Family
I recently returned from my annual trip to the beach in Gulf Shores, Alabama. The weather was beautiful the full ten days, and rest and relaxation was the storyline. Good times with friends, much time for reflection alone, reading on my Kindle…all made for a perfect trip. Plans to go on this trip were made far ahead of time, deposits paid, my directives for staff in readiness and I was so looking forward to this trip. Then the news of an impending hurricane…Isaac…threatened to thwart all my wonderful plans.
The week before my departure, it was looking more and more like I may have to cancel my trip. I was watching a friend’s Facebook page. He lived right in the area where I was to stay, and the pictures he was posting looked fierce. When I expressed my concerns about cancelling my trip he assured me “Don’t worry, by the time you come next week you won’t even know the storm has blown through here.”
So after thinking about it for a few days, I decided to take my chances and not cancel my trip. I was hoping for the situation to change exactly as he said it would. And it was the right decision. The storm hooked, moved past the area, the bit of messiness was cleaned up in record time and I arrived to find a beautiful white sandy beach and all things in their rightful, safe places as I always had in the past.
On a particular day during my visit I was sitting quietly watching the children play and the pelicans swoop down for fish. I thought back to the wisdom of my friend’s advice and how it relates to life in general. I also thought how the beach is a beautiful example of the ever-changing life we are called to lead. I also thought back a bit further…
In high school,as an aspiring Journalist, it was quite natural that I would choose Creative Writing as one of my electives in my senior year. That year our class self-published a book full of some of the best of the literary works written by its students. The following work was chosen to grace the cover of the book. As I sat on the beach that day, I thought back to the words of this poem:
The secrets of the earth are written in the sand.
Each grain a different story, for those who understand.
The author is the ocean who left her book on shore.
Her waters hold the copyright, and now…just as before
The sea keeps on writing and her waves keep on churning,
And even now as we speak, another page is turning…
I pondered the meaning here and the words of my friend from the week before and how it related to my life at that very moment. So many of us are given a book of life, so to speak. It is full of pages of memories and moments…some laughter, some tears, some good times and some not so good, but they are all a vital part of our own book. Sometimes we have a book that others convincingly perceive as so perfect, that even we begin to think it is perfect and indestructible. Then a storm brews, the clouds lay low in the sky, the wind picks up and before we know it the tempest has become a full-fledged hurricane leaving debris and wreckage in its wake, and perhaps taking away buildings, a pier, the white purity of the sand and replacing it with seaweed and blackened piles of wood and mess. It is as if the book of our own life that was so beautiful one moment had pages ripped from it, and the remains were tossed on shore like flotsam, and forgotten.
We may deal with many things in our own book of life….the loss of a job, death of spouse, divorce, cancer or other illness, betrayal of a friend. We may feel as if our perfect life at that moment had an unrelenting storm blow through, crushing us, ripping a page from our life…and we find ourselves wondering if our book of life will ever be normal and whole again. Many end up turning to outer means to salve the inside heartbrokeness. They look for the missing pieces in another person, frenetic activity, a bottle of pills, or a martini glass. And they realize no matter how many things come into our life on the outside to cover over the sadness, the page will still be missing…but… it’s ok to have a missing page. It doesn’t mean you no longer have a book…
How many times do you keep going back to that same spot in your own book, looking for the missing page, and ignoring all your other beautiful and joyful pages in the process? How many of the other pages appear pristine and look as if no one has ever visited them? Shouldn’t they be lovingly dogeared, thin from where you have handled them, reading and re-reading the wonderful parts of your life, and remembering? Isn’t your life to be like the sea…getting written over and over each day with new stories, new experiences, new opportunities to cover up and
wash away the harshness that is the missing page?
Perhaps the secret…is in the sand…
I am one of the unfortunate sufferers of arthritis and osteoporosis. The effects of both these conditions have pretty much been a part of my life in one way or other since my late teens, early 20’s. At first, my parents thought it was traditional “growing pains”, so we pretty much ignored it as such and went on. But as I left my teens and entered my 20’s I started having some really odd pains…most mornings it was hard to get out of bed.
I found I couldn’t do the common things of a 20 year old…it was an effort to pick up my baby, my hands would “give out”, or my upper arms some mornings had virtually no strength in them, seemingly overnight. My feet had what I called heel spurs, but looking back I can see it was where the osteoporosis had set in. Not the normal physical life of a 20 year old. I plodded through it and played more with my daughter on the more mobile days, and cut back activity on others when we sat and read a lot or watched the tube, due to my aching joints and bones. But once I entered the 30’s, the pain had become debilitating more days than not, so off I trotted to the doctor, and thus the diagnosis all those years ago.
