Sally Hanan's Blog, page 16

What does it mean—to be a light in the darkness? What’s a practical way to let the light in you shine?

We have to shine brightly, because the less we shine, the lower the light, the longer the shadows.

“If you spend yourselves on behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.” – Isaiah 58:10

Love is such a nefarious word, but if you nail it down, it’s about giving time, money, a listening ear, prayer, and support to those you encounter who need it. If you can’t leave your house much, you can still encourage and support people online—from the heart to the heart.

The post To Be a Light appeared first on Pick Your Life .

“The first step in asceticism the desert will teach you is purification from haste, agitation, impatience, pressure. In the desert you have to get rid of the ‘master of the situation’ complex. You find that you are little, insignificant, squeezed in on a waiting bench. No one takes any notice of your needs. Your name has no influence with people. Your urgent engagements become negligible. And the world goes on without your breathless rushing about.

You get things done not by thumping and kicking but by displaying a quality which is highly respected in the desert: the ability to wait. In the desert you enter another level of time where the hands of the clock are replaced by patience and imperturbability. Your organism has to adapt itself not merely to a different time scale, but to a different rhythm and to a different scale of values. And unless you adapt yourself you run the risk of a nervous breakdown. If, on the other hand, you succeed in entering this new dimension of time, you will experience an unexpected calm, a hitherto unknown sense of freedom, and a surprising capacity for wonder.”

—Meditations on the Sand by Alessandro Pronzato

The post The First Step in Asceticism appeared first on Pick Your Life .

When people break your heart,

and they surely will …

With what will you fill the bleeding, gaping cracks?

Wet cement 

or

fiery, liquid gold?

Wet cement will certainly harden well.

Leave that heart fortified.

Powerful

Gold, on the other hand,

is a soft, weak metal.

Weathers poorly.

But oh, how it shines in the light….

The post When People Break Your Heart appeared first on Pick Your Life .

You know when you watch chick flicks and they’re lying on the car on some overlook pointing out the stars, and one of them starts naming the constellations. Writers put stuff like that into books and movies because it triggers our spirit-soul connection with the source of all creativity.

And when you’re outdoors yourself some night, staring upward, you notice that the longer you adjust your eyes to the dark, the more light you can see.

I was thinking about that – the fact that each star is unique, that together they form different patterns in the sky as signs for us to see and wonder at.

What if we did that closer to home – we looked at people the way we look at stars, focusing more on the light when we’re in dark places, savoring the incredible detail in each person, seeing how people connect and form patterns as signs we can wonder at.

The longer your adjust your eyes to the dark, the more light you can see….

The post Pointing Out the Stars appeared first on Pick Your Life .

It is not a woman’s job to make a man feel better about himself.

It is not a man’s job to make a woman feel better about herself.

Value must come from within, and the responsibility to feel better about yourself comes from within too.

When someone then treats you with value, you can nod your head in agreement, because you know it’s true. When they don’t, it won’t faze you, because you know they just can’t see you clearly yet, and it’s not your job to clean their glasses.

In every relationship — marriage, friendship, work, etc. — it is both the man’s and the woman’s job to treat everyone with kindness, respect, clear communication, support, encouragement and thoughtfulness. Once you can give that to yourself, it is easy to spread the overflow and see the same value in those around you.

The post Making a Man Feel Better About Himself appeared first on Pick Your Life .

Sometimes things happen in life that leap into the base of your stomach with a thunk and slowly spend the next few days crawling back up the cliff face of your esophagus without a rope. It doesn’t matter who you talk to or how secretive you become about what’s going on—the fear sticks to your insides and no amount of positive thinking can wash it away.

I have had days like these.

Being the strategic kind, my unhelpful brain usually kicks into gear and replays all of the possible scenarios that could take place. While the brain can be a very useful thing, it is amazing how easy it is for the negative to take over when the possibility of bad news shrouds the horizon of hope.

Here are four things that can help:

Only share with friends who trust God’s goodness more than they fear the devil’s attacks.

Receive many doses of faith-filled prayers.

Receive love.

Receive support.

Fear wants to be your constant companion but it is not a faithful, loving bedfellow. Kick it out of bed and invite love in instead.

The post When Fear Sticks to Your Insides appeared first on Pick Your Life .

A few months ago, I read a post by a mom who had decided to stop telling her kids how to do anything a better way. Instead, when they ran up to her for her approval after doing something, she chose to say the words, “I just love to watch you ___ (dance, play soccer, read).”

She talked about how rested that made her kids, and how it gave them far more joy in their activities than they had previously experienced.

If we are to parent the generations after us well, we can’t go far wrong with her advice. “Did you see how clearly I heard God speak? Did you see how many times I prayed for people? Did you see how I was able to get that insight into God’s character from that Bible verse? Did you watch me preach to that friend?”

“I just love to watch you connect with God and let that overflow to those around you.”

Some think that mentoring is about squishing the desire to shine out of growing Christians, when the truth is that we are all designed to shine in our own ways. A mentor’s job is to focus back to the root of it all — the joy of knowing Jesus — and shining with that joy is always encouraged.

The post I Just Love appeared first on Pick Your Life .

Today I posted a quote by Helen Keller on social media. Just like every other dead person we revere, she lived well. She lived with each moment of opportunity in mind, not because she knew her name would be praised centuries later, but because she knew small tasks mattered. Over time, those small tasks amounted to the greatness we associate with her name today.

