Lessons learned across the nation

BY NORRIS BURKES
FLORIDA TODAY

Since leaving my hospital chaplain job last spring to pursue full-time writing, my teenager thinks I'm on some kind of extended summer vacation. She even asks her mother why I don't work anymore. Ouch.

So, if you'll allow me a moment of personal indulgence amid a busy travel schedule, I'll depart from my usual column to write about what I did with my summer vacation.

I call it, The Summer of My Best Intentions.

My intention was to spend the summer writing a new book, but everything changed when Andy and Laura Petruska invited me to speak before their Unitarian Universalist church in Melbourne.

My Baptist friends warned me that UU congregants don't believe in God. They were partly right; some UU congregants don't believe in God. However, they are engaged in a deeper search for things outside themselves. I have immense respect for that.

They also believe in warm hospitality. They welcomed me with open arms and heard my speech on what born again really means, not just how the televangelists explain it.

More invitations followed from readers in Colorado, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

In Colorado, I spoke in a conservative Lutheran church. I didn't mention my speaking experience at the UU church, but they listened intently as I shared how they might become a listening presence in the lives of people who are hurting, no matter what their theological beliefs.

I spoke in colleges, hospitals, libraries and community groups. Yet nowhere did I approach with more reticence than I did at a lunchtime lecture to a newspaper staff. Journalists are stereotyped more for their cynical disbelief than their belief. What does a chaplain share that could remotely interest reporters? I wondered.

Yet the folks at the Star Gazette in Elmira, N.Y., munched on sub sandwiches and listened patiently as my talk went into double overtime. Just as I had challenged the previous churches, I encouraged the staff to tell the faith stories of various groups in such a way as to foster understanding.

Wherever I went to share the various stories from my book, "No Small Miracles," people came forward with stories of their own: war stories, love stories and childhood stories.

They talked about their losses: losing a job, losing a marriage, losing a child, losing a spouse, losing a premature baby.

They told me how my column stories related to their life stories. I was humbled to hear how they post these columns in their work cubicles, discuss them in their Sunday school classes, read them from the pulpits, paste in their organizational newsletters and tack them up in the teachers' lounges.

So, what did I learn on my summer vacation? you might ask.

I learned several things:

I learned New York isn't always cold, Colorado has deserts and Florida isn't always humid.

I learned I may have been wrong in a column last summer when I called Mount Mauna Kea on Hawaii's Big Island the quietest place on Earth. That designation likely may belong to River Street in Galeton, Pa., where it was so quiet that I had to turn on a white noise machine and bring guest crickets in for the evening.

I learned stereotypes never are an effective way of knowing people. I learned sea captains aren't always crusty, preachers aren't all preachy, newspaper editors aren't all cynics, librarians aren't all stuffy, college professors aren't always professorial and Sunni Muslims sometimes become Christians and faithful column readers.

Finally, in Elmira, I learned as hard as you might try, you can't get everyone to like you. Bailey was my teacher of that truth.

Next week, more about Bailey.