Years ago, I used to send “Island Notes” about life on St. Maarten in the Caribbean.  I am reminded of those notes on my visit to Taylor University in Upland, Indiana.

On this, the tenth anniversary of what has become known simply as “Nine-Eleven,” I know that many people have lost hope in America;  while we stand and talk tough, we have become a demoralized, uncertain, frightened nation, a nation on the decline.  I am writing today to say that I, for one, no longer believe that.  I have found a place of hope, of light, of life right in the  heart of America.  I feel I will express it poorly, but here goes:

I have the honor of being invited by a friend, Dr. Dennis Hensley, to do a series of weekend writing workshops at Taylor University, a Christian school with about 2,500 students.  This first week was a great experience, my class filled with a handful of sharp, motivated, talented students. 

After a full day of teaching, I went to the Commons to eat.  I sat by myself and watched hundreds of students as they had their Saturday evening meals.  I saw a slice of America I thought was long gone.  The huge dining room was charged with more positive, honest, joyful energy and noise than I had experienced since attending a Rascal Flatts concert several years ago. 

What I did not see was a single tattoo or “angry” T-shirt, though some did have crosses on them.  I heard lots of playful laughing and saw students, quietly and individually, bow their heads in silent prayer before eating.  What I did not hear was a single curse word, even after I saw students at one table prank a friend by heavily salting his food while he went to get his drink, or a table of male athletes engage in a mild food fight.

So, lose the idea of a Christian college being filled with a bunch of repressed, weak-kneed Bible scholars.  As I said, they are athletes (Taylor has football, baseball, softball, basketball, and other sports), as well as serious, ambitious scholars, focused and purposeful.  (Taylor offers a broad range of majors, from Accounting to Economics to Theater and more.  It also has one of the first and best Professional Writers programs in the country.) 

Earlier, over lunch with some of the students, as well as in class, I found that they are not afraid to speak of their faith as a simple fact of life.

My point:  On this, the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I am pleased to report a wondrous message of light and hope.  This is not the lost generation, and I strongly suspect Taylor University is not a lone colony, but the ever-present renewed and renewing seed of America.  – jri 

 John Ingrisano

209 Church Street

Algoma, WI 54201

(920) 559-3722

www.dailyconnections.net

September 11, 2011

“I have a death wish,” my brother, Lou, once told me with a shrug when I asked why he does medical mission work to the most dangerous places on earth.  I almost believe it.  Almost.    

•  He got mobbed by a group of street children in South America who discovered he had a knapsack full of tennis balls.  (He brought them for the children, but had to abandon the knapsack for his own safety.)    
•  He faced armed and nervous teenage militants in Darfur who weren’t sure his papers were in order.  (He kept working on patients in a makeshift clinic while, guns aimed at him, they sorted out the papers, which I suspect they could not read.
• He got lost one night after going for a walk in Kabul, Afghanistan.  (He ended up hunkering down with Pakistan troops behind sandbags until the U.S. Embassy opened in the morning.)

 Why does he do it? No, he’s not a thrill seeker or a glory hound.  I believe it is because he has a “life wish,” a restless need to devote is life to something that actually counts and that actually makes him feel alive.  I know the feeling.  We all do. 

 When he is at home, just doing the routine medical stuff at the hospital in Bar Harbor, Maine, he is bored to death, restless, and borderline (if not downright) miserable. 

That kind of explains why he created the “Outer Island Initiative” years ago, bringing medical care to residents of Maine’s offshore islands (and picking up a reputation along the way as one of the best Physician’s Assistants in the country); why he runs triathlons at the age of 64, even though his body is wracked with arthritis; and why he became  a 2^nd degree black belt in Karate (the hard contact stuff) several decades ago. 

