This post is dedicated to anyone who is in the midst of struggle, heartache, pain, and grief. Dark days of any kind. And especially to those who are searching for their gifts, for the meaning of life, or even the reasonn they are alive.
I apologize in advance if this–or any of my posts–comes across as preachy. I’m just a student of life–and a slow-learner at that–so I’m probably just about the last person on the planet who should be preaching to anyone about anything.
Anyway, you’ve been warned, so here goes:
I probably don’t know what your gifts are, my friend, but this I do know: You have some wonderful gifts to share with the world. Gifts that it badly needs. If you haven’t discovered them yet, I hope that you keep looking until you do, and when you find them, I know that you and the world will be better for it as you share them.
I can give clues to you as to where to look: The sources of your greatest pain, trauma, or sadness are often also the catalysts of one’s greatest gifts for the world.
I know that life can be hard. That is easy to say. It is especially easy to say for those who haven’t yet dealt with many hardships.
You won’t have to dig very deep into this blog to learn that my father left my mother with 3 young children and one still in the womb when I was the oldest child and only 4-1/2 years old, that I nearly died of Whooping Cough as a young child, had many lung collapses and endured two lung surgeries in my teens, got dumped by a fiance’, nearly lost my daughter to an incurable disease, suffered some business failures including one that drove me to personal bankruptcy and erased the financial resources of a lifetime of hard work, and most recently my Beloved had thyroid cancer.
I share these things so you’ll know that I haven’t been immune to dark days and that when I say that I know life can be hard, I have some idea about life not always being full of sunshine and fair winds.
But I also mention all that so I can say this: So what? Big deal. Virtually everyone has similar stories of hardship, pain, trauma, and heart-ache.
I believe that I am a better person for having experienced each of those very unpleasant things. I wouldn’t wish them on anyone, but they happened. I can’t change that. I can focus on what lessons I can learn from each and can have empathy for others who are going through their own tough times.
It isn’t the stories that matter. Not mine, and not yours.
What matters to me is what I choose to do with the miracle of each new day of life. I can choose to make the most of it and enjoy and share all I can of the many blessings each day offers; or I can dwell on those sad stories and how unfair, cruel, and ugly people and life can be; or I can even squander each precious day worrying about a future that may or may not even happen, living for a tomorrow that never comes.
Like everything else in life, the choices are mine. I won’t always be able to choose what happens to me and to those I love, but I WILL always be able to choose how I react to what happens, and what I do about it.
And with those choices comes an amazing life-transforming power.
To make my life and my world better.
Or not.
May I choose wisely.
Russ
Russ Towne's A Grateful Man 