It's another beautiful Monday in Sarasota, my retirement destination home of choice. Sometimes, it's still hard to believe that I moved here virtually sight unseen without knowing a soul. But I believe that it is my fate and it is God's will that I be here for this glorious season of my life.
The warm weather, perpetual sunshine and lush greenery suits me perfectly. It has taken awhile, but I'm getting into the rhythm of each day. After some pretty intense volunteer endeavors for the first 14 months here, I have slowed down and am learning how to cherish and relish each day.
I can't believe that I was caught up in a whirlwind of being so busy that I forgot (albeit momentarily) that I love music, and that my day is incomplete without it. After years of piano lessons, I can't play a lick, but I can read and I love to sing at the top of my lungs on most days, and preferably without an audience.
Most of my music is now digitally housed in iTunes, even the myriad of CDs that I copied over. The music is backed up on an external hard drive. I am now a baby boomer purchaser of any tune I hear and want to own. My Sirius XM radio in the car offers so much variety, although my favorite stations are gospel, watercolors and oldies from the 60s. I keep a pad and pen in the front seat to jot down the name and artist of anything that I hear and love.
It's amazing to me how my iPod can shuffle thousands of songs and come up with just the right combination of what I want-no, what I need to hear at that moment. Classical, jazz, blues, easy listening, and of course, my favorites, gospel and contemporary Christian.
I'm contemplating heading out to he beach today, but right now, after a marvelous walk with the doggies, I am enjoying the rhythm of my day.
I hope that you are too.
Monday, April 22, 2013
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Giving Myself Away...Again
Gail is a friend from Michigan who moved to Florida last year to be near her adult children and grandchildren. She lost her husband to a sudden heart attack a few years ago, but stayed in Michigan to be near her mother, who resided in a nursing home until she passed away last year.
I met Gail when we were both Realtors at Keller Williams. We became friends and spent time together, and even traveled together because her husband didn't care to travel. Gail is one of those people who never throws away a friend and has maintained friendships with folks all over the countrty that she has met through various stages in her life.
I always admired that about Gail; she has such a happy-go-lucky outlook on life that she doesn't allow anyone to rain on her parade. She is patient and kind, tenderhearted and thoughtful.
Her son called me the other day to tell me that Gail had fallen in the back yard while gardening and broke her hip. As she was being wheeled into ER, she made him promise to call me.
When Gail gets in a tight, she calls me. When her husband died in their home, the EMS technicians, police and neighbors were with her and she insisted that someone call me. So, I get a cryptic call from a police officer at 2 o'clock in the morning asking me to please come over because Gail needed me. He didn't say why, but I was there in a matter of minutes (we were neighbors), and I discovered her husband lying in the vestibule covered in a yellow tarp as they waited for the county coroner to show up. Gail and I spent the next few hours crying and praying and waiting for the family to fly in to help her make funeral arrangements.
As I pondered what I could do for her this time while she is recovering from hip replacement surgery, I remembered that sometimes you just need somebody to be with you. So I've offered and she has accepted that I will come and stay with her after her stint in rehab.
Why am I doing this? Because that's what friends do for friends. Amen.
I met Gail when we were both Realtors at Keller Williams. We became friends and spent time together, and even traveled together because her husband didn't care to travel. Gail is one of those people who never throws away a friend and has maintained friendships with folks all over the countrty that she has met through various stages in her life.
I always admired that about Gail; she has such a happy-go-lucky outlook on life that she doesn't allow anyone to rain on her parade. She is patient and kind, tenderhearted and thoughtful.
Her son called me the other day to tell me that Gail had fallen in the back yard while gardening and broke her hip. As she was being wheeled into ER, she made him promise to call me.
When Gail gets in a tight, she calls me. When her husband died in their home, the EMS technicians, police and neighbors were with her and she insisted that someone call me. So, I get a cryptic call from a police officer at 2 o'clock in the morning asking me to please come over because Gail needed me. He didn't say why, but I was there in a matter of minutes (we were neighbors), and I discovered her husband lying in the vestibule covered in a yellow tarp as they waited for the county coroner to show up. Gail and I spent the next few hours crying and praying and waiting for the family to fly in to help her make funeral arrangements.
