David Crumm: In ‘Healing a Shattered Soul,’ Mindy Corporon invites us to join her tribe of peacemakers
“Every day we have a choice to make. For me and my tribe, we choose courageous kindness.”
Mindy Corporon in Healing a Shattered Soul
By DAVID CRUMM
Editor of ReadTheSpirit magazine
Healing a Shattered Soul begins with a news story—like so many others we read these days with heart-breaking regularity: Three Killed in Shootings at Kansas City-Area Jewish Centers. We all have seen far too many of those headlines, haven’t we? Usually, these stories fade as they are eclipsed by the next mass shooting—or they become the fuel of true-crime dramas that take us into the killers’ worlds.
That’s precisely what makes Mindy Corporon’s new book unique and so compelling. This is not a true-crime thriller about mass murderers. In fact, the shooter who killed Mindy’s father and her young son is never even named in these pages. This book is not about such monsters. Instead, what will keep you turning these pages are the stories of people just like us—Christians, Jews and Muslims—whose lives are forever changed in such a moment of violence.
In this book, you’ll meet moms, dads, grandparents, children—and discover their courageous responses after crimes that would crush many of us. Their kindness is inspiring and contagious. As Mindy intended when she was writing—this book represents the collective story of so many of us who have found our lives “shattered” through domestic terrorism.
Mindy makes this clear throughout her book and in her public talks and podcasts: Rather than recoiling in fear after such horrific moments, our daily focus can be on compassionately reaching out to the countless families nationwide who have been scarred by violence. Underlining this theme near the very end of her book, Mindy writes: “Every day we have a choice to make. For me and my tribe, we choose courageous kindness.”
Ultimately, this book is a call to action—an invitation to become a part of Mindy’s tribe of peacemakers.
HERE IS MINDY’S INVITATION
In most of our cover-story interviews with authors, we quote them about their hopes for their work. In this case, Mindy responded with a video. AND HERE’S A GOOD IDEA: This is a great short video to share with friends to convince them to discuss Mindy’s new book—and to get involved in peacemaking.
But, wait! There’s more! If you are interested in inviting friends to discuss this book—and perhaps follow up by connecting with some of Mindy’s peacemaking programs—then you may also want to send your friends a link to this review of Mindy’s book by veteran journalist and author Bill Tammeus.
Bill’s review says, in part:
What Mindy Corporon would like everyone who reads her book to know is this: “Everyone can heal. You have to keep looking for what your path is. God will put people around you and you need to welcome them. … Everyone has a path toward—I don’t want to say complete healing—but healing enough that you can move onward and can make a difference in your life and in other people’s lives.”
IT’S A REAL INVITATION TO GET INVOLVED IN APRIL 2021
Here’s another reason that this ReadTheSpirit cover story is unique: Rather than focusing exclusively on her own story in our interview, Mindy immediately focused on the many ways people can get involved in peacemaking today.
“This upcoming program—SevenDays® Make a Ripple, Change the World—began as an annual response from the community around Kansas City,” Mindy says. “But because of the pandemic, in 2021 these events are virtual—so we want people everywhere to know that we welcome them. Visit our SevenDays® website and get involved.
“You can take part in these events from wherever you are able to join us online. For example, part of the SevenDays® experience is a walk. It’s on April 25 this year, 2021, but I won’t be walking in Kansas City myself, this time. I’ll be taking part in the event virtually as I walk in Pompano Beach, Florida. You can walk wherever you are around the country. In fact, it will be really inspiring this year to think about people walking with us all across the United States.”
This annual program first was organized as the one-year anniversary of the Kansas City shootings approached in April 2015. Mindy explains, “We wanted to encourage people to respond in a helpful way—to discover ways they could reach out in kindness. Someone suggested simply asking people to think of their own acts of kindness, but I wanted to give people more specific ideas of things they could do. We created this program so that people can commit six days to focus on kindness for others and one day on kindness for ourselves.”
Jump into the SevenDays® website‘s homepage or, if you want to learn more about the focus of each of the seven days, visit the Our Events page within that website.
OR, CONTACT MINDY ABOUT WORKPLACE HEALING
As you will learn in her new book, Mindy’s career before the shootings was all business, quite literally. She was a successful business consultant and head of a wealth-management company, so she has a lifetime of expertise in corporate management and culture. Even though she has stepped away from most of her earlier roles in business, she has launched new ventures. The most important is Workplace Healing LLC.
“Workplace Healing LLC was born after some experiences I had in late 2017, as I was making a transition out of wealth management, I still was interacting with a lot of business executives and it became obvious to me that most companies don’t give their employees any training on how to deal with grief and trauma experienced by their co-workers,” Mindy says. “It might be the death of a loved one, or a family crisis of some kind, or suddenly finding yourself in an empty nest, or—well, there are a lot of painful life disruptions that so many people face, but the people in their workplace just don’t know how to respond.”
Far too often, co-workers or managers all but ignore these personal relationships after such a crisis. “For example, a president of a company told me about an employee he valued who had lost her husband and now it seemed likely that this employee might leave his company. He didn’t want that to happen. So, I asked him what he had done to reach out to her. He said, ‘Well, our company has an employee assistance program.’ I pressed him on that. ‘That’s all? You left this to employee assistance? What did you do personally?’ Turns out, he ignored her. He said he didn’t know what to do or say—so he basically did nothing. In the end, that valuable employee did end up leaving because she felt no one cared enough to reach out.
“That’s why we started Workplace Healing LLC and we’ve helped a lot of people so far,” Mindy says. “But right now, we’re pausing for a few months.” Through the spring of 2021, Mindy and her colleagues at Workplace Healing are redeveloping the way their programs are presented to allow wider access to more companies. “So, tell people reading this story that we do welcome them. They can visit the website right now and learn about what we do. They can contact us with their interests. But we aren’t quite ready to roll out our new training programs just yet. Launching the technology for this next phase will take another four or five months to complete.”
How can Mindy possibly maintain this schedule of writing, podcasting, online writing, video appearances, nonprofit organizing and the redevelopment of her corporate programs?
She answered that question with two words—two words that really sum up the inspiring power of her new book. Those words? “People help.”
And that brings our cover story, this week, full circle to Mindy’s new book. Her central theme also is captured in a couple of lines in the final pages: “While God placed the words, ‘I am with you,’ in my head and in my heart—God actually showed up through people most often.”
Originally posted on ReadtheSpirit.com, used with permission