Tag Archive - presence

Holy Vocation: Encountering the Other in Front of You

May 12, 2010 in Ministry-Theology, Technology-Social Media, Therapy-Psychology with 3 Comments

I recently just finished a really great book by Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart: Finding Our Spiritual Home in Times of Loneliness. In one section of the book Rolheiser writes about a conversation he had with a nun. In that conversation the nun said the following:

“my vocation is, at each moment, to make the person in front of me the most important person in my life!”

I’ve been thinking a lot about what the nun said to Rolheiser, and wondering if I do that myself with those I encounter. We have all experienced (at least I hope so) what it feels like when someone is really paying attention to us…free of distraction. We have that feeling as if everything else has fallen away (all the noises, background conversations, etc.), and we become, if only for a moment, the most important thing to that person.

It sounds easy, but this is not easy to do. We live in a culture that finds it very hard to focus on the people directly in front of us. We are always wondering about who is texting/calling us as our phone vibrates in our pocket. We are wondering what latest news has come across the wire. We stare past people in church, wondering if someone more exciting is available to talk to during greeting time.

There is no secret formula to making the person in front of us the most important person at that moment.  But I think it involves several things (that I know of), and probably lots of other things (that I’m unaware of).  Here are some things/reminders that I try to keep in mind:

  1. Cutting out distractions.  When I’m with people, I try to limit, or eliminate the distractions so that that person in front of me becomes the most important person to me.  For me that means turning off my phone/closing my laptop/turning off the TV or radio during conversations with others.  This was/is a difficult practice.


  2. Reminding myself that my encounters with others are a gift–it is a divine encounter, not experienced elsewhere.  I love Martin Buber’s I-Thou relationship, and how Aubrey Hodes summarizes some of it here: When a human being turns to another as another, as a particular and specific person to be addressed, and tries to communicate with him through language or silence, something takes place between them which is not found elsewhere in nature. Buber called this meeting between men the sphere of the between.


  3. We have a better sense of self, and who we “truly” are when it is reflected back through another person, rather than through a self-construct we have built ourselves.  We often spend countless hours constructing another self (via technology, superficial relationships, lies, degrees, awards, money, fame, etc.), but someone we truly devote our energy, focus and time to (as if they are the most important person) can truly liberate us in many ways.  I think we often avoid doing this practice for out of fear that we may be exposed.


  4. To be truly present to another person I think requires the practice of “simply noticing.” I’m currently in a course/coaching program that trains therapists, executives and other professionals to be better at their craft, and one of the things that has resonated with me is this concept.  “To simply notice is to be aware–to pay attention.  Simply noticing has nothing to do with asking yourself why you are the way you are, although these answers may become obvious to you as you learn to simply notice your being you. (Taming Your Gremlin by Rick Carson, pp. 26).  The more I “simply notice” and pay attention to what is going on around me, the more I able to focus myself on those that I encounter.  I think we spend a lot of time unaware of our behavior, and not noticing how we interact.  I’m trying to change that in my own life.

These are some things/reminders that I keep in mind as I try to practice the vocation of making the person in front of me the most important person.

Have you found anything helpful to you as you try to do this in your own life?

Are You Everywhere, But Really Nowhere?

December 10, 2009 in Ministry-Theology, Technology-Social Media with 3 Comments

51pAAdjvXqL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA240_SH20_OU01_If you have been following my Twitter stream over the last week you will have noticed how much I love the new book, Introverts in the Church: Finding Our Place in an Extroverted Culture by Adam S. McHugh. I will be blogging about the book more at length in the near future, as well as posting an interview with Adam in the next few weeks.

But I wanted to post a pretty long section of the book that is found on pages 68-69.

Through a scene at a local movie theater, Adam really gets at the heart of our struggle to stay connected to one another, our ease with which we let our interior lives weaken, and how we can often let technology get in the way of our relationships and of being fully present to one another.

Ours is an overstimulated culture, and an insidious side effect is that our inner worlds are atrophying. As our world becomes more and more driven by external stimulation and our lifestyles mirror the dizzying speed of our technology, we focus outward at the expense of the inward. We take leaps and bounds in one direction but drift from another, which can have the effect of alienating us from ourselves, others and God.

My wife and I recently witnessed the disorienting nature of technology at a local movie theater. The next day, perhaps ironically, I recorded my reflections on my blog:

There were three people in the rows in front of us who had their cell phones open during the entire movie. They were text messaging and surfing the Internet and otherwise annoying people. As I saw those cell phone screens open during the movie, I observed that the people using them were not fully committed to being anywhere during those two hours. They were physically sitting in the theater, even sitting with others who accompanied them, but their minds and hearts were scattered all over the place. They were not fully present, in terms of their attention, to the visual and auditory experience in front of them, they were not fully present to their friends and family that they were sitting next to, and they were not geographically present to the people they were text messaging. They had a hand and foot in several different places that were disconnected, leaving them as some sort of radical amputees. They were everywhere and they were nowhere.