As I pondered what I could do for her this time while she is recovering from hip replacement surgery, I remembered that sometimes you just need somebody to be with you. So I've offered and she has accepted that I will come and stay with her after her stint in rehab.
Why am I doing this? Because that's what friends do for friends. Amen.
Thursday, April 11, 2013
What's Your Purpose?
One of my all-time favorite movies is Babe, a 1995 comedy-drama. It's the story of a little piglet who grew up on a farm, and who emulated the other animals because he had no other pigs to emulate. In the story, Ferdinand the duck was emulating a rooster by crowing at dawn every morning. Ferdinand saw that roosters had a purpose (to wake up humans every morning), and that roosters generally were safe from slaughter and being the next holiday meal. So, he acted like a rooster, with decidedly mixed results.
Babe the pig emulated the Border Collies on the farm and became good at helping herd and protect the sheep. But Babe's "Aha" moment came when he encountered the human's vain and evil-minded house cat, who said something to Babe that made me cry. The cat said, "pigs don't have a purpose." The cat went on to tell Babe what her purpose was, and what the purposes of the other farm animals were, but she assured Babe in no uncertain terms, that his only purpose was to wind up being bacon and ham on the human's table.
Babe was crushed. Imagine being told that you don't have a purpose, that you and all your kind are totally worthless. I love this story so much, because although I am an unadulterated lover of the occasional breakfast bacon, I saw myself in Babe. Growing up in the segreated South in the 1950s and 1960s, I was not expected to be much or to do much with my life. My "kind" were black folks who had been oppressed for centuries, and who struggled most often for survival, not equality and civil rights. But education was always preached by parents and other role models as the means of escape from poverty, and that education was the gateway to a better life.
I aspired to higher education not because of desiring a better life; I was so shielded from the cruelties of the world as a girl, that I didn't know what a better life was. We certainly had plenty of food to eat, a nice little house, a TV set, and a family car. If we were poor, I didn't know it. I just knew that there had to be something more to life out there in the world, and that I was destined to find out what that something more was. I embraced my destiny and my journey and I never looked back. I will always remember where I came from, but I will never go back to the oppression and hopelessness that black folks felt less than a century ago. As a young girl, I longed for a purpose, something beyond what my current reality was. As I strained forward, God started revealing to me what my true purpose in life was.
But getting back to Babe...his story ends well with finding his purpose and in a fairy tale ending, not becoming the porkloin served on Sunday. His purpose in life was not for all pigs...his purpose was just for him.
Your purpose, your God-given reason for being here, may not fit the mold and be for anybody else but you. God created you for a purpose! It's your purpose, not for your mother, your father, your sister or your brother. Your purpose may take you places you've never dreamed of, and have you accomplish things that only God knew you were capable of accomplishing.
What's your purpose? If you don't know, seek God earnestly and openly with humbleness and prayer and supplication, and He will reveal Himself to you. Know your purpose already? Then seek His face to reinvigorate your purpose and dreams. He said he'd never leave you or forsake you...He's just a prayer away.. and wait for the small, still voice that gives you revelation to go to a higher level.
Find your purpose and remember Luke 12:32
Babe the pig emulated the Border Collies on the farm and became good at helping herd and protect the sheep. But Babe's "Aha" moment came when he encountered the human's vain and evil-minded house cat, who said something to Babe that made me cry. The cat said, "pigs don't have a purpose." The cat went on to tell Babe what her purpose was, and what the purposes of the other farm animals were, but she assured Babe in no uncertain terms, that his only purpose was to wind up being bacon and ham on the human's table.
