Shine (26 page)

T
he absolutes or truisms that you’ve been reading throughout this book have always worked for me in all aspects of my life. But as I build my relationship with God, there are some that transcend all others. They’re pure and positive ways to find spirituality, and I know not to doubt them. When I want to talk to God, they’re my absolutes and they help me find the way.

How else can you find your way to God? These work for me:

A Quiet Mind

It’s the best way to find your way to him. The poet Kahlil Gibran says we speak when we feel uncomfortable with the silence of our minds—“You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.” For me, I hear and talk best to God when my mind is quiet. Then, I hear the silence of the still, small voice within me, the silence of strength and contemplation, the silence of the spirit. My grandma used to sing an old spiritual called “Blessed Quietness.”

I think that regularly, we have to still the static, still the news, the laughter, the air conditioners, the traffic, the phones, even occasionally still
The View
to make the blessed quiet we need to hear God’s voice. We have to carve out time every week for solitude, meditation, prayer, and soul searching for private talks with God.

Be quiet and listen, and the spirit will work through your mind. Don’t expect Moses’ experience of God’s booming voice giving him the Ten Commandments. It is a calmer, soundless voice you’ll hear. And don’t just speak to God; let God speak to you. Why is it that we think we always have to be in control?
Sometimes you just need to shut up. Shut up and listen for a minute. Your brain, your mind, your heart, it all talks to you.

Ever dated someone you know is no good for you? When you go in that quiet place by yourself, and the door is closed, and you shut everything down, every single thing that has been bothering you bubbles right to the surface. You don’t need anybody to tell you to make him history, that no-good guy. You don’t. But, see—that’s God talking to you.

One day, I talked about this on television. It was actually on the day of my bridal shower. I explained that I was no longer allowing anything mean-spirited to come into my ears or to have an impact on my psyche because it was my job to break up Satan’s airwaves. It’s like you’re listening to a sweet radio station, and you’re jamming to your song, and your fingers are popping, and all of a sudden static just messes it all up. That’s Satan trying to mess you up so you won’t hear God’s voice.

Satan?

You bet—Satan. I definitely think you can’t believe in God without believing that there’s evil. There are people who will do everything in their power to rob you of your blessing. I live this day by day. I know there are people out there who are unhappy with themselves, and so their mission is to make you unhappy, too. Al and I were really tested during our engagement period. One day we would read that Al was out gallivanting with a bunch of women. The next day, we’d read a story questioning his sexuality.

I remember my husband saying to me, “Baby—what am I today?” And me answering, “Just who you were yesterday, baby.” The attacks on the nature of our relationship never bothered me a bit because I knew this man. But attacks on me, saying I was nasty or discourteous—those hurt so because I could not challenge the rumormongers. Al would give me strength one day, and I’d give him strength the next, and we prayed every morning and every evening, and we still do.

But you know what, even if there’s Satan static in your life, you bring in Nancy Wilson and her rendition of “What a Difference a Day Makes,” and it
doesn’t matter what kind of nasty stuff is going on, she makes it better. Doesn’t have to be an old-time spiritual to be a spiritual.

“…twenty-four little hours, brought the sun and the flowers, where there used to be rain.”

Oh, Nancy. I stop and give thanks for Nancy.

Rituals

Can I say a few words about ritual? You know religion is filled with ritual—the sprinkling of the holy water, the incense, the candles, the prayer rugs, the communion. I think in life we should make up our own rituals; they hold magic, they bring us quiet and calm so we can hear the voice of God. Again, this has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with a relationship with God.

I’ve got one ritual I’ve never changed for years. When I get on a plane, I need to quiet myself, I need to find comfort in spirituality. So, I pray the same prayer—it always works. And now Al prays it with me. I say, “God, we’re about to fly in your sky. Please send down your angels to safely guide us on their wings to our destination.”

I made it up, and that visual gets us through a fourteen-hour flight. You ask God to do you a favor and send down his protectors, his angels, to get onto this giant bird and glide you down safely. I’ve got more faith in God’s angels than I do in that plane.

Another ritual: Al and I like to not end a conversation mean—even if we’re annoyed with each other. We talk until we can get to a point where we can end it where we’ve said something pleasant to each other. You don’t want to end it mean. You don’t.

And my shower ritual. That’s private time with God in the morning. Just me and him and that soothing water cascading down. And lately I notice Al does the same thing. I hear him talking to God in his shower.

We also have a phone ritual. If, say, Al has a big presentation in the morning, I know we’ll hold hands and pray at the house before we both leave, but the ritual isn’t complete until Al calls me on the phone to say, “Hey, I’m about to go into the meeting.” That’s my cue to say something like, “Father God, bless this
meeting, and we want to thank you for our relationship and the fact we can rely on each other through you. We know Al is going to use every bit of his talent, intelligence, heart, and spirit you’ve given him because all this is done for your glory.”

And if Al doesn’t score at the meeting? That means we’re on to the next great thing God has planned for us. We walk the path together. It’s what God wants.

Create your own rituals. They’re little ceremonies, sweet observances that you do over and over. They bring peace and a sense of mystical other worldliness.

Laughing

Humor is an absolute in my life, and it has everything to do with my personal brand of spirituality. God’s not so serious that you have to be so proper in his presence. Sometimes, when I have to do something hard in God’s name, I’ll say to Al, “Woo! Jesus is no joke!” Then, sometimes I’ll hear a sermon, and within an hour, I will hear a song about exactly the same thing. I then know what God wants me to do. I laugh to myself, thinking, “God, if you wanted me to know it, just tell me. You didn’t have to smack me in the head, okay?”

