk about being present to self in your venue sometime. Alright, that's it for today. I need to focus on driving because I want to get to work safely. And thank goodness for the way we can drive hands-free and communicate through recording software and all that good stuff. Alright, much love to everybody. Thanks for listening to Voices in My Head. As always, you can find out more about me at rickleejames.com. You can find out more about this podcast at voicesinmyheadpodcast.com. You can follow me on Twitter @RickLeeJames, or the more popular account that I run on Twitter is @MrRogersSay. I think we're gonna get to 100,000 followers on there by the end of the year, so please join us there if you have not. It's a great community of people where we share daily doses of kindness in the spirit of Fred Rogers. So that's it for now. May the Lord bless you and keep you and make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you and give you peace. Until we meet again, God bless.