Dear Friends,

Finding Inner Peace In Times of Stress

“You don’t always need a plan.
Sometimes you just need to breathe,
trust, let go and see what happens.”
~ Mandy Hale

The last three years have had their fair share of challenges for us all. We have had to grapple with growing uncertainty and mounting pressures all around us while facing the painful realities of climate crisis, a pandemic, a divided nation, and now, a devastating war and recurrence of mass shootings.

Considering what so many of us are going through right now, I want to acknowledge that this is a lot. It’s been a painful, taxing, traumatizing time. And you might have found yourself at times overwhelmed, shutting down, burning out or even breaking down. And it’s understandable.

It’s becoming more and more apparent that when it comes to facing hardships – this time that we are living through is a marathon, not a sprint. So we need ways to navigate our way through these ongoing challenges that can help us maintain awareness, agency and greater peace of mind, even when we’re plunged into chaos or difficulty. 

Today I’m sharing helpful framework (The four L’s) that I learned from the meditation teacher Melli O’Brian for living through tough times. While they can’t take away difficult moments, or how we feel about them, they can help us find resilience, inner peace and wisdom in the middle of it all.
 

The four L’s:
Listen, Let be, Live, Let go

1. Listen (to your body and mind) 
Listen carefully to the signals coming from your body and mind in times of greater stress. Many of us have a tendency to overlook, ignore or push through feelings of overwhelm, exhaustion or stress but this only wears us down and burns us out over time. It’s important to listen to yourself and give yourself what you need to restore along the way and find balance. This may mean turning off the news for a while, having extra sleep, spending more time in nature, eating nourishing food, and asking for more connection and support from loved ones. Keep filling your cup!

2. Let be (any difficult thoughts and feelings)
In times of crisis or hardship, difficult thoughts and feelings will probably arise. They are a natural response to the more challenging moments of our lives. We don’t want to pretend we’re not feeling them, struggle with them or try to escape them. Struggling with difficult thoughts and emotions in these ways only tends to prolong them and make them bigger. So instead, allow whatever feelings you have to be there, and give yourself compassion for what you’re going through. 

3. Live (In integrity to your values)
One of the most empowering things you can do in difficult times is to take meaningful action – action guided by your own core values. Your values might be kindness, courage, patience, love, compassion or determination. Research shows that focusing on what you can control and taking action, shifts you from a state of helplessness to one of hopefulness and empowerment. Perhaps you can start with simply asking yourself the question “What’s one thing I can do to help or make things better right now?” 

4. Let go (of what you can’t control)
During challenging times we often cause ourselves excess suffering by wishing things were different then they are or continuously worrying about all kinds of things that are not in our control. While that might be a fairly normal thing for the mind to do, it simply is not helpful.
 
For example we cannot control what other people do. We cannot control how governments are responding to world events. And we cannot control the future of the world or how the war will unfold. In fact, the more we focus on things we cannot control, the more overwhelmed, disempowered and frantic we are likely to feel.
 
So the most powerful thing you can do when you’re facing any great challenge is to focus on what you can control and take action on that. Accepting that for now, the rest of it simply is as it is. This is not resignation but the simple acknowledgement that “right now it’s like this.”
 
May these 4 practices help us find ease and strength in our journey as we are accompanied by our friend in Jesus. Go gently with yourself.

“I have trust that if I keep doing what I’m feeling called to do,
all of my needs will be met.”
– Light Watkins

Yours in Christ,
John

May Bonanza

Dear Friends,

Loneliness, as defined by mental health professionals, is a gap between the level of connectedness that you want and what you have. It is not the same as social isolation, which is codified in the social sciences as a measure of a person’s contacts. Loneliness is a subjective feeling. People can have a lot of contact and still be lonely, or be perfectly content by themselves.

In small doses, loneliness is like hunger or thirst, a healthy signal that you are missing something and to seek out what you need. But prolonged over time, according to latest researches, loneliness can be damaging not just to mental health, but also to physical health and life expectancy. Loneliness has real consequences to our health and well-being. Being lonely, like other forms of stress, increases the risk of emotional disorders like depression, anxiety and substance abuse. Less obviously, it also puts people at greater risk of physical ailments that seem unrelated, like heart disease, cancer, stroke, hypertension, dementia and premature death.

Even before the pandemic, there was an “epidemic of loneliness”. In a 2018 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, one in five Americans said they always or often felt lonely or socially isolated. The pandemic only exacerbated these feelings.

For two years you didn’t see friends like you used to. You missed your colleagues from work, even the barista on the way there. You were lonely. We all were. The unknown is the lasting effects of two years of prolonged isolation and the loneliness that came with it.

As pandemic restrictions beginning to cautiously lift, our lives return to some semblance of normalcy. One of the wonderful gifts of belonging to the faith community are communal worship and the fellowship that follows at the coffee hour. If offers a cure for our loneliness and isolation. If you are vaccinated, boosted, and for some double boosted, I enthusiastically invite you to participate on our weekly Sunday services and coffee hour following. In the month of May we have fantastic speakers lined up for our enrichment and edification.