But sometimes, yes, he does have to smack me in the head, because I’m not listening. So, when you hear a message being broadcast to you every which way, through a song, through a newspaper headline, through a whispered voice, just say out loud, “Oh,
that’s
what you wanted!”

Sometimes, you know, if you don’t deal with whatever issues are going on in your life privately, God will have to deal with them publicly. It’s the only way he can get your attention.

Stacked

Albert Einstein once said, there are two ways to live your life: one, as if nothing is a miracle, and the other is as if everything is a miracle. Here’s an absolute: in my life, everything is a miracle and planned by the miracle maker. My pastor
once said that nothing that God does is by happenstance. It is all according to a plan and for a purpose. If you walk down a street, said Pastor Bernard, and you see a bunch of change strewn across the sidewalk, your first thought is, “Oh my God, somebody dropped their money out their pocket.” But if you walked down the street and saw quarters stacked up in a stack, you’d say, “Somebody put those quarters there.”

As I look at my world and how things are in my life, somebody put those quarters there. Somebody stacked ’em up. Somebody put those quarters down for me to retrieve. There are no accidents. There’s a reason behind each and every thing. Think about my life.

I was born to a single mother in a town in North Carolina. I had two sets of grandparents who decided “our baby’s not gonna want for anything, so we’re gonna take care of her and between the two sets of grandparents, we’ll make sure she has everything she needs. My biological father’s sister, my Aunt Shirley, happened to be an educator, so I learned to read before most children. I started school earlier than most children, skipped the second grade, went straight from the first grade to the third grade. Moved to New Jersey, lived in a housing project while my mom struggled with low income. My mother instilled pride and purpose into my life as a little girl because as a little girl,
she
climbed her way out of poverty, became a social worker, helping others do the same thing. My mother started directing one of the relief agencies that she used to benefit from, and I graduated from high school. I won every community-based scholarship that was available to win so I could pay for school—every one except the Jewish one, and I couldn’t win that because I wasn’t Jewish. My mother didn’t say, “Pick a community college. Pick a local school.” My mother said, “Pick the best school you want, we’ll figure out how to pay for it.” I worked throughout college every single day, work-study job for the first two months because that’s what you get. Then, I taught myself how to increase my typing speed, took myself down to the Brookings Institution, and got one of those part-time typist jobs, typed 90 words per minute, so I went from a work-study job making $4 an hour to making $10 an hour as a freshman. Worked my way through college. Applied to law school. Worked my way through law school. Came out of law school owing $70,000 in student loans—$70,000! Took my dream job that paid very little money—$22,500 a year as an assistant district
attorney. That’s the job I wanted. I didn’t think about the fact that I could have gotten one of these law firm jobs that paid $75,000 which would pay back some of those loans. I took my dream job because that’s the job I thought could help me give the most back. Spent more than I earned (that shopping thing again). Went into terrible debt. I had the credit collection agencies calling me, and me saying, “You know, Ms. Jones, she don’t live here no more”—that kind of thing. It was so embarrassing. Got my wages garnished as an assistant district attorney, but I plugged along. And I plugged along. I was kicking butt in the courtroom, and somehow, some way, somebody saw me do some commentary in the beginning of Court TV. I got a phone call to come and do the first weekend of Court TV, and a young booker from NBC said to someone important, “You know, she’s special.” The Important One called, brought me on the
Today
show, and six weeks later, I became a national news correspondent, for NBC News, for the
Today
show and for
Nightly News with Tom Brokaw.
This little girl from a small town in North Carolina. Within a year, I’d paid those loans back.

Now, you tell me that somebody hasn’t stacked those quarters up for me.

That change was not just dropped there, momma.

Reflect God’s Shining Face

“The Lord makes his face to shine upon you,” and I think that we have to be mirrors of God’s shining face, and it is my job as a reflector to send that radiance right back to you, okay? That’s an absolute, a truism. It’s what I should do.

But I don’t—not always, anyway. Every time I don’t do it is when I disappoint God and when I do a disservice to him.

Recently, I really forgot that God is reflected in everything I do.

There is a radio host, very popular with a certain segment of society, who has been vicious to me for several years straight. I don’t think there is a word in the dictionary that could adequately describe what nasty is when it comes to his comments. He might think they’re funny. He might just mean to appeal to his audience, but his remarks about me are the basest, most vulgar examples of immorality, intolerance, and viciousness that I can imagine. It’s been relentless. He makes my heart hurt. But never once did I address his comments directly.

Never once until I found myself baited on television one day, and I fell into a trap.

We were having a conversation on the show about censorship and whether or not this radio personality’s comments should be censored by the FCC. Somehow, I allowed my emotional self to respond instead of that purpose-driven woman I know I am.

What did I say? I said there were certain people that quite frankly, didn’t deserve to have their comments heard, and I thought his remarks didn’t fall within the purview of free speech. But then, instead of just making my opinion known, I went very personal.

“I couldn’t care less if the vultures ate upon his body,” I commented.

Okay—it wasn’t very pithy and it sure was mean. Actually, what I said was so intense and mean-spirited, I gotta tell you, immediately thereafter,
I felt so good.
I felt wonderful. I felt it’s about doggone time. And I got e-mail from people saying, “It’s about time.” My girlfriends called me saying, “It’s about time.” Oh my gosh. I came home, and I bragged to Al, “Baby, this is what I did, and da da da da da,” and his response to me was, “Does it make you feel better?”