Being Warm Hearted

Honest concern for others is the key factor in improving our day to day lives. When you are warm-hearted, there is no room for anger, jealousy or insecurity. A calm mind and self-confidence are the basis for happy and peaceful relations with each other. Healthy, happy families and a healthy peaceful nation are dependent on warm-heartedness.
     Dalai Lama

Compassion, Grace. Kindness. Love.

Each of these qualities is shown through warm-heartedness. The Dalai Lama is right. When we have honest concern for others, our everyday lives will be better. Compassion puts us in other’s shoes, in their lives, and helps us to see and grow to understand more their circumstances, their fears, their challenges. Grace allows us to remember that no one is perfect, that we ourselves are not perfect, and it helps us to be more forgiving, more patient, and to have fewer unrealistic expectations. Kindness enables us to be more generous, more considerate and more thoughtful about another’s life. Love, very simply, brings us a connection that touches our spirits and our souls with goodness and infuses them with joy, bonding us with another and bringing meaning to our lives and relationships.

Each of these qualities can move us to gratitude, to a place in which we recognize more and more of the wonders and blessings in our lives. When we are grateful, even amidst our challenges, we are able to meet those challenges from a place of strength and assurance rather than from a place of insecurity and resignation.

When we allow ourselves to be warm-hearted and are more grateful, the petty divisions, momentary frustrations, and fleeting annoyances will begin to melt away. When those aggravations are no longer at the center of our daily living, our perspective beings to change and we can see beyond them, we see more light. That enables us to see more clearly and when we see more clearly a bigger picture emerges that helps us to see what really matters and what does not.

We spend so much of our time agonizing over things that don’t really matter in long term, in the larger scheme of life. When we can put those things aside, we can focus more on the issues and circumstances that really matter – and we can meet them in a much healthier way.

We’ve read so often about Abraham Lincoln’s warm-heartedness. One way on which he exhibited it was through the sympathy letters he wrote throughout the U. S. Civil War, notes to families of those whose sons, fathers and brothers were killed in battle. Perhaps the most famous of the countless letters attributed to him is this one, from November 21, 1864, to Mrs. Lydia Bixby, of Massachusetts, who had reportedly lost several sons in the conflict. In reads, in part …

… I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.

 I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom …

 Yours, very sincerely and respectfully,

 A. Lincoln

Warm-heartedness is something we both very highly value and that we hope we practice daily. In fact, we hope that we become warm-hearted people – that it’s not something that we do, but instead it is who we are. Living in a world in for which there is so much to be grateful and with so much good to see all around us, there is also much brokenness. Warm-heartedness is all the more needed and significant because of that brokenness. Just a few days ago we were moved by a meeting with a friend who shared with us her anguish over the tragic death of her best friend’s father, just days before. We could see and feel her anguish as she spoke. The feeling was coming from deep within, from the depths of her heart and soul. Our friend’s warm-heartedness was deeply evident through the outward emotions she expressed, her face, her posture, her entire being. She didn’t hide it, and couldn’t. It was that strong. Her story still resonates with us days later, an example of how we hope we can be, of how we hope all of us can be toward one another. And when we can, life takes on a whole new purpose, a whole new – and more contented – meaning.

Photo by Ed Fr on Unsplash