When I asked participants to identify three to five specific behaviors that their friends, family, and colleagues do that raise their level of trust with them, funerals always emerged in the top three responses. They feature in a surprising finding from my research on trust. Music can pierce the heart directly it needs no mediation.”įunerals, in fact, are one of the most powerful examples of collective pain. The neurologist Oliver Sacks writes, “Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional.

All I could think in that moment was, He would have loved our messy voices and singing hearts. Laura’s dad was a small-town hero who never met a stranger. But we did, and it was a holy experience. When we were asked to stand and sing one of his (and my) favorite hymns, “How Great Thou Art,” I wasn’t so sure how two hundred or so strangers could pull off singing an old hymn a cappella in a reception hall. There were no choir members or pianos in the overflow room, just a few hundred people in folding chairs watching the eulogies in the main church via a projector and computer screen. I was at the funeral for my good friend Laura’s father. Just recently I found myself in the overflow room of a church in a small Texas town. This is not about forging a relationship with a distant God but about the realization that we are already within God. And the work of holiness is not about perfection or niceness it is about belonging, that sense of being in the Presence and through the quality of that belonging, the mild magnetic of implicating others in the Presence. Only holiness will call people to listen now. If you order now, it normally delivers the next day! Order on Amazon and join us for Q&As from the road.

Read that excerpt below.Īlso, I’m taking off for a crazy book tour next week (cue Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again”). There’s a section in the new book that talks about “A Ministry of Presence”-it so perfectly describes what we’re seeing here right now. While we are still in major heartbreak here in Houston, I’ve been so blown away by the kindness of strangers. Braving the Wilderness is a call to courage.Ī call to move closer to each other, because people are hard to hate close up.Ī call to speak truth to bullshit.

Brene brown i am the wilderness