 Why does he do medical mission work in dangerous places?  First of all, he is drawn, almost magnetically, to the children.  They haunt him in his sleep, he once told me.  And though he never quite admitted that he has a need to feel alive and meaningful, he did once share with me that “this is what I do, this is what matters to me.”  He is driven to fulfill a sense of purpose, to make sense of the often meaningless days and days and days of our lives. He didn’t write a check for Haiti relief; he went down there personally. 

My point:  It is only when we feel focused with a genuine, credible purpose (not a mindless goal of beating our own best golf score or growing the world’s biggest pumpkin) that life matters.  I am jealous of my brother; he reminds me that there is a meaningful, important reason why we were born.  Lou makes me restless to go out and, once again, find my sense of purpose … real purpose.    – jri

“For the secret of man’s being is not only to

live … but to live for something definite.

Without a firm notion of what he is living for,

man will not accept life and will rather destroy

himself than remain on earth ….”

                       –  Fyodor Dostoevsky

                             (edited out copy from The Brothers Karamazov)

Lou leaves this week for Libya, a hot war zone.  He expects to be gone three weeks.  Please keep him in your prayers and thoughts.  I suspect that he will spend that time miserable, tormented, yet joyful in his own way.  I am so proud of the old guy.      

John Ingrisano

209 Church Street

Algoma, WI 54201

(920) 559-3722

www.dailyconnections.net

July 31, 2011

Why do we suffer grief?  I just read about an amazing answer to that question in the June 9, 2011 edition of The New York Times.  Cate Edwards, 29, is an attorney and the daughter of the late Elizabeth and disgraced former senator John Edwards.  She has become the glue that holds the wreckage of her family together.  She’s an amazing lady, her strength born of loss.

Fifteen years ago, Cate’s brother, Wade, was killed in a car accident.  She was a teenager, and it was her first brush with suffering.  She grieved and struggled for two years.  However, it was this painful loss that gave her the strength to become the touchstone and glue for the family during the recent series of suffering: her father’s political loss, followed by his disgrace over the revelations of infidelity that tore the marriage apart, her mother’s long battle with cancer (Cate delivered the eulogy at her mother’s funeral last December), and now her father’s indictment, with the threat of prison (Cate is a key member of her father’s defense team). 

Life isn’t all lollipops and puppies, and meditating on the splendor of God’s beauty in this world; it’s a tough trip.  Remember that the hero of our story, Jesus the Christ, got pretty much skinned, gutted and fileted during his 33 years here.  Sure, he came back in triumph … and that’s the whole point.  In the end, we win!  However, taking up the faith does not mean we suddenly are given Kevlar armor and freedom from pain.  It means we take up the cross, shoulder the struggles, and, most of all, throw an arm around the waist of others to help them in the journey.  Hang tough.  Be strong.  No whining.  God bless.

John Ingrisano   

DailyConnections
209 Church Street
Algoma, WI 54201
(920) 559-3722
June 9, 2011

I know people – way too many – who shun the light, who dwell in a self-imposed state of hopelessness, overwhelmed by either their own too-numerous failures or a sense that life has done them wrong.  They wouldn’t know joy if it snuck up and bit them.  Worse, somewhere along the way, they decided that the darkness was best for them, a comfortable, if bleak, known.  They have quit.

Then I think of my mother, who was beset and assailed at every turn of her life.  However, every day I knew her she awoke with an off-key song on her lips and a twinkle in her eyes.  Most of all, when I would feel defeated, she would ferociously admonish me: “Go for the light, Johnny.  Always go for the light.”  

My point:  We cannot always choose our outcomes, but we can always choose our attitudes.  In faith and life, choose joy … no matter what.  And never give up! – jri 

How can we choose joy?  Well, start at the end.  We will all die someday.  That’s a fact:  100 percent mortality.  We don’t know when and we don’t know how, but we will die.  To me, that means every day is  a gift, a blessing, an opportunity.  (No, there are many days I do not see it this way, trust me.)  During each day, all we can do is the best we can, and some days we will fall again and again and again.  That doesn’t matter.  We can choose (and that is sometimes the only thing over which we have control, our ability to choose) to keep getting up, keep trying, and also keep accepting our weaknesses as well as our strengths and successes.  Joy is a choice we can all make.  Choose it today.  God bless. 