Aside from how piercingly bright a cell phone screen can be in a dark movie theater and how bizarre it is to text message during an intense and complex spy movie. I got to thinking about how handheld technology affects our sense of personal identity. So many people walk through their lives as ghosts, not fully present to anything, gliding through places and around people but not really seeing or experiencing or being seen or experienced.

Are You Truly Listening to Your Spouse

October 20, 2009 in Marriage-Family, Therapy-Psychology with 12 Comments

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[image by ky_olsen]

One of the things that was sort of a wake up call for me when I got married were the number of times that I thought I was really listening to my wife, but she would retort with “you aren’t listening to me.”

Inside, my pride was telling me that she didn’t know what she was talking about. I mean, come on. I was a pastor and listened to people for a living (pastors can sometimes been notoriously bad listeners). And I was training to become a therapist…who listens more than a therapist?  And after all, were all those people wrong who would tell me I was a great listener?  That’s what I was thinking inside my head. And of course those thoughts stayed inside my head, as should many thoughts that came racing across my brain during arguments with my wife.

But as time goes on I am beginning to see that what we often see as listening is not really listening at all. We assume because we hear, that therefore we have truly listened. But hearing and listening are not the same thing as most of you can attest to.

The longer I’m married, the more people I counsel, and the more material I read, I am convicted that we are a society that is not very good at listening to one another.  In fact, we rarely take time to listen to ourselves, instead choosing to fill up the space with noise to keep us from having to truly reflect on what is going on inside of us.  This inability to listen to ourselves doesn’t stop with us, but carries over into our most important relationships. Continue Reading…

Reminder to Parents: Presence=LOVE

October 19, 2009 in Marriage-Family, Therapy-Psychology with 10 Comments

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[image by Schantzilla]

One of the things that I vividly remember from growing up was my father’s voice calling out encouragement from the sidelines of my athletic events. It didn’t matter if I was a good or bad player, or whether or not I even got in the game. My dad’s presence on the sidelines or in the stands was always there. The more I reflect on that, the more amazing it is to me, especially since my mom died when I was 11 years old and my dad was essentially left alone to raise my younger brother and I.

I probably didn’t realize it then, but I have come to see it more clearly now, especially since I’m a parent. And what I realized was that for my dad to be present at my brother and I’s events (be it school plays, sporting events, etc.), a sacrifice of time was required. There was juggling of work schedules and many other things that went into him being there.

Ultimately, the message that was being sent to my brother and I was that time with us was more important than making extra money to buy things we didn’t need; that time with us was more important than sitting in front of the television.

I don’t know how many parents get this, but I wish more did.

I have worked with thousands of kids over the last 15 years in various settings. From camp counselor, to youth pastor, to therapist. And they all wish the same thing (sometimes spoken out loud; sometimes only discerned by the look in their face).

And that is….Parent’s time with their kids translates into love. Kids know that they are loved and cared for when their parents are present. Continue Reading…

Are You Able To Be FULLY Present To Others?

September 21, 2009 in Marriage-Family, Ministry-Theology, Technology-Social Media, Therapy-Psychology with 15 Comments

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[image by mikebaird]

One of the unique things about being a therapist is that it requires me to be able to be fully present to those who sit across from me in my office. No cell phone. No computer. No interruptions. No distractions. For45-50 minutes they get my full, undivided attention.  In fact, one of the comments that I hear most frequently from those who come to therapy is that this is the only time in their week when they feel like they have someone’s full attention.  Nowhere else does someone seem to be fully present to them.

In a culture that has become increasingly noisy it is not surprising that the correlative affect is that many people are simply drowned out by the noise. And therefore, in the process, this drowning out has a transforming affect on our relationships with one another.  This issue has been an ongoing topic of conversation at conferences I have been attending, blog posts I’m reading, and I had a great conversation with my father about it over the weekend, and with John Dyer last night.

My father, who is not anti-technology at all, simply said to me, “I’m afraid we are losing our ability to be fully present to one another.”

We all want to believe that we are fully present to one another, especially to those of us we consider most important such as spouses, children, friends and family, but more than likely, if we are completely honest with ourselves…we simply are not.

Recently I’ve noticed some of these things I see around me, and I cringed, realizing that I do this quite a bit as well: Continue Reading…