Monday Oct 17, 2022

How to Be Good & Kind with Rich Villodas

Hey there everyone! Today’s episode is packed with wisdom and grace, and I just know you’re going to love this conversation with pastor, author, and speaker Rich Villodas. We talk about how we can truly become whole in a broken and fractured world.

Listen in as Rich invites us to ask ourselves two questions:

1. How did we lose goodness, kindness, and beauty?

2. More importantly, how do we get them back into our lives?

The answers to both are especially valuable as we live in our walled-up and often hostile world.

Rich Villodas is the Brooklyn-born lead pastor of New Life Fellowship, a large multiracial church with more than seventy-five countries represented in Elmhurst, Queens. He enjoys reading widely, preaching, and writing on contemplative spirituality, justice-related matters, and the art of preaching. He's been married to Rosie since 2006, and they have two beautiful children, Karis and Nathan.

Listen in to learn more about:

The five questions we can ask ourselves whenever we experience anxiety to protect both our emotional health and our relationships with others.
Ways to cultivate a calm and loving presence in the middle of an anxious culture.
Contemplative prayer and why it is important in our lives.

Favorite quotes:

At its core, sin is failure to love. If Jesus says that the greatest commandment is to love God with your heart, soul, mind and strength and to love your neighbor as yourself, then the essence of sin must be the violation of that.

A calm and loving presence is a presence that is not driven by your action or reaction. It’s a life that moves beyond emotionality and reactionality.

Contemplative prayer, at its core, is being present in the presence of God. It is friendship with Jesus.

The fruit of contemplative prayer is not simply greater self awareness or self actualization or religious goose bumps, it is how can I be more lovingly present with people. It begins with us befriending silence, normalizing boredom and reframing distractions.