Jon C. Swanson's Blog, page 43

A preface to “A Great Work”

You want to do something great.

We all want to do great things. We all want to change the world. We all want to do something that matters, to be someone who matters. I do. You do, too.

We don’t have to be in charge, we tell ourselves. In fact, we’re not sure we could be. But we’re tired of just doing stuff for someone else’s agenda.

You and I have both read too many management books, leadership books, greatness books. They are full of great ideas, promises, guidelines. But maybe we n...

A prayer for the sixth Sunday of Easter

God.

We would love to have the world be overcome.

Not in some power-grabbing way.

But this weekend, in our community, in our hospital, in our world, there is so much sadness and anger and grief.

We would love to see the rivers clap their hands and the mountains sing together for joy, to give you a standing ovation and a rock concert.

Some days, it seems that would be less of a miracle than people in our communities
clapping together and singing the same songs, with you at the ce...

Go with it

When I was a kid, I worked on a little project and tried to get a screw to go into a hole. No matter how hard I worked, it wouldn’t go in.

My dad saw me struggling and said, “Don’t force it.”

There was a different way to make it work, and he showed me how.

If I had forced the screw, I would have destroyed both the screw and the hole it was going into.

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Last week, my work team got together for meetings and team-building activities. Before the meetings, we each took the Stren...

Thinking again about a great work.

Starting next Monday, I’m inviting an old friend to fill in for me for a bit.

It’s me. I’m the old friend.

Jon from ten years ago spent a year reading and teaching and writing about Nehemiah, both a person and a book from the Bible. The result of that year was a book called A Great Work: A Conversation With Nehemiah For People (Who Want To Be) Doing Great Works.

For me, the conversations that I had with Nehemiah were formative. The way I’ve interacted with God and others and myself ...

IJM

Rich Dixon on learning tough truths.

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Our 500-mile tour was filled with symbolism.

We began in Cincinnati at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Museum and ended at the Lincoln Memorial. On our final day together, we visited the headquarters of International Justice Mission.

We were prepared to meet lawyers who work worldwide on legal issues regarding justice for trafficked people. We didn’t expect, in a downtown DC office building, to encounter locked doors and security...

Three short thoughts and a request.

I was rereading The Next Right Thing by Emily P Freeman and found this statement: “We can’t prevent storms from coming, but we can decide not to invent our own.”

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For Sunday’s homily, one text was 1 John 4:7-21. I said,

John is saying, in my own paraphrasing, “How can you say that you love the one who lovingly brought you into his family and, at the same time, turn around to other people that were lovingly brought into that same family and hate them. You don’t understand love.”

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What does it look like to live without fear?

That’s the first story I read on Sunday, a story about Philip.

Philip was Jewish but not from Jerusalem. He was an outsider, with a Greek inspired name. And he knew God’s love.

So when people got kicked out of Jerusalem for loving Jesus he went first to Samaria, the home of the Samaritans. The outsiders. And he talked about how much God loved them.

And they were delighted.

And he listened for God’s quiet nudge which said, go out to the road that goes to the desert, to Gaza and the...

A prayer for the fifth Sunday of Easter

God.

We are asking you for signs all the time.

We are asking you for directions, for plans, for meaning, for answers.

And you told Philip to go to a road in the desert that led to nowhere.

I could be wrong, but I’m guessing that it wasn’t a message written in the sky.

I’m guessing that it was a nudge, a thought that wouldn’t disappear, an awareness that he needed to go and that it was you that was making him aware.

And then he met a chariot with a man that was reading the ex...

An old reminder of a request to rejoice.

In late March 2020, our hospital system began a new project, a daily internal TV program with a conversation between a host and a number of coworkers. Each episode ended with a prayer from a chaplain. I was part of the process and wrote out the prayers that I then prayed on the “The Daily Dose.”

All those prayers and reflections from that time are in God. We Still Need You: A Year of Pandemic Prayer and Practice from a Hospital Chaplain.

This week, I was thinking about writing a praye...

If you have.

Continuing the story I started in ““

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Sometimes I walk into hospital rooms and I say, “Sometime I’m going to do that. I’m going to say, ‘in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk.’ But today isn’t the day.”

In our first reading this morning, we hear what happened when Peter and John were taken to court. Because they were. They were arrested for causing a disturbance, for being part of a miracle, for somehow connecting back to Jesus.

And they faced th...