May 1:           Holy Communion                        Preaching: John Song

Message: “The Cure for the Epidemic of Loneliness”

May 8:           Mother’s Day Celebration       Preaching: Carmelita Abenoja   

Carmelita Abenoja claims that she was a Methodist even before she was born. From her home church in the Philippines, she was nurtured and given all opportunities to be involved and participate in church work and get elected to district and conference positions in the UM Youth organization while finishing a degree at the Wesleyan University-Philippines. She taught college briefly but left the academy for the opportunity to travel as a Field Executive for the Girl Scouts of the Philippines. She also worked with an American missionary as the head of the Board of Missions at the United Methodist Headquarters in Manila.  While working there she took classes at the Union Theological Seminary hoping to finish a sacred music degree.

Carmelita immigrated to US on April 21, 1979 (43 years ago) with husband and their 4 children. They became members of the Freedom UMC. She wore many hats and volunteered as organist and music director until the Freedom UMC merged with Watsonville First UMC.  She retired 6 years ago from a high-pressured job as the Administrative Assistant at the California Highway Patrol.

May 15:        Guest Preacher: Haley Feuerbacher

Message: “Not Just Resurrection But Transformation” 

Dr. Haley Feuerbacher is a storyteller, creator, adventurer, facilitator, spiritual activist, and theologian. She attended Vanderbilt Divinity School and Brite Divinity School for her Master’s in Theological Studies and completed her Ph.D. at Southern Methodist University in Religion and Culture and Women’s and Gender Studies. A recent transplant to California from Texas, Haley was a faculty member at SMU and The Seattle School for Theology & Psychology and served for several years as a youth minister and then as campus minister for a United Methodist Reconciling college ministry. Passionate about the power of joy and compassion for personal and systemic transformation, Haley is currently the founder and executive director of the Center for Courageous Compassion, which is creating a movement of fierce survivor-centeredness and transformation of trauma in which our helpers, caregivers, activists, leaders, and ministers engage in courageously compassionate work, life, and being that yields sustainable joy and resists systems and patterns that lead to vicarious trauma, burnout, and compassion fatigue. Haley is also a running coach, yoga facilitator, surfing and outdoor enthusiast, partner to SB, mother to son Christian, and author, with her first book, Single (M)Other, available later this year through Wipf & Stock.

May 22:        Preaching: John Song

Message: Sacred Activism: “Standing Up for the Defenseless”

Special Music:     Turn, Turn, Turn        by Brandon and Trisha Kett

This American song Turn, Turn, Turn (To Everything There Is a Season) is written by Pete Seeger in the late 1950s and first recorded in 1959. The lyric is from the Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew bible written around 300 BC. According to rabbinic tradition, Ecclesiastes was written by the wise King Solomon in his old age. It speaks of the truth of temporality and paradoxes in life.

May 29:        Guest Preacher: Peter Coster      

Message: “The Sign of Jonah”

Peter H. Coster, PhD, MDiv, LMFT is Relational Psychotherapist, Clinical Supervisor and the Executive Director for the Center for Psychotherapy, Spirituality and Creativity. He lives is Sonoma with his wife Kate and cat named Aribel.

Yours in Christ,

John

Christ is risen.
Christ is risen indeed!

Every year on Easter Sunday, Christians begin the service with this proclamation. Christians celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ who on the third day rose from the dead.

When I was attending seminary, the New Testament professor was teaching the Easter stories from the bible. He asked the question to students, “What’s the first thing Jesus said when he rose from the dead?” He answered his own question with the answer, “Y’all, can you see me?” It was a joke and we had a good laugh.

A traditional thinking for Christians is that Jesus rose from the dead so that we can also be resurrected after we die. But this misses the crux of Jesus’ teaching. The emphasis on “Risen life” is not about happening after we die but happening before we die. It’s dying before we die and resurrecting before we die. Kabir, the 14th century Indian poet, wrote, “If you can’t cross over (to the other side) while you are alive, how can you when you are dead?”

The risen life requires some kind of ego death which is no easy task. Ego will not voluntarily die and it will not go quietly in order for new life to emerge. Ego does not like to lose control over your life. It will kick and scream to avoid transformation at all cost. The difference between Saints and the ordinary Joe or Jane like most of us is that Saints voluntarily walk into the volcano knowing it will be an annihilation. They do so with faith and conviction that it is a necessary step toward the Risen life. It is like “Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over it became a butterfly.”

The Japanese novelist, Haruki Murakami, in his novel Kafka on the Shore powerfully describes the experience of transformation in the section “Sand Storm”:

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.

And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You’ll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.

And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’’ be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

Raimon Panikkar, the Indian Christian theologian and mystic wrote in his book, Christophany: The Fullness of Man, “What happened in the life of Christ will happen in us. In our transformed lives, God lives in us without us losing our own being.”