Several different medicines have been tried, but not being much for synthetic answers, I pretty much have just “adjusted” to the pain and difficulty in my body as the years have rolled on. Now at the age of “over 50”, there is pain every day, all day, in more than one spot of my body and that is my norm. Frankly most of the time I push through it and don’t even really notice it until it gets outside the pain level I have grown accustomed to all these years.
This week, I decided to change my daily routine. I had begun working at home the last couple of months pretty much exclusively and although I am a very organized person, I kept finding myself kind of drifting from one activity to another during the day and not getting as much accomplished as I desired and knew I could complete. I also seemed to be running out of time to just be myself and do some personal things I love such as read the Kindle on the back deck. So I sat down with pencil and paper, jotted down a tentative scheduling of my time and necessary daily activities, and placed those in general slots of time during the day. I wanted to create a new “normal” schedule for myself since the “normal” I have had for many years was no longer existent when I came back home to work, rather than going to an office every day.
All week, I have been on schedule and now that it is Friday it is actually starting to kind of feel “normal”. I marvel over the things I am accomplishing. I am marveling more over being able to stop at a certain time of the day, just like in an office setting, and fix my dinner, watch TV, read, rest or whatever I want to do for a slot of hours in my evening, rather than working till bedtime because I took 5 minutes here and 15 there during the day and “got behind” on things I really needed to complete for the day trying to grab moments of personal time of reflection and rest. I am more focused, I am more energized, and even my body is responding by getting more physical rest in longer segments, which could do nothing but aid in my health issues, right?
What I have found most interesting is this…
I have spent years working in my business. Many hours were willingly put in and very much enjoyed because the business was growing and so was I. I was meeting new people, being recognized in my community and among my peers, becoming a spokesperson for my industry. My new “normal” was getting up, working till bed with a few moments sprinkled through the day here and there of personal or family time, and doing it all over the next day. Prior to this working career, I had been a stay-at-home mom that worked at home, was in my yard and gardens for about 30 hours a week ( my passion), worked in my church, cooked every day, made bread, and did all those things that I adored doing for my family. A sad divorce forced me into the work world, and I adapted to it quickly and loved it, too…but the things that were once “normal” for me became the “abnormal”, and stayed that way for many years.
When I got up this morning at 6, I started thinking about my life now, and what my “normal” is now…and more what my “normal” today should be. As I took my morning walk, I thought about how my joint pain over the years had grown to a point that what was once thought of as terribly paralyzing “growing pains”, were tiny compared to the pain I now feel in my body as the norm each day. It truly does paralyze me in many ways and make me incapable of living a “normal” life for my age. I had let pain and difficulty physically become my “normal”. Nowadays, some pretty severe pain has to come along to slap me and say “hey you, you have some real physical issues here that need to be addressed. This isn’t just something you have to go through…a “growing pain”…it is out of the NORMAL…do something about it”.
How many of us, I wonder, have let sad situations, people who are jerks that consistently disrespect us by their words or behavior, or personal hardship and fear become our “normal” because it was looked upon as a “growing pain”…just something you have to go through, everyone does… it is “normal”…
Maybe it’s time for each of us to take a good long look at the life we lead, who we allow into it, what activities and priorities are part of the DNA of our today. Have we allowed people, emotions, beliefs or any number of “abnormal” things become our “normal” through disregard of the pain they may be causing us, and have caused us over the years? Is it time for us to change our perception? Or, even more… is it time to take a look at our pain head on, decide what has taken the value of our life and turned it into a devaluing thing…and then make a shift back to our kind of “normal”?
It might be that going back to our “normal” is the real growing pain we need to experience today.
This blog post comes at the end of a perfect day. I usually go to yard sales a.k.a. junkin’ as my Granddaughter calls it, but not today. I decided to stay home and work around my house instead. So much was accomplished…the piles of things that had accumulated over the last week from estate clean outs and purchasing trips was put away, housework was done, organizing in my home office was marked off the list and I was ready to retire for the night. Then I remembered that I had read there was a meteor shower, more visible after midnight, and I quickly looked at my watch and decided to head outdoors. The air was really cool for this time of year, unseasonably so. I had a glass of strawberry zinfandel and my lawn chair as silent companions, and I waited, peering up at the night sky. Perseid comes through each August. It is the time of year that the Earth goes through the shattered remains of a comet that actually began disintegrating around the time of the Civil War. Amazing, we are still feeling the effects every year at the same time, just like clockwork.
