“It makes sense that Winthrop, a man accustomed to setting lofty goals for himself, would then set lofty goals for the colony he is about to lead. ‘A Model of Christian Charity’ is the blueprint of his communal aspirations. Standing before his shipmates, Winthrop stares down the Sermon on the Mount, as every Christian must.

“[It presages] Martin Luther King, Jr., doing just that on November 17, 1957, in Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He concluded the learned discourse that came to be known as the ‘loving your enemies’ sermon this way: ‘So this morning, as I look into your eyes and into the eyes of all my brothers in Alabama and all over America , and over the world, I say to you, ‘I love you. I would rather die than hate you.’ ”

“Go ahead and reread that. That is hands down the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical thing a human being can say. And it comes from reading the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical civics lesson ever taught, when Jesus of Nazareth went to a hill in Galilee and told his disciples, ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.’

“The Bible is a big long book and lord knows within its many mansions of eccentricity finding justification for literal and figurative witch hunts is as simple as pretending ‘enhanced investigation techniques’ is not a synonym for torture. I happen to be with King in proclaiming the Sermon on the Mount’s call for love to be at the heart of Christian behavior, and one of us got a Ph.D. in systematic theology.

” ‘Man,’ Winthrop reminds his shipmates in ‘Christian Charity,’ is ‘commanded to love his neighbor as himself.’ In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus puts the new in New Testament, informing his followers that they must do something way more difficult than being fond of the girl next door. Winthrop quotes him yet again. Matthew 5:44: ‘Love your enemies … do good to them that hate you.’

“He also cites Romans I 2:20: ‘If thine enemy hunger, feed him.’

“The colonists of Massachusetts Bay are not going to be any better at living up to this than any other government in Christendom. (Just ask the Pequot, or at least the ones the New Englanders didn’t burn to death.) In fact, nobody can live up to this, but it’s the mark of a Christ-like Christian to know that he’s supposed to.

“Winthrop’s future neighbors? Not so much. In fact, one of his ongoing difficulties as governor of the colony is going to be that his charges find him far too lenient. For instance, when one of his fellow Massachusetts Bay magistrates accuses Winthrop of dillydallying on punishment by letting some men who had been banished continue to hang around Boston, Winthrop points out that the men had been banished, not sentenced to be executed. And since they had been banished in the dead of winter, Winthrop let them stay until a thaw so that their eviction from Massachusetts wouldn’t cause them to freeze to death on their way out of town. I can hear the threatening voice-over in his opponent’s attack ad come the next election. John Winthrop: soft on crime.

“This leads us to something undeniably remarkable: ‘A Model of Christian Charity’ was not written by a writer or a minister but rather by a governor. It isn’t just a sermon, it is an act of leadership. And even if no one heard it, or no one was listening, it is, at the very least, a glimpse at what the chief executive officer of the Massachusetts Bay Colony believed he and this grumpy few before him were supposed to shoot for come dry land. Two words, he says: ‘justice and mercy.’

“For ‘a community of perils,’ writes Winthrop, ‘calls for extraordinary liberality.’ One cannot help but feel for this man. Here he is, pleading with Puritans to be flexible. In promoting what he calls ‘enlargement toward others,’ Winthrop has clearly thought through the possible pitfalls awaiting them on shore. He is worried about basic survival. He should be. He knows that half the Plymouth colonists perished in the first year. Thus he is reminding them of Christ’s excruciating mandate to share. If thine enemy hunger, feed him.”

Author: Sarah Vowell
Title: The Wordy Shipmates
Publisher: Penguin
Date: Copyright 2008 by Sarah Vowell
Pages: 45-47

My friend and partner spoke at the grave site and said that he has been angry and questioning God only 2 times in his life: The first when Robbie was born, and the now the second when God took Robbie from him.  WOW! The powerful truth that so often the only way to the mountain tops is through the valleys of life.