It’s not even that she saw needs as opportunities to complete, as she called them, “great and noble tasks.” She saw them as her opportunities to share kindness and practical help. Her priority was to give what she could from her knowledge and capabilities to enrich other people’s lives. Every time.

And it just so happened that word got out and then we all knew about her kindness. We still talk about it.

If you think you’re on this earth to achieve some great and noble task, you’re not. Because that great and noble task that marks the purpose of your life is not one big thing. It is the accumulation of thousands of everyday choices to care. It’s about you “being” every day. Not doing something once. You’re so much more than a one-off.

“I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.” – Helen Keller

The post Your Great and Noble Task appeared first on Pick Your Life .

– Know that’s not who you are. You were designed perfectly and were given the breath of life to make sure you lived out your life being and doing all you were given life for.

– You did horrible things. Accept that fact, but again, know that that’s not who you are. Don’t let those things define you. Nothing is wasted in this life if we use what we have learned to better our fellow man in the future.

– Figure out who you are — personality, talents, learned experiences, communication style, passions. Know what you have so you can give it away every day.

– You are a gift to this world. See yourself as a gift. Make it your daily goal to make one person smile, give one person help unasked for, make time to listen.

– Once you know who you are — all the good that’s been placed in you — and once you’ve mastered the art of giving yourself and your time away, you’ll see the beauty in your life, in all life, and you’ll thrive.

Again, every time you look back on the bad things you’ve done, stare them down and say,

That’s not who I am.

Because it’s not.

The post When You’ve Done Horrible Things appeared first on Pick Your Life .

My four nights of night shift were over. Sleep was very much enjoyed. And now I was alone in our flat in Dublin, Ireland, with the dulled sounds of the city suburbs moving around the walls protecting the tiny patch of grass, and my washing on the line, three floors down.

I leaned back into our ratty armchair while lax evening light napped in long squares on the carpet, and let silent tears fall. Truth had come at last.

I’d only wanted to be a nurse because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. An English and languages lover in high school, no career seemed to appeal. All I knew was that I didn’t want to sit in a classroom for another three years, and back in those days in Ireland, a young woman could get a nursing degree and a salary in three years by working and taking eight weeks of classes a year. Deal.

I took off after school to live a little first, settling into Andalusian life with a host family and learning the language as quickly as I could, while providing many laughs as I stumbled over similar words like pollo and polla. I chased boys, organized drinking parties, avoided anything that looked like responsibility, and came back to Ireland ripe as a cocoa bean and ready to be a great nurse.

Only I wasn’t.

I couldn’t get my mind around the body parts and chemistry of drugs, couldn’t work quickly, couldn’t look busy doing nothing. The only thing I felt comfortable doing was talking to patients, listening, explaining, understanding. I can’t count how many people I forgot about on the commode, or the women I left stripped to the waist behind flimsy curtains. Or how late I started the observation round. Or how I froze when someone had a heart attack.

Fortunately, student nurses are just that—students, so someone was always ready to rush in and fix my inability to just get it already, do it right already. But it wasn’t just that. I felt completely inadequate as a being. I wasn’t good enough, clever enough, likable enough. I wasn’t enough at all.

And so there I sat in the twilight feeling sorry for myself when truth dropped into my heart almost as audibly as a living voice. Even if I sit here for the rest of my life, I’m still enough.

I knew it was the truth, because my thoughts never sounded like that. My thoughts always criticized. This voice was kind.

After that day, I wasn’t instantly twirled into a perfect woman, like Cinderella before the ball. But I was different, more settled in my skin, and dare I say it, happier. Knowing I was enough made me think about myself less. I was more able to focus on other people—hone in on what they wanted and needed rather than on the things I’d thought I needed to feel safe around them.

I got my degree, stuck it out for another few years, and then I heard that voice again. Almost audible. Completely unexpected. A name. My future husband’s name. We weren’t even dating, barely knew each other actually, and yet I knew. I knew this was the same voice that had told me I was enough, and now it was telling me this man would be enough for me. A tall order.

Wanting to stay home with my babies was a fabulous reason for never going back to nursing again. That was probably one of my greater gifts to humanity.

And then I heard the voice one more time. Louder than a thought. Out of nowhere. Thunk into my soul. We would move to another country, where we would be enough together.

We landed in Austin, Texas, with a three-year-old and a five-month-old, and integrated quickly into a new routine of life. Gone were the days of dropping into a neighbor’s house for tea unannounced. New was getting a driver’s license and having to drive to go anywhere. We grew together; made friends; bought homes; loved, laughed, and cried. Sometimes we shed so many tears that we missed seeing the happy flashes for what they were—sparklers in the yard of life, shooting hope into our dark moments and joy into our lighter ones.

And that voice . . .

Some would call it God, a guide, gut instinct. We don’t have to label everything supernatural we discover outside and inside ourselves. Some things just are. I like to think we are all created with a holding box that is opened by that voice, that presence, and once sprung open, we’re released into all we can be.

We cycled through many small business efforts while finding what made us feel fully alive, and we’ve found our finest happiness comes from moments when we can serve up our best from the fulness within—our special mix of heart and talent and hope. Our family has had so much to celebrate and look back on with joy. We have so much beauty to stop and see and touch in the present.

Yes, sitting in that old chair and hearing that voice say I was enough was one of my happiest moments, but in this season of my life, happiness holds new meaning. Happiness isn’t always about a moment in time I can never recapture. Sometimes it’s about a truth given in a moment that takes root and grows in ways that allow it to be recaptured day after day forever. An infinite truth.

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