Leslie D. Lyons-Values Based Selling & Leadership

I’m not Puerto Rican but I lived in Humboldt Park for many years. Does that count for something? 😂
I don’t even really watch TV. If you know me, you know that already.

But I woke up this morning and went back to watch Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance and I was freakin’ blown away.

Do you know how creative you have to be to tell a story in another language and it still resonated on a visceral level?

The visuals. The history in the movement.
The joy he had felt like resistance and liberation at the same damn time.

I’ve been to Puerto Rico and what I saw last night felt familiar in the way that oppressed people telling their own story always does.

It made me proud. Proud to watch them claim their beauty in a very hostile world.
Viva Puerto Rico.
What a beautiful people with a beautiful story.

Today I opened a thank you card from a widow.
The wife of one of my deceased patients.
She said something simple and weighty:
You’ve truly chosen the right calling.

And I just sat there with the card in my hand.
Because I don’t know if I chose this…

I want to believe I was called.
That I said yes to a voice that kept interrupting my plans.

But if I’m being honest?
There are days I wonder if I misheard God.
I walked away from a life that made sense on paper.
A business that I spent 20 years building.
A version of myself that was living a life of hustle but I felt compensated well.
I stepped into chaplaincy because I believed God was asking me to follow a quieter, truer yes.

And now here I am.
Serving an affluent white population.
Being “seen” by patients in their most honest, unguarded moments.
Holding grief and fear with people who will never know what it costs me to carry this work in a Black woman’s body.
Some days I feel more like a mammy than a minister.

I get affirmation from the dying.
From widows.
From families in crisis.
But from the people I want to see me?
From the places that shaped me spiritually?
The silence is loud.

My husband and I talked tonight about time.
About whether we’ve wasted any of it.
About whether obedience is supposed to feel this lonely sometimes.
And I keep coming back to what I know in my bones:
God wastes nothing.

Not the years I spent building something that fed me and exhausted me.
Not the years I’m spending now learning how to sit with suffering without trying to fix it.
Not the disorientation of being called out of one world and not fully welcomed into another.

Still, I ask God questions.
Lord, What does it mean to be called when the people you hoped would clap are quiet but heaven keeps whispering, keep going?

I don’t have clean answers.
But I do have this card.
This witness.