Tonight I met with the group at the church for the final session of the retreat I have been doing. To finish, the speaker talked about making a plan to help live what we learned over the past 10 weeks. One of the biggest points to take away from the retreat was to be merciful to others. I always struggle with large concepts and was happy that this was broken down into something tangible. The author explained that the characteristic that sets people apart from other living creatures is that we have a yearning for God. Each one of us experiences a deep loneliness and long for someone to really know and love us. We keep ourselves very distracted so we don’t have to be alone with ourselves and face this fact. Between cell phones and computers, work and sports, sometimes drugs and alcohol, we do what we can to stay busy or to try to find happiness. But ultimately, we each have a sense of emptiness and loneliness that can only be filled by a relationship with God. So, how do we “be merciful to others”? We can do this by acknowledging the dignity of each person through simple things like allowing someone to go in front of us in a grocery store line, to ask someone how they are doing and then really listen to them, by being joyful and patient and helping others to do the same, by praying for others. And as a bonus, when we act merciful, it makes us more compassionate. I thought these were all great suggestions and things that I can work on. I really enjoyed the retreat and will definitely try to be more merciful to others.

I Found God today in the final retreat session and a commitment to be more merciful.