As I sat waiting for the light show I was certain would be spectacular, I began to grow restless when no shooting “stars” were visible immediately. After maybe 6 or 7 minutes I saw something fly across my peripheral vision…and then it was gone…so fast I thought “Did I really see what I thought I saw?” So I waited for another…and waited. More time passed and I was about to convince myself I had seen a random firefly rather than a meteor when right in front of me swoosh…one flew past…and went out as suddenly as it had appeared. Now that was thrilling! I couldn’t wait to see the next, and the next…the time in between was pretty much the same…every 6 minutes or so, but once I had seen a sure meteor, I KNEW I would see another one, so the wait felt shorter each time one flew past my line of vision. I never doubted again that I would see exactly what I had come out to see…a life event.
As I gathered my things and came indoors I realized I had witnessed a life lesson for myself. So many times we ask, we pray, we plead for opportunities to change our life, our job, our home. We wait on those opportunities…and we wait. We think there will be a “sign in the sky” or some type of out of the ordinary event that will give us the assurance that THIS is what we need to do, or THAT is where we need to go with our path. Many times the chance to make a real life change comes by so quickly, we aren’t even sure we really saw, or heard, what we thought we did. So we continue to wait for change to happen on its own. Time passes and we think we really didn’t see the opportunity clearly and maybe we were wrong to even think that…oh, there goes another opportunity whizzing by…much brighter than the first! This is when we may get excited…maybe, just maybe, I am on the right path this time…maybe this is where I am supposed to be, doing what I am supposed to do. And maybe…when we were so heartsick, lonely ,afraid or feeling as if we were in a huge rut we didn’t see the opportunities coming, just like clockwork, every year, every month, or day to give us the permission to accept them and pursue our own contentment.
In the same way the comet exploded into tiny fragments, with millions of pieces flying through the air and our planet barreling through those fragments for the last 150 plus years…maybe we are guilty of spinning through opportunity after opportunity, rather than seeing them right in front of us because we were looking for that one big “something” rather than the tiny little pieces that would make the spectacular life we have always wanted become a reality.
In the Bible, 2nd Corinthians says our troubles are “light and momentary” but achieving a far greater thing in eternal ways. Perhaps all the light and momentary opportunities, just like the meteors that went flying past and were gone, are just the pre-show to the really wonderful life that is to come…if only we reach out and take hold of them before they are gone. I only know, I don’t want to be sitting in a lawn chair watching my opportunities…and my real life path…go flying past anymore. It’s time to gather the light and momentary and turn it into something lasting and true .
Interesting….life, that is. When you think you have it figured out, it throws you a curve ball…and sometimes it feels like an anvil. The last year of owning a cleaning business has had many ups and downs. Our industry has been one of the hardest hit for many years as customers’ wallets started closing and they scaled back due to the economy and having to tighten their own purse strings. Somehow my own company, until this year, had escaped the scenarios of many of my colleagues. Our business was strong, we were turning business away much of the time because we couldn’t handle some of it. We referred to some of our local “competitors” that have the same standards we do. It was about getting the customer serviced and happy. It also helped keep the money in the local economy and my struggling competitors solvent in many cases. Then…something shifted….
In the last 12 months, the steady flow just cut off like a faucet…running full blast, then not even a drip.We beefed up the marketing, we attended more meetings and sent out more press releases, but to no avail. After almost 6 months of struggling to maintain the status quo, I came to the realization that our company was going through what others had much earlier, and it was not going to get better, no matter how many doors we knocked on or how many neighborhoods we canvassed putting out information. People in our area were frightened. News of “recession” coming out of Washington and foreclosure signs going up next door to them made for emotional responses, and unfortunately the cleaning lady is the easy place to start the budget cuts when you are afraid you may lose your home or vocation.
