This morning, I listened to myself on UPR – an interview from last Tuesday. “I wish I hadn’t cleared my throat so much,” I thought. “Or clicked my tongue.” I looked back seven years to the convocation speech I gave when I graduated with my MBA. I struggled to rid myself of the nasty click back then, too. My communications professor coached me and encouraged me to slow down – to connect – as I gave a speech on connecting with the ONE.
At the convocation, I spoke of our usually callous NICU physician who gently picked up a dying child and rocked the child because the young and immature parents refused to come to the hospital. The physician said, “No one should have to die alone.”
“And no one should have to live alone,” I said.
Lolma Olsen, president of Sage Consulting, quotes Margaret Wheatley, author of Turning to One Another, “Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals who can go it alone.”
I told the convocation audience about a man who had become paralyzed from the neck down in an automobile accident. He had no family support and was headed to a nursing home. He shared with me how just a few days earlier he had begged the nurses to give him something to make him die. He couldn’t see that his life was worth living – that is until a nurse sat at his bedside and talked with him, listened to him, and connected with him. She helped him identify his fears and told him she cared. She began writing a journal for this man. He shared that journal with me, proud of what he had written. He said, “I couldn’t see a reason for living – but now I know my life has meaning. I know my purpose in life. My purpose is to allow others to serve me, and they can be happier through that service.” Although he was still in a hospital bed unable to move, he had been healed because someone else cared.
As I listened to the radio interview, I was reminded of Mom’s last testimony recorded two weeks before her death which I had shared with the radio audience. “There are many things we can…that we need to do in order to be good members of the church,” Mom said. “And it begins with …being loving to one another.” She pleaded with her children to LOVE. “And I pray that we can, each one of us, strive more diligently to be like our Savior wants us to be,” were her final words of instruction.
Christ fed the multitudes, but he healed the ONE. In Luke 4:40 we read, “Now when the sun was setting, all they that had any sick with divers diseases brought them unto him; and he laid his hands on every one of them and healed them.” He laid he hands on EVERY ONE of them. May we, too, reach out our hands with love and remember the ONE.
