Thursday, November 5, 2009

Healing through giving.

So I found myself again on one of my favorite websites, www.postsecret.com. A community mail project that was started many years ago by a man named Frank Warren. He provided for people an address to send in decorated postcards with their secrets, deep and dark or funny and light alike and select ones are posted on the website. The project took off, it has made rounds as an exhibition in art museums, the cards have been released in a series of books, and it has been a movement which has given many hope.

Anyways I was on the website and one of the cards really touched me it read, " Working with cancer patients has helped me stop having suicidal thoughts." and i thought how brilliant is this? thats it really it isn't it. So often we are told that our lives happiness lies in self-fufillment or even in therapy in finding "our wounds." Which I will say working through our wounds is important but its really through serving others we take the focus off of us and we are happier and we get healed in the process. I'm not saying go do and push your problems under the rug; I'm saying we find fufillment not in focusing on ourself as our culture tells us, but in doing as Jesus did and serving others. Ironic, countercultural, and anti-self help at times it is what it is.

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