There was a while when the business was falling off that I was afraid too. Funny, I have been through so many years of so many situations, both personally and professionally, but was caught off guard with this one. I (mistakenly) thought that our company was so good at what we did and customers were so happy with our services that we would escape the huge cutbacks people were forced to make for survival. They had so far hadn’t they, even when many other cleaning companies had closed their doors long before…
We had to make a shift in the internal finances, yes, but more than that a shift had to take place in the very DNA of our company. I had come to the realization of this, but didn’t really know what changes to make and one day something fell out of the sky like manna. A former cleaning customer had her mom’s home they were getting ready for the market. She needed someone to clean it out, and get it ready to sell. This happened about 6 months ago, and today I am this side of several estate clean outs and selling vintage items online, at estate sales and yard sales. The income it has produced has been modest, but has kept the cleaning side of my company afloat, at least for now.
I have been a “junkin’ junkie” since I was a teenager. My only child, Samantha, was given toys for Christmas and birthdays and was dressed from yard sales and always looked like she had walked out of a band box. There is something thrilling, even now, about finding a treasure for a few cents that you can enjoy for a while, then sell for much more than you paid for it. After the first yard sale, “Got Junk In Our Trunk” was born. As a professional organizer by trade (this is how the whole cleaning business began) I knew I could set up estate sales, conduct them efficiently and have a great time helping others disperse of their unwanted items. Many people that I have purchased items from myself have had to sell due to their own financial situation, so I knew although it was a hard choice for them to make, my purchasing was helping them do what they needed to survive a lean time. I also knew that this was something that had always brought me great joy…there is nothing like getting out at 6 a.m. on a Friday or Saturday morning when the air is still cool and crisp, chatting with folks at the sales like they are old friends, running into the same junkin’ buddies that go to sales each week, and then coming back and looking up the treasures, researching and getting things ready to sell. Yard sales are one of the last remaining true community activities, and it is an extra bonus that I am able to make money from the things I find.
I also have always been what I have affectionately dubbed a “Trash Dash” queen. I love driving down the road and coming upon something that is trash to someone, that I turn into a treasure for myself or my family. But, I have upped that activity as well, and go through the neighborhoods several times a week seeing what can be re-purposed and cleaned up and sold, and have had many great sales from these items. I even redecorated my home office with practically all free stuff!
One thing I did learn through all this that I hope I never forget. No matter what is going on around you, you must stay focused and sure of your own special great outcome. Sometimes it takes crawling through a fire on your belly, but you can get through anything with concentration and determination if you don’t give up.You just gotta evaluate after some consideration, but more importantly don’t waste time floundering…just get out there and get the thing going in a new and exciting direction!
In school we had fire drills once a month and their words to us will be the inspiration for me the next time I face a crisis…”Stop, drop, and roll”. If it’s not working, stop it. If it’s not helping you in your life path, drop it. If it is not moving forward the way you are going, then it’s time to roll with it, baby….and head to your new adventure. 🙂
Today is my first blog post for 2012. Rushing through twinkling lights, gift wrappings and farewell toasts, the end of 2011 leaped into a brand New Year. So it is traditionally time to reflect on the old and ponder the new, right? The resolutions flow freely, diets and new company programs are jump started and frenzied activity seems to take up right where it left off with no real line drawn between the two years at all. As I have gone over the last year in my mind this morning, it is amazing to reflect upon where I find myself both professionally and personally.
We found out yesterday that Samantha, my daughter, is having twin BOYS! Wow…we have no clue what to do with the male species in our family. My mom had my sister and me, my sister had a daughter, I had a daughter, my daughter had Lorelai who is now going to be a big sister to snip-snail-puppy dog- tail boys. Everything has always been Princess Pink, tea parties on tiny toadstools, and fluffiness in our family. This will be a totally new adventure, but should be “interesting” to say the least.
In January 2011, I had a full staff and big visions for our staff and company. But in May…something changed. There was a great wave of staff turnover that began due to a variety of events…some needed to leave for family and personal reasons, some moved, some found themselves pregnant (!) and others were encouraged to leave because their performance was less than the stellar performance I promise my customers, or we realized they were not apt to embrace the awesome company culture we were dedicated to growing. Now in January 2012 we have had a complete staff turnover, but somehow I feel more at peace with the company and our current tiny staff and what we provide today than I have for many months. Changes that were pretty much out of my control when staff left resulted in an unexpected but refreshing purge of old attitudes and mindsets and made way for clearer thinking in myself and my current staff. It’s kind of like hanging onto a relationship that you know is bad for you and you cannot grow in…but you hang on and try and make it work because of your investment of time and self, and because it is all you know. But then you have to be away from the relationship for a while due to traveling with a job or visiting relatives and suddenly you find yourself saying “This is not working for me anymore, and that’s ok…and it’s ok to change