Blessed are you for both blessings and curses
By Peter Bauer
Human life can be a complex enterprise. The earlier years of youth can be marked by great enthusiasm and optimism. When you are young, you can have the tendency to see yourself as invincable, you can do anything.
There was a time in my early 30’s when I was working full-time, going to graduate school two days a week, completing a Mental Health internship and I was drilling monthly as a Naval Reservist in the Chaplain Corps. There were many night shift tours I did at my job that allowed me time to attend graduate school during the day and attend to other duties.
I don’t remember getting a lot of sleep at that time.
But I was in my 30’s then. I can’t imagine trying to replicate that kind of schedule now.
This kind of driven initiative to complete an education while working full-time and having a family was not an easy task. Anything but easy-there are always elements that are going to lose out, in many cases it can be relationships.
What are we to make of this whole mix of good and bad in life?
There was once a program that offered Psychiatric Nurse practitioners with prescriptive authority the ability to visit with inpatients and provide assessment, treatment and follow up referral services. This program was a huge success. The patients, families and the doctors loved the attention to detail, and the fine care provided.
Everything went fine until three alleged so-called wise health care bureaucrats from the East arrived. They surveyed the program, looked at spreadsheets and determined that the service program was not generating enough profit. The three so-called wise health care bureaucrats represented the parent company who were going to buy out that hospital that sponsored the effective program.
The purchase of the hospital was completed, and the effective program was dismantled. Somehow, no one in the corporate office bothered to think that taking apart a perfectly good program was a bad idea.
Months later the new hospital organization was starting to lose money, patients and families served by the Psychiatric Nurse program complained bitterly regarding the lack of services. The hospital too late recognized that they had made a very bad decision. The corporate board fired the three alleged so-called wise health care bureaucrats, and they were sent packing and heading back east.
Charting a course, thinking that you have all the right answers and showing hubris that you know it all and will not consider other perspectives, can be a sure-fire recipe for disaster. Services were lost and the health care of people who needed psychiatric care suffered.
So being blessed can be a mix of both blessings and curses, as odd as that sounds.
Self-guided individualism is a phenomenon that a lot of people worship. I recently got out of my car at a local restaurant, and I saw a bumper sticker on the back of a truck which read:
“I don’t care about your feelings!”
First, I was a little taken a back, I thought, “Is this Emerson on steroids?”
But then I thought no, even Emerson for all his emphasis on self-reliance saw the wisdom of being concerned to the lives of others.
Following Jesus means that we are no longer neutral, no longer a part of the non-aligned movement, not fence sitters, not those who stay non-committal in safe protected havens.
Living in faith means that you do things, you take risks, you become vulnerable in the service to others, in the proclamation of the Kingdom of God.
Harriet Tubman was a risk taker. She knew that she could not stand off in the sidelines and continue to witness cruelty and dehumanization that came from slavery.
Harriet Tubman is perhaps the most well-known of all the Underground Railroad’s “conductors.” During a 10-year span she made 19 trips into the South and escorted over 300 slaves to freedom. And, as she once proudly pointed out to Frederick Douglass, in all her journeys she “never lost a single passenger.”
Tubman had made the perilous trip to slave country 19 times by 1860, including one especially challenging journey in which she rescued her 70-year-old parents. Of the famed heroine, who became known as “Moses,” Frederick Douglass said, “Excepting. John Brown — of sacred memory — I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than [Harriet Tubman].”
During the Civil War Harriet Tubman worked for the Union as a cook, a nurse, and even a spy.
She knew that the real blessing and secret of life had to do with reality which was beyond oneself.
Yes, we are blessed more than we know. We live with both blessings and curses, both ying and yang, both with creation and disintegration.
The challenge becomes how do we position ourselves to be ever expanding, more creating, more caring, more loving and in turn agents of more redeeming not only for ourselves but for the life of the world.
May we appreciate more fully the gifts and the challenges of this life now and always.
May it be so.
Rev. Peter E. Bauer is a United Church of Christ minister.
Peter– a thoughtful and timely message. It’s Black History month and much can be said and much encouragement should be given to those fighting this fight. I hope this type of message is preached and adhered to today. I’m gone from Tomball and will preach soon at 1st Presbyterian in Rosenberg next Sunday. It may become an interim position– we’ll see. Hope we can visit soon.
Blessings! Dave