Renew your heart, engage your head, and speak your truth

By Todd J. Sukol

There are moments when your work in the nonprofit sector will seem futile. You begin to wonder, “Am I really moving the needle or just filling up time and space?”; “Is it worth it?” If you are staff, you may consider abandoning the grind and pursuing a job making more money in the commercial sector. If you are a volunteer or donor, you begin to think the whole enterprise may be a vanity. Are you just fooling yourself, or maybe even being taken for a ride?

These are the times when we need to remember that we are princes and princesses. We possess royal power. Nonprofit work is holy work and it requires our very best selves if we are to succeed. We renew our resolve by looking inward. We need to access our deepest motives for making change. We cannot afford to just go through the motions. Our work requires ever-renewing connection to our internal fire in order to carry us through the hard times until our efforts pay off. And at the same time, we must check the passion of our hearts with the strategic thinking of our minds. We add our best thinking to that of our co-travelers — volunteers and staff alike. We chart new courses, try new approaches, and yes… we put our heads down and persevere with those things that seem to be working.

“The greatest sin of man is to forget that he is a prince — that he has royal power,” said Abraham Joshua Heschel in A Passion for Truth. “All worlds are in need of exaltation,” he continued, “and everyone is charged to lift what is low, to unite what lies apart, to advance what is left behind.” That is the work in which you are engaged. Renew your heart, engage your head, and speak your truth. The work of your hands will carry more power when you do.

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Creating Meaning

Usually when we ask the question, “Why?” we are looking backward, searching for causation. While there is value in understanding how we ended up where we are, most of the time there are too many variables to definitively decipher repeatable recipes for our current triumphs or predicaments.

But what if we are looking in the wrong direction? The Hebrew word for “why?,” which is “lama?” (sounds like “llama”), points us to a forward looking version of the question “Why?” The Hebrew word “lama?” can be thought of as a contraction of the prefix “l’…,” which means “to” or “toward,” and the interrogative word “what?.” In other words, the Hebrew language is suggesting that when we ask the pervasive, very human question “Why?” we ought to be directing our thinking toward the future, not the past. Don’t ask “From where did this come?” Ask instead “To where do I take this?”

Taken together, perhaps, the Parable of the Chinese Farmer and the ancient wisdom of the Hebrew language are directing us to respond to the vicissitudes of live by devoting ourselves to creating meaning through creative purpose. Purpose, or meaning, is not something we merely attempt to decipher. It is something we are responsible to create, perhaps in partnership with the Divine. Whether we confront tragedy, anxiety or triumph, we are challenged to direct our pain, our pride, our talents and our struggles toward making the world something closer to what we believe it can and should be. What would happen if our way of celebrating success, mourning loss and managing uncertainty all consisted of a new kind of “Why?” What if we responded to life’s every conquest, concussion and curve-ball by asking “What am I supposed to do with this? How do I make it matter?”