Babe was crushed. Imagine being told that you don't have a purpose, that you and all your kind are totally worthless. I love this story so much, because although I am an unadulterated lover of the occasional breakfast bacon, I saw myself in Babe. Growing up in the segreated South in the 1950s and 1960s, I was not expected to be much or to do much with my life. My "kind" were black folks who had been oppressed for centuries, and who struggled most often for survival, not equality and civil rights. But education was always preached by parents and other role models as the means of escape from poverty, and that education was the gateway to a better life.
I aspired to higher education not because of desiring a better life; I was so shielded from the cruelties of the world as a girl, that I didn't know what a better life was. We certainly had plenty of food to eat, a nice little house, a TV set, and a family car. If we were poor, I didn't know it. I just knew that there had to be something more to life out there in the world, and that I was destined to find out what that something more was. I embraced my destiny and my journey and I never looked back. I will always remember where I came from, but I will never go back to the oppression and hopelessness that black folks felt less than a century ago. As a young girl, I longed for a purpose, something beyond what my current reality was. As I strained forward, God started revealing to me what my true purpose in life was.
But getting back to Babe...his story ends well with finding his purpose and in a fairy tale ending, not becoming the porkloin served on Sunday. His purpose in life was not for all pigs...his purpose was just for him.
Your purpose, your God-given reason for being here, may not fit the mold and be for anybody else but you. God created you for a purpose! It's your purpose, not for your mother, your father, your sister or your brother. Your purpose may take you places you've never dreamed of, and have you accomplish things that only God knew you were capable of accomplishing.
What's your purpose? If you don't know, seek God earnestly and openly with humbleness and prayer and supplication, and He will reveal Himself to you. Know your purpose already? Then seek His face to reinvigorate your purpose and dreams. He said he'd never leave you or forsake you...He's just a prayer away.. and wait for the small, still voice that gives you revelation to go to a higher level.
Find your purpose and remember Luke 12:32
Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.
Monday, April 8, 2013
Giving Myself Away
Growing older in Christian maturity definitely has its advantages. It makes you to be free from the underbrush of situations, and handing decisions over to God has really made me free.
I have a friend back in Michigan who, after a decades long strugglle, and six years of dialysis, received a kidney transplant last week. An older and highly educated man, he accepted his fate with his usual droll and dry sense of humor. After each setback, each painful death defying episode, he would bounce back with a kind word and a twinkle in his eye, despite the pain and the ever decreasing possibility that he would live long enough to get a kidney.
But God had a plan to restore him, just as he restored King Hezekiah in Is 38.
What gift do you send a person whom God has given another chance at life? Flowers? A card?
No. A still, small voice told me to send him a letter every day for a month.
Hand written letters have gone by the way of the dinosaurs, white gloves and tea parties. Who has the time in the 21st century to actually put pen to paper and write? And then, to actually back an envelope, add a stamp, and send that letter via snail mail?
I do. I'm going to do my part to bring back the personal, intimate way of communicating with another human being. What will I write about? My God, that won't be a problem. I can be chatty Cathy when it comes to writing. My prayer is that each letter will be received with a smile and anticipation of receiving good news from Florida.
I have a friend back in Michigan who, after a decades long strugglle, and six years of dialysis, received a kidney transplant last week. An older and highly educated man, he accepted his fate with his usual droll and dry sense of humor. After each setback, each painful death defying episode, he would bounce back with a kind word and a twinkle in his eye, despite the pain and the ever decreasing possibility that he would live long enough to get a kidney.
But God had a plan to restore him, just as he restored King Hezekiah in Is 38.
What gift do you send a person whom God has given another chance at life? Flowers? A card?
No. A still, small voice told me to send him a letter every day for a month.
Hand written letters have gone by the way of the dinosaurs, white gloves and tea parties. Who has the time in the 21st century to actually put pen to paper and write? And then, to actually back an envelope, add a stamp, and send that letter via snail mail?
I do. I'm going to do my part to bring back the personal, intimate way of communicating with another human being. What will I write about? My God, that won't be a problem. I can be chatty Cathy when it comes to writing. My prayer is that each letter will be received with a smile and anticipation of receiving good news from Florida.
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