Blog

In an increasingly complex world, Carmel Thomason offers practical ways to simplify life and see the extraordinary in the everyday.

Speak Kindly

Sometimes people say unpleasant things more out of habit than intended harm. I once worked with a woman who repeated nasty comments she overheard adding: ‘I always say forewarned is forearmed.’ In other words, she justified repeating cruel remarks by saying she was helping me. She wasn’t. Those words hurt and made me suspicious of people I otherwise might have had a good relationship with. After all, haven’t we all said something about someone at some time to let off steam?

It’s easy to feel like we’re bonding when we complain, but any support we feel from this is short lived. If you want to find fault with other people there will always be something. The same is true for your career, your home, or anything in the world. There is always plenty to grumble and complain about, but the opposite is also true. Don’t miss opportunities to speak kindly because you’re too busy focusing on what’s wrong. If you think something nice about someone, be free with your compliments and let them know.

Be the peacemaker

It’s upsetting when people assume the worst of you. Working as a journalist I meet lots of people in all kinds of situations. Unfortunately, some believe all journalists are sour people who only want to tell the worst of life. It’s fine if someone doesn’t want to talk to me, but often these same people are very vocal about it. Even in social situations they make it clear they don’t want to speak to me in case I write about them, yet take umbrage when I do what they ask and ignore them.

Faced with such hostility it would be easy to become cynical, to forget that these people are a noisy minority, and to begin to act in the underhand manner they expect. But, would that make me feel better about myself or help me to enjoy my job?

It is easy to get caught up in other people’s chaos and allow them to distract you from the good God is working in your life. Choose to see the best in people and view anyone who brings chaos to your day as an opportunity to practise letting go of minor irritations and forgiving quickly. Don’t wait for other people to change until you can feel at peace; peace starts with you.

Trust God

Sometimes we learn to lean on God by practising letting go of small every day anxieties. Other times it takes a situation so clearly out of our control that we have nowhere else to turn but God before we truly experience what it means to put our trust in him.

Trusting God means that we don’t need to speculate or over analyse, going over and over the same problem. If there is something we can do to help the situation then God will guide us in that direction, no amount of worrying is going to change it.

In my garden I put smooth pebbles on the top of my plant pots. They look pretty and also help protect the plants from losing too much water in the summer months. When I begin to worry about something I’ll hold a pebble in my hand, pray about the situation and then lay the pebble down.

Whenever I notice I’m thinking about the same problem I look out onto the garden and feel reassured that I’ve given it to God. I might not understand or like where I am, but I know that God is in control. He will sustain me and work all things out for good.

Say thank you

Several times in the Bible we are encouraged to count our blessings. I particularly like Psalms 103:2 which reminds us to remember all God’s benefits.

When our blessings become familiar, they can be easy to overlook. Some years ago I took a trekking holiday in Costa Rica where we camped, drank water from streams, ate little more than rice and beans, and lived without a shower, flushing lavatory or comfortable bed. Coming home a soak in the bath felt like the most decadent experience in the world, and for a short-time I began to see small luxuries, like snuggling under a duvet, in a different way.

On my trip I bought some ground coffee from a local factory. Drinking it reminded me of all the people I’d seen working to produce my morning cuppa. It made me savour the taste. I began enjoying my food more too, thinking about the variety of produce available within a short distance of my home, and all the people who work to make that possible. I benefiting from the work and talents of so many people and yet I’d started to believe that by going to the supermarket, paying for the food and cooking it, I was somehow doing it all myself.

Ask God to help you appreciate all of his kindnesses, so that in recognising how much you already have, you can confidently reach out and ask: who can I bless in return?

Appreciate the people in your life

As a journalist I’ve written on many subjects, but the most memorable was one for which I had to do no research at all – how I feel about my mother. Coming up to Mother’s Day I was asked to write about what my mum means to me. On the face of it, this should have been the easiest assignment in the world. Yet it made me realise just how infrequently I stopped to think about and appreciate specific qualities about the people I love.

When asked a question like that I was all too aware how easy it is to slip into spouting platitudes. Yes, such words might be true, but do they reach to the heart of a person?

The headline on the story read, ‘Telling your mum how special she is means more than any gift’. I still sent a Mother’s Day card and bought a present for my mum that year. Presents and cards are tokens of appreciation, but it is the appreciation that is the real gift, and it is a greater gift than any money can buy.

Think about a person in your life who you love. If you had to write something about what they mean to you, what would you say? Offer a prayer of thanks to God for bringing this person into your life.

Be the miracle

We all have incidents when someone seems to have shown up just at the right time. Had they come into our lives minutes later or earlier things could have been very different.

A friend of mine was enjoying a country walk with his family when his mother-in-law suddenly took ill. It was a remote spot, and none of them could get a phone signal to call for help. Within a couple of minutes a young woman came down the hill. It turned out, she was a medic and recognised immediately what was wrong. ‘We had seen no-one all day, and then she shows up out of the blue when we needed someone,’ my friend said. ‘It was like she was an angel.’