I have a confession.  I’m a fretter.  Beneath, my boyish charm and bluff manner, I tend to worry.    

I fret when life is troubling.  I fret when life is good … wondering when it will flip back to the troubled side again.  I also fret that this fretting is a sign of lack of faith, a lack of trust. 

So, today – if only for today – I declare it Fret-free Friday.  I will refuse to worry, refuse to get anxious.  I will put my whole trust (remember, it’s only one day) in God and put it all in His hands. Ahhhhhh!  Care to join me?  — jri

This one’s longer than usual.  Sorry ‘bout that.

My mother used to say I could fall in a pile of horse manure (not the exact words) and come up with a rose between my teeth.  I’m not the only one. 

Last Friday, I did a platform presentation at a client’s annual meeting in Pennsylvania.  The plan was to fly in on Thursday, do my dog ‘n pony show on Friday morning, fly out Friday afternoon, and be home, safely snuggled in my own bed, Friday night. 

God had other plans … again.  This time He decided to “bless” half the nation (and me personally; yes, I take these things personally) with one humungous blizzard.  After a series of misadventures reminiscent of the movie, “Planes, Trains & Automobiles,” I finally made it home Sunday afternoon.   

The rose between my teeth?  I got to meet some fantastic people along the way, most notably a fellow speaker with whom, by happenstance (yeah, right, Lord), I shared a limo from the airport on Thursday and also shared part of the return trip adventure, including paying a delightful hotel cook $100 to four-wheel us through unplowed highway roads to the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania airport after the snowstorm shut down the shuttles and cabs.

His name is Mike Schlappi (no, not the cook; the speaker).  He’s an Olympic Gold Medalist (basketball), businessman, husband and father, marathoner, snowmobiler, scuba diver, etc.  He’s also a man with a humongously huge positive attitude.  (No, not the silly-grin, butterflies and everything-is-beautiful kind, but one with substance behind it.)  Still, no big deal, right?  (Well, except for that Gold Medal part … oh, and the marathon stuff, too.) 

The big deal part is that Mike has done all this from a wheelchair, after having been accidently shot in the chest by a friend when he was 15.  His presentation got a standing ovation — several actually — as a genuine inspiration to never quit, to never give up.  (His book is titled, “Shot Happens: I Got Shot.  What’s Your Problem?”) 

The rose part for me?  With my schedule blown to Kingdom Come, my luggage circumnavigating the globe in the opposite direction, my underwear on the verge of breaking a record for how many days and ways it can be worn, and all the usual stress of disrupted travel, I had the opportunity to laugh, talk and travel through part of my journey this week and this life with a terrific, everyday guy who had done (and continues to do) some pretty amazing things.

But I admit that, to me, I am not so much impressed with Mike Schlappi because of his pretty amazing accomplishments.  I just got the biggest kick out of his magnificent, positive attitude, as well as his candid honesty.  (Part of his presentation addressed his bouts of self-pity and how you can have some pretty lousy days even if you work to have a good attitude.)

I like Mike for a number of reasons, one of them being that he landed in a pile of horse manure at age 15 and yet keeps coming up with a rose between his teeth. 

My point:  God always blesses us …  just not in ways we might originally choose.  For me, it was a blizzard that delayed my return home and gave me an opportunity to meet Mike Schlappi.  For Mike?  I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I’d say it was a bullet in the chest at age 15 that gave him the opportunity to rise to his own personal great heights and to inspire, motivate and make a big difference to the thousands of people he touches. – jri

“Faith is not something we have but

something we do.”

-         Barbara Shlemon Ryan

(Living Each Day by the

Power of Faith)

John Ingrisano

Daily Connections

204 Lakeview Drive

Algoma, WI 54201

February 7-8, 2010