Risen life is not about accomplishing but manifesting. It is moving from doing to being.
It requires transformation of dying before dying and resurrecting before we die.

Christ is risen.
Christ is risen indeed!

Dear Friends,

In place of my pastoral letter, I want to share this article written by Maria Shriver who speaks to all of us what we are experiencing. It’s a moving and poignant piece.

John

I’ve Been Thinking…
By Maria Shriver, March 13, 2022

It was dark when I woke up. I made my coffee in silence, then sat down to do my morning meditation. I’ve come to notice that it’s in these early hours when it’s still that I can feel the most. I’m able to make sense of life for a bit when it’s quiet. The stillness allows me to just be.

As soon as I closed my eyes the other morning, the tears started to flow. They came slowly at first, then picked up steam. Within moments, I felt overcome.

I felt overcome with the heaviness of what is happening an ocean away. Overcome by the heartbreak, the sadness, and the brutality of what we have been witnessing. Every image has pierced my heart. Every story has brought me to silence. Watching women my age and older walk for miles in the freezing cold, holding their purses, falling and getting back up, and charging ahead as they fight back tears. Watching children hold their parents’ hands with looks of confusion, fear, and sadness on their faces. Watching men put their hands up to train windows as they say goodbye to their families leaving, while they stay home and fight to defend their country. Watching loved ones cradle those who lost their lives—weeping and wailing with emotion.

I don’t think anyone can bear witness to any of these images without being totally undone, without being deeply moved, without thinking “there but for the grace of God go I.” It’s impossible to bear witness to this war without your heart breaking into pieces. Then you bear witness to President Zelenskyy speaking with strength, conviction, and defiance. He is quite simply extraordinary. His words, “I’m not hiding. And I am not afraid of anyone,” and his resolve took my breath away. This is a man who has met this moment in every way.

I’ve also watched President Biden lead in his own way. I’ve watched him try diplomacy. I’ve watched him work to solidify the NATO alliance. I’ve watched him try to calm fears and reassure a shaken world. I’ve watched him impose increasingly tougher sanctions, doing all he can to bring some resolution to this horrendous situation without putting Americans on the ground and into another war. I know many pontificate from the sidelines, but I feel like he has done a good job unifying the Western world. I am grateful for his steady, calm leadership. I’m grateful he is leading America at this moment.

I also know that I don’t know the half of it. I also know that it all can change in a split second, which is why it’s hard to focus on anything else. It is overwhelming for everyone who is paying attention.

And how can we not pay attention to what is unfolding? How can we not feel what our fellow human beings are going through? This week I also listened to phone recordings of the wives and mothers of Russian soldiers who called a Ukrainian hotline looking for their husbands and sons, seeking information and trying to find out if they were alive or dead.

They, too, deserve our compassion. They, too, are human beings caught up in this insanity. And, as Mila Kunis points out below in our exclusive Conversation Above the Noise, they are not the enemy. I feel like I can almost feel millions of hearts cracking wide open around the world. The pain, the heartbreak, the sorrow spilling out everywhere. All because of one out-of-control man. God help us.

Every morning this week I found myself struggling to hold onto hope. I’ve struggled to hold onto my faith. I’ve struggled with my own anger, rage, despair, and helplessness. And yet, every time I turn on my TV, there is some story of someone who inspires me and lifts me up. Someone whose humanity takes my breath away.

Humanity—at its best and at its worst—is being played out in front of our very eyes. I believe that this moment is calling us all, no matter where we live, to be beacons of hope. To not lose faith. To carry on like the millions of Ukrainians who are walking for miles hoping to find safety, hoping to find refuge, hoping to not be afraid.

As I’ve watched the images, I’ve been struck by the fact that one’s life can come down to a backpack. It comes down to the clothes on your back and what fits into your backpack. Let that sink in.

I’ve found myself sitting in the comfort of my home thinking a lot about that. Thinking about whose hand would hold mine. Who would walk with me? Who would welcome me in? Who would help me? What would be in my backpack?

Do you know what would be in your backpack? Do you have someone in your life who would walk with you? Do you think you would be taken in by total strangers? Would you take in total strangers like so many in Poland have done?

Are you thinking about how to meet this moment? There are many ways each of us can meet this moment. None are too small. Whether it’s a donation of diapers, booking an Airbnb in Ukraine, supporting journalists, taking things out of your backpack and sharing them with others here in our own neighborhoods—the list goes on.

These are profound questions. These are questions for this moment and this moment is all we have.

Collective Prayer:
Dear God, please help us make sense of what is happening half a world away. What can we learn from the bravery and courage demonstrated by the people of Ukraine? What lessons might we learn from witnessing humanity, at its best and worst, play out in front of our eyes? Help us hold a place in our hearts for our fellow brothers and sisters everywhere who are displaced and suffering. Amen.