In that woman’s kindness my friend and his family saw a reflection of the divine that is within all of us. In acting out our faith, we give life to God’s spirit within us and we never know where that might lead. What may seem a small act to us could be part of a miracle God is working in someone else’s life.

As a journalist I meet all kinds of people. Despite the stereotypical view, I usually want to make people look their best. Sometimes it’s harder than others, because some people don’t help themselves. They’ve already decided all journalists are sour people who want to tell the worst of life. There are people who make it clear that they don’t want to talk to me in case I write about them, and then take umbrage when I do what they want and ignore them. Usually these are people who have nothing interesting to say anyway. And then there are people who have such an amazing story to tell that meeting them has changed my view of the world.

Ray Rossiter is one of those people. I first met Ray when I called him about an exhibition that the Imperial War Museum North was running about the experiences of prisoners of the Japanese during World War II. Lots of men were interviewed for that exhibition. They all had fascinating tales to tell, but there was something about Ray that stuck with me. Some men understandably said that they could never eat rice again after their experience. Ray said: “I love rice, it kept me alive.”

When I spoke to Ray he asked if I was going to visit him. Given the time constraints of my news desk I couldn’t. Then he told me that his wife had dementia and he was the sole carer. I realised that he probably wasn’t getting out of the house much at all, so I said that while I couldn’t visit him in work time, I would go to see him. I suppose I went to his house the first time because I felt sorry for him and his situation, but as time went on Ray was to touch my heart in a way that I could never have expected.

In my job I was used to people calling me to ask me to fight their corner, seek justice for a wrong done to them, even if it was simply to expose it. I’d hear people describe anything from a cross word between friends to the most heinous of crimes as unforgiveable. Yet, here was a man who had suffered unimaginable wrongs and he carried no bitterness. As Christians we talk about forgiveness all the time, but it can feel quite abstract. When we actually witness it lived out, as Ray is doing, it is life-changing.

When Ray talks about the war he says: ‘I felt that God was there all the time, his love shining through the actions of men, one for another. He was there in every kindness, every act of compassion – it is how we survived. It was often said: “It’s every man for himself in here,” but in reality nothing was further from the truth. We depended so much on one another for encouragement, morale-boosting and in numerous instances for our very survival.’

The friendships Ray forged in those adverse times were ones which were to last a lifetime. The men he knew then, men who could be cheerful under the most appalling circumstances, were not men who could let bitterness eat into their souls and he didn’t like to see hatred consuming them in this way. It was a big ask, Ray more than anyone knew that, but he wanted to encourage them, for their own sake, to forgive.

‘Even years later it was a taboo subject among our fellows and it wasn’t an easy thing to get across because it’s hard to comprehend just how much there was to forgive,’ he says. ‘We came out of captivity breathing fire and vengeance against the whole Japanese race – all of us believed at that time that it would be impossible ever to forgive them. Yet while every instinct may be screaming at us to hate them for what they did, we have to stifle this natural impulse. We can’t go on hating forever. The happiest people are those who can find it in their hearts to forgive.

‘Peace within a person is where it all starts, because the actions of nations are merely the actions of men writ large. No-one who has personal experience of world war ever wants to see another one. While there is life, strength and breath in our bodies we should be striving for a better world and our better world will come if the common people of the world wish for it and work for it hard enough’.

We can speculate forever about why things happen or why some people do terrible things, but we rarely find the answers we seek. Jesus showed us another way and people like Ray are showing it is possible. Thankfully, he’s not alone. Since meeting Ray I’ve met many people who have made forgiveness in a reality in their life. All of them share a desire to make the world a better place, one in which these huge wrongs might never happen in the first place.

It’s a vision that is shared by the Restorative Justice Council, which give victims the chance to tell offenders the real impact of their crime, and holds offenders to account for what they have done, enabling everyone affected by a particular incident to play a part in repairing the harm and finding a positive way forward.

It was through the Restorative Justice Process that Joanne Nodding was able to meet and forgive the man who raped her. She says: ‘Did I hate him? For a while afterwards you could probably say that I did, but you can’t go on living with hate in your heart forever. Well, I can’t anyway. I’m not a person who feels hatred. That feeling isn’t me, or it’s not the me I recognise, and it’s not the me I want to be. Besides, hating him is not going to change what happened.

‘I could sit here, thinking, “God, why has this person done this to me?” Or I could say, “God help me to forgive and help him to have a better life”. Everyone can change and everyone deserves a chance to change. As I see it, I could either hate him for the rest of my life or I could forgive him’.

I can’t begin to understand what Ray and Joanne went through, but the goodness they reflect through their capacity for forgiveness makes me want to live a better life. They’ve made me think about how many opportunities I have each day to either forgive or not, to let go of pain or to let it weigh heavy in my heart. Do I need to focus on a throwaway remark from a stranger so that it spoils the rest of my day? Am I open to accept help even when it doesn’t come from where I might expect it? Can I be more loving, grateful and less critical? Can I focus on the good in people? What I’ve learned is that life can be messy, but we are all given choices every day. In choosing to forgive we are choosing to love, and to live the best life we can today.