Weekly Words of Wellness Archive
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• Living in Relationships
• Gaining Healthy Perspectives
• Practicing Self Care
• Building Values
• Spirituality
Living in Relationships
"When We Can't Untangle Ourselves"
"Springing Back to Life"
"In The Same Boat"
"Restoring Power"
"Don't Try This At Home!"
The Community of a Peloton
"Dadisms: Happy Father's Day!"
"Celebrating With Our Graduates:"
"You Can't Hurry Love"
"Making A Great Entrance"
"The Best Valentine's Gift of All"
"The Healing Power of Community"
"Let's Root, Root, Root for the Home Team"
"The Available Parent"
"Who Do You Appreciate?"
"The Love Of A Father"
"Miracle Workers"
"Standing In Love"
"Sitting Together, On Purpose"
Christmas Love
"Of Masks and Halloween"
"Coaching Opportunities"
"Muscular Love"
Pay Attention To What You Pay Attention To
"Learning to Shift"
"Flood Recovery"
"Fireworks and Relationships"
"Emotional Triangles"
"The Grass is Always Greener....."
Commencement Exercises
Response Ability
"Big Shoes To Fill"
"Emotional Cutoffs"
"The Ground Begins to Soften"
"How Silently, How Silently, the Wondrous Gift is Given"
"Deploying Our Energy"
A Reminder to Pay Attention to What We Pay Attention to
Life itself is the proper binge
Relationship Math
Standing in the Need of Prayer
All In Good Time
Happy Mothering Day!
You, Too, Can Be a Superhero
Moving Well Without the Ball
I DARE YOU!
The Rest of the Story
A New Kind of Stimulus Package
You Are In Love
Pilots and Passengers
Don’t Be a Frog When Dealing with Stress
The Roots of Change
A Higher Degree of Resolution
TRICK or TREAT Just for Halloween
Pay Attention to What You Pay Attention To
December 27, 2009
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"How Silently, How Silently, the Wondrous Gift is Given"
The Rev. Dr. Scott Stoner
A primary part of our mission at Samaritan is to create and offer programs related to Family Wellness. Most of our programs teach the skills and habits needed to create and strengthen healthy relationships--between parents and children, spouses, parents and teens, friends, colleagues--any and all relationships. We teach these classes at churches, YMCA's, schools, businesses, and at our offices. There is one skill that we teach that participants in our programs have told us makes a world of difference in their relationships, once they have mastered it. This skill is the ability to stay calm and keep one's voice soft in the midst of a heated argument or conflict.
Everyone of us has done the opposite of this skill on countless occasions. When a situation or conversation becomes tense, our natural inclination is to become intense ourselves and to speak loudly as a way to try to be heard. The typical response when we feel like someone is not listening to us is to speak more loudly: A coach feels like her players aren't listening and so she begins to yell; a father feels like his children aren't listening, and so he gets angry and yells; spouses feel like they are not being heard and so they both begin to raise their voices until there are two people yelling and no one listening; a teenager's volume goes from zero to a hundred when she feels like no one is listening to her.
These examples show how much we all long to be heard, and yet at the same time they show how easily we can sabotage our efforts to be heard. Raising our voices when we do not feel heard pretty much guarantees the outcome we are trying avoid. The principle that we teach in our classes is that staying calm and keeping our tone soft is what will maximize our chances of being heard. A soft heart and a soft voice can almost always restore a break down in communication and connection that has been caused by hard hearts and loud voices.
Christmas is the incarnation of God's love through the soft heart and soft voice of the Christ child. Jesus entered a world just like our world today; a world of hard hearts and loud voices, a world of heated arguments and conflicts. The genius of God is that God did not send one more loud voice into the world to try and drown out all the other loud voices. Instead he sent the voice of an infant, the voice of Love into the world to gently soften our hard hearts and loud voices.
Silent Night is perhaps the most beloved Christmas carol because it softens our hearts every time we sing it, especially on church on Christmas Eve with just the candles lit. I am pretty sure there will never be a Christmas carol called, "Really Loud Night." It is in the silent and soft moments of this season that we most clearly feel God's love, as well as the love we feel for one another.
We at Samaritan wish each and every one of you a Merry Christmas, filled with many quiet and soft moments of Love.
