Rev. Carlos Samuel Reyes Rodriguez offers guidance on how to tend to your soul and deepen your relationship with your own value.
See more videos in the ONWARD series with Rev. Carlos:
Graduation: A Blessed Pause / Carrying the Family Forward / Identity
Script:
Hey fam, I'm Carlos Samuel Reyes Rodríguez and I serve as a Deacon in Peninsula-Delaware learning from the way of life of our latinx people.
Let me ask you something: What did you do this past week to cultivate a stronger you? What did you do to nurture your soul? Your mind? Your body?
In an ongoing race, we ought to build practices that refresh us personally to continue this collective - this communal walk. It can be difficult to make important decisions while we are drained, tired.
Investing time for the sake of our wellbeing is placed at the end of our priorities because we spend most of it looking for solutions to immediate adversities.
At some point, we have to stop surviving to start living.
Life is sacred and we need to take care of it.
Author and activist Naomi Ortíz says that “self-care is really about deepening our relationship with our own value.” Deepening our relationship with our own value.
So, even when we are attempting to change the world, we need to start internally first. Resting, centering, breathing are some of the practices that lead us to appreciate the value of ourselves.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, Sabbath is a specific time established to connect with the Creator and creation.
By taking it, we declare that we are free from oppressive forces and recognize that we are not God; the world continues its course without us.
It is for our own sake that we take the Sabbath. As we continue working and living with communities seeking equality, we need to find a space for the Sabbath to be manifested among us, in which belonging is the powerful channel of soul searching and soul charging.
Here at Wesley United Methodist Church in Dover, Delaware we are seeing the living witness of a spiritual practice that frees us. Refreshes us.
Through the different gathering expressions, Dreamer students have organized dinner nights where we prepare delicious typical food from our hometowns, decorate the hall, and lift up joys and concerns, to then partake in this special meal while listening to music or simply dancing.
When offering ourselves to the common good, uncertainty and pressure are lived out strongly in togetherness, as one, with and from nature.
Scripture is filled with reminders of how the usage of earthly elements save us from blindness, for example, when Jesus makes mud with dirt and sends us to wash our eyes with clean waters so we may be able to see. Or the dwelling Spirit, who travels like the wind as the Holy Migrant, trespassing walls and borders to sustain us.
It is in communion with nature, with ourselves and with others that we deepen the relationship with the redemptive love of God, so that rest can be found even in the midst of struggles.
Family, may our lives be guided by the One, who eternally walks with us saying that we are not alone; that we are here to live in fullness our call, as a whole, because His Love, Justice and Peace is with us always.
So be it.
Amen.