The typical Inquiry remains the dreaded yearly or quarterly employee evaluation.  This is the place where the boss critiques the employee.  We have all been ‘evaluated’, and we have all been found wanting.  Even if you receive a glowing evaluation, it takes only one ‘but’ to ruin it.  “You continue to do an amazing job, BUT you could improve in this or that…”  We are convinced that this negative feedback is essential and productive.  BUT if you are at all like me, I only hear the negative, and it burns into my heart.  I go sleepless for days stewing over my critique.  In fact, the negative causes me often to be counterproductive, frustrated, sad, depressed, discouraged, etc.
 
now in a parallel universe:
 
Your boss calls you into a room and gives you a list of sincere appreciation.  A list of blessings. A list of all the great things that you do.    Would your productivity go up? Would you work harder? Would you sleep well that night? Would you wake up excited to go to work the following day? Would you appreciate and encourage my co-workers and boss more? Would we all be more likely to smile, laugh, encourage, and bless those around us???

Now What?

What if we started to sincerely appreciate those around us? What if we took the time each day to choose someone to bless with words of affirmation? Can we all try this? I did.  WOW!  It almost brought the person to tears…it is THAT powerful.  If we all got into a rhythm of daily blessing those around us with words of encouragement, what might happen?? Please share with us your experience in trying this…

I also just finished Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller. He points out that it is not our responsibility to change anybody (and as Carnegie has pointed out, you can’t so stop trying!).  We can, however, try and see them as God does (as a beloved son or daughter) and love them as God does (unconditionally).  By putting away our ‘judgmentalism and pride and loathing of other people’ and instead treat everybody ‘as though they were [your] best friend’, they will change for the better.

When organizations discover that they are having a problem, they get a team together to look at the problems and try to find a solution better known as problem solving.  About 10 years ago, a team of expert problem solvers were hired by a large corporation to come in to ‘fix’ their problems in hopes of increasing their production rates.  They found that after their problem solving their production rates actually went down instead of up.  Puzzled, they tried a different method.  Instead of looking at the problem and filling everyone with negative thoughts about each other and the organization, they looked at the positive.  They looked at all the things that worked well, and they focused on making them work even better.  The production rate soared.  This method is known as Appreciative Inquiry.

It has been thought that allowing and encouraging people to air their grievances about other people in the organization and list their complaints about others and the organization is the path to improvement.  This has been shown time and time again to have the opposite effects. It produces negativity, discourages others from working harder to make things better (why bother if you are only going to hear the negative from a select few?!), and it creates a work environment that is defeatist, negative, counter productive, and filled with cattiness and  pettiness.  So next time your organization decides to send out questionnaires to critique, or wants to create a work group to problem solve, I would hope we all can consider Appreciative Inquiry and the wisdom of Carnegie, Miller, and Christ.

This is principle #5 in Carnegie’s book,  How to Win Friends and Influence People, and Lowndes book,  How to Talk to Anyone also points out the importance of smiling.

Example #1: Volunteers were given scrambled sentences and one group was given a group of scrambled sentences that were about rudeness and the other group was given a group of scrambled sentences about being patient.  The group that had just found the words relating to rudeness were much more likely to interrupt the interviewer’s phone conversation.  Very interesting.

Example #2: The other example they did is they had again 2 groups but this time one group got scrambled sentences with words to be found about being old and the other group had random words.  These two groups of participants were then timed from when they left the office, where the testing was done till they reach the elevator and they found that there is a significant slower pace to the group of people that were finding the words that were related to being old elderly.

Example #3: One group was asked to think of a very smart person and then answer trivial pursuit type questions vs. another group that was asked to think of a very stupid person and then answer the same trivial pursuit type questions.  The group thinking of the smart person did better at answering the trivial pursuit questions!

Example #4:  Finally the last example is from the tipping point by Malcolm Gladwell and in this book he discusses a very interesting story regarding the good Samaritan.   Princeton University psychologist met with a group of seminarians people studying to become a pastor’s and they were trying to answer the question who would stop and help a person who is slumped in the alley head down, eyes closed coughing and groaning.  One group was told that they were late to the class that they were going to teach and they are expected in only a few minutes so they better get moving quickly.  The other group were told that they have enough time to get over to the classroom.  What they found was that on several occasions the seminary students going to give their lecture which was actually on the parable of the good Samaritan literally stepped over the mock victim as he hurried on his way.  What they say is of the group that was in a rush 10% stopped to help, but of the group that was not in a rush that had some time to spare 63% stopped and helped.  This study suggests that the convictions of your heart and the actual contents of your thoughts are less important in the end in guiding one’s actions than the immediate context of your behavior.

All of these studies suggest that we as individuals must be very cognizant of the world around us and to influence it in a positive way, to show a good character,  we must be aware of our surroundings and slow down.  Those with truly great character do the right thing no matter if they are late for a meeting nor are they influenced in a negative way by their surroundings.

Sally Beth Roe, a character in Piercing the Darkness by Frank Peretti, becomes a Christian, but Peretti provides us with a glimpse of what is occurring in heaven during the very moment that Sally Roe becomes a Christian.  It is a remarkable moment of angels celebrating and the lamb of God embracing her.  We have NO idea.

“Above, as if another sun had just risen, the darkness opened, and pure, white rays broke through the treetops, flooding Sally Beth Roe with a heavenly light, shining through to her heart, her innermost spirit, obscuring her form with a blinding fire of holiness.  Slowly, without sensation, without sound, she settled forward, her face to the ground, her spirit awash with the presence of God…All around her, like spokes of a wondrous wheel, like beams of light emanating from a sun, angelic blades lay flat upon the ground, their tips turned toward her, their handles extending outward, held in the strong fists of hundreds of noble warriors who knelt in perfect, concentric circles of glory, light, and worship, their heads to the ground, their wings stretching skyward like a flourishing, animated garden of flames.  They were silent, their hearts filled with holy dread…As in countless times past, in countless places, with marvelous, inscrutable wonder, the Lamb of God stood among them, the Word of God, and more:  the final Word, the end of all discussion and challenge, the Creator and the Truth that holds all creation together–most wondrous of all, and most inscrutable of all, the Savior, a title the angels would always behold and marvel about, but which only mankind could know and understand.  He had come to be the Savior of this woman.  He knew her by name; and speaking her name, He touched her.  And her sins were gone…”-pg 321, Piercing the Darkness by Peretti

Edwin Abbot in his book Flatland shares with us, through parable, mathematics, and physics, the very real possibility of dimensions and realities so very close to us, but we remain unaware of them.  What if string theory is true?  What if there are dimensions just beyond our reach?  What if God and the heavenly realm is all around us, surrounding us, embracing us?

What would it be like to get a glimpse into heaven uninhibited, over joyed, overwhelmed in celebration?  Here is a brief video of a wedding that brought laughter and joy to my heart as I imagined….dancing and rejoicing in heaven over US!

Johnny is a grocery store bagger who has Down syndrome. He heard from one of the grocery store people about how people can make a difference but he thought he couldn’t do anything special for the customers because he was just a bagger. But then he had an idea: ‘he decided that every night when he came home from work, he would find a ‘thought for the day’ for his next shift. It would be something positive, some reminder of how good it was to be alive, or how much people matter, or how many gifts we are surrounded by. If he couldn’tfind one, he would make one up. Every night his dad would help him enter the saying six times on a page on the computer; then Johnny would print fifty pages. He would take out a pair of scissors and carefully cut three hundred copies and sign every one. Johnny put the stack of pages next to him while he worked. Each time he finished bagging someone’s groceries, he would put his saying on top of the last bag. Then he would stop what he was doing, look the person straight in the eye, and say, ‘I’ve put a great saying in your bag. I hope it helps you have a good day. Thanks for coming here.’ A month later, the store manager found that the line at Johnny’s checkout was three times longer than anyone else’s. It went all the way down the frozen food aisle. The manager got on the loudspeaker to get more checkout lines open, but he couldn’t get any of the customers to move. They said, ‘That’s okay. We’ll wait. We want to be in Johnny’s line.’ One woman came up to him and grabbed his hand, saying, ‘I used to shop in your store once a week. Now I come in every time I go by–I want to get Johnny’s thought for the day.’ Johnny is doing more than filling bags with groceries; he is filling lives with hope.-excerpt from ‘When the game is over it all goes back in the box’ by John Ortberg

“I heard a guttural scream,” Rich says, “and a man was handing me his lifeless son.”

“How old?” I ask.

“Nine months. We worked on him for over an hour.”

Rich moves his chair, coughs. It’s freezing in the conference room. [Note: For privacy, nurses are mentioned only by first name.] The muffled din of the emergency room is audible through closed metal doors. It’s 7 a.m., and Rich’s 12-hour shift has just ended. “I flashed to something I heard once about how a casket doesn’t weigh very much—just enough to break a father’s heart,” he says, “and I lost it. I’m standing there, between beds one and two holding that dead baby, and I’m sobbing. I am in charge, and I’m crying.”

As an 11-year volunteer in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center’s emergency room, I’ve seen close up what ER nurses deal with. It takes rare emotional courage not to burn out when you know that every time those doors open—whether you are working triage in front, where a guy may stumble in with a heart attack, or in back, where paramedics may race in with a girl who has been knifed or shot—it’s bad news. Then there’s the physical strength required to survive 12-hour shifts with two half-hour breaks and 45 minutes for lunch. ER nurses never sit. But it’s the children—every ER nurse will tell you—who take the biggest toll.

“For a very long time,” Rich says, “I viewed it as a badge of honor—How much crap can I take? How much horror can I see and not show emotion?” He clears his throat. “But you can’t keep stuffing it down; you have to deal with the emotion.”

Rich has been a nurse for 22 years. He has a 12-year-old son. There are 98 nurses in Cedars’ ER. Their ages range from 24 to 67, and they are as different as heavy metal is to polka. What they share are guts and a desire to give. “I was an operating-room tech in the army. My CO said, ‘Nursing?’ And I thought, Maybe,” Rich says.

He is big and bulky, with soulful eyes and a wild sense of humor. When I ask why he really became a nurse, he jokes, “I liked the cute little hats, the white nylons and the sensible shoes.”

Rich was diagnosed with leukemia last year in his very own ER, when he showed a doctor some large bruises on his body. The doc ran tests while Rich was on shift and returned with the diagnosis. The story goes that he asked the doc if he could finish his shift so he wouldn’t get docked pay. After eight months off, five rounds of intravenous and oral chemo and too many bone-marrow biopsies, Rich is back working nights. I don’t know how he does it. I don’t know how any of them do it.

“It affects your soul,” Melissa says. She could be called the queen of trauma, having done 20 years in what she terms “the knife and gun club” at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital in Harlem and five years in Newark, New Jersey, before coming to L.A. “Newark made New York look like kindergarten,” she says.

Hearing Melissa’s accent is like flying to N.Y. and walking into Original Ray’s. She recalls a guy “who was having a big heart attack in room nine…In the middle of his pain, he heard me, looked up and said, ‘What part of the Island are you from?’ ”

“Why nursing?” I ask.

“I had a scholarship to the American Ballet Theatre, and I was good, but I wasn’t brilliant…and my dad said, ‘You need an education—go be a nurse.’ ”

I can’t imagine Melissa in ballet shoes, but 29 years ago, she traded them for a stethoscope. We’re at Orso, across the street from Cedars, having dinner after Melissa’s 7 a.m.–to–7 p.m. shift. She’s wearing a chic black jacket over blue scrubs, but there are smudges under her eyes. “Where do you find joy in the job?” I ask.

Without blinking, she says, “Using my knowledge to participate in stopping bad things that happen to people.”

Of course, they can’t always be stopped. You can’t stop a mother’s pain when her 18-month-old drowns. “The mom was still wet,” she says, “making a puddle by room three. When she knew her baby was gone, she wailed…just melted to the floor.” She pauses. “I swaddled her in warm blankets. It was all I could do for her.”

“What do you do for you?”

“I compartmentalize,” she says, finally smiling. “And I buy very expensive shoes.” She must have a closet full of Manolos.

Shari runs to cope with the stress. She did the 2007 Boston Marathon. “I’ve also run after psych patients who escaped the ER and took off down Gracie Allen toward 3rd Street.” She works mostly as a charge nurse, overseeing patient flow. If paramedics bring you in on a gurney, you’ll see the charge nurse first. That’s who decides whether the man in room four gets kicked into the hall because the room is needed for the woman the LAFD just scooped up off the pavement.

Some ER nurses charge, but all work triage and patient care. There are approximately 15 nurses on each shift, and shifts change all day. There are 41 beds in the ER—58 if they fill the halls. Cedars is a number one trauma center—the wait can be 10 minutes or four hours. Think of all the L.A. hospitals that have closed.

Shari, who was raised on a farm in Racine, Wisconsin, has been a nurse for 21 years. The only other job she considered was a baker…and that was when she was five. “How come you didn’t do that?”

“They have to get up really early,” she says, taking a bite from her perfectly wrapped homemade sandwich. She expertly cuts her peach with a paring knife.

Shari came on at 11 a.m. and will work until 11 p.m. We’re in the cafeteria on her dinner break, but she looks like she has just showered—blond curls escaping a perfect ponytail—a Goldilocks nurse who behaves like a general. I have seen her hustle a parade of bloody, broken patients through the door with the cool calm of an air-traffic controller moving jets through a bank of thunderstorms.

Abby and Sylvia carpool from Santa Clarita. They call the drive back and forth to Cedars their “psychotherapy hour.” Abby, fast and funny, was born in the Philippines. She has been a nurse 27 years—Hoboken and then L.A. “Why nursing?” I ask.

“I got into the short line,” Abby says, and she and Sylvia fall into a fit of laughter. “I’m Chinese, and when you’re Chinese, you’re supposed to study math—go into accounting, banking. So I went with my girlfriends to apply to school. All of the lines were really long, but there was this one short line, so I got into that one.”

“It was the premed, premed tech and nursing line,” Sylvia adds, smiling widely.

“I passed the test,” Abby says, “and I said to my friends, ‘Nursing?! My mom is going to kill me.’ ”

The ER can bring out the worst in people—not just the patients but the people bringing in the patients. Week after week, I see fear breed anger and despicable manners. I ask Abby how she deals with that. “You can’t take it personally,” she says. “You have to get over it and move on.”

“What’s the joy in this job?” I ask Sylvia, who has three children and has been a Cedars nurse for 19 years—not long enough to dim her radiant smile.

“You get to help people,” she says. “You make a difference.”

The nurses remind me about the funny stuff: the toddler whose potty got stuck on her head when she tried to put it on like a hat; the four-year-old who shoved an aspirin up his nose. “Did you have a headache?” Rich asked the kid.

Some of the nurses are on their second careers. Paul, one of the calmest in the ER, was a Navy SEAL. Jerry, who could find a vein in a stone, was a fashion designer. Joe was in marketing at Anheuser Busch. “And then came 9-11,” he recalls, “and I was watching those firefighters on TV, and I just knew I had to change my life. I had to do something honorable.”

Clean-cut, in pressed scrubs and Clark Kent glasses, Joe is the one you’d want to marry your daughter. “Can you have the same compassion for a drug addict as you do for a cardiac arrest or the patient back for the third time with terminal cancer?” I ask.

“You have to. What about the guy booked on a double vehicular manslaughter, still drunk, spewing ef-yous and showing no remorse? He’d kept driving after he hit them,” Joe says, eyes narrowing. “You have to give him the same care.”

Lots of people are brought into the ER in cuffs—think of gang shootings, car wrecks, domestic violence. Bad guys get hurt just like good guys, and they’re all brought to the same ER.

Kelly wanted to be a cop. “First an actress, second a cop,” she says. Raised in Tennessee and Arkansas, she calls herself a hillbilly but looks like a movie star. She hunts, motorcycles, parachutes and has an 11-year-old son. A nurse for 10 years, she once did CPR on a woman in the ER driveway.

“I was triaging, the doors opened, and someone was yelling for help. It was the sound of the help; the hairs on the back of my neck stood up,” Kelly recalls. “Female, mid seventies, cold as a cucumber, not breathing, in the passenger seat. I pulled her down onto the cement. There wasn’t any time; her feet were still in the car.”

Flor nods. She, Kelly and I are at Du-par’s on their day off. “I did CPR on a doctor once,” she says. “We were moving him to the OR, and he went into cardiac arrest. I jumped up on the gurney, straddled him and did CPR—in the elevator. It probably didn’t look good,” she says, brown eyes wide.

Flor is a “good Catholic girl” from Manila—nuns and rosary beads to Kelly’s bikes and rifles. “My aunt was a nurse in the U.S., and when she’d come home, it was like she was a celebrity. People gathered around—they made a fiesta: We have to kill a pig,” she says, grinning. “They respected her, and I thought, I want to be like that.” She has been a nurse for 31 years. She has three kids in college and looks like she’s their age. “I’m a caregiver,” she says. “That’s what I took the oath for.”

Triage is the hardest, most ER nurses agree. It’s not just the patients’ vitals. What are the skin signs, the alertness, the level of consciousness? Sweaty, pale, faint, red? It’s not just their pain.

“Triage is the most dangerous,” Nili says.

“You use your clinical judgment to assess the patient. You can’t let anyone slip past you, and you can’t make a mistake.” Tall and impressive, if Nili walked into your room with a needle, you’d extend your arm. “Why did you go into nursing?” I ask.

“Oh,” she says shyly, “I was out of control at Cal State Northridge, and my parents said, ‘It’s either nursing school or leave home.’ ” She has been on the job for 16 years. “Not everyone can do it.”

Well, that’s for damn sure. I’ve seen Nili on the trauma team, suited up in blue plastic, waiting for the paramedics to arrive, like a solider about to take a hill. I’ve sat next to her at the radio when the LAFD calls. The silent blue lights in the corners of the ER flash and spin, and a nurse on the blue team hotfoots it to the radio room. “Cedars base, copy,” and the line crackles: “This is Rescue 41. I have a 57-year-old male, altered LOC, in moderate distress; this is Rescue 27, I have a 16-year-old female…” And on it goes.

“Every day is a crisis,” Nili says.

ER nurses don’t give long-term care. They don’t get to know you, and they don’t even know what happens to you after you leave the ER. They are a platoon of adrenaline junkies with invisible capes and angel wings, there to take care of you at your worst moments. And it never ends. “Patients are like waves of ocean hitting the beach,” Shari says. “New ones just replace the old ones.”

“If I have to cry, I cry,” Mark says. “You can’t carry it to the next shift.” Blond and lanky, he has the mischievous air of a reformed bad boy. He did 10 years as a paramedic before his 10 as a nurse, so he has seen his share. “I wanted to be that person who knew what to do, how to run a code—perfectly.” A code, even laypeople know, is when the heart stops.

Mark thinks about the process for a moment and flashes one of his rare smiles. “It can be a miracle,” he says.

“Does it scare you anymore?”

“No,” he says. “I’m either enlightened or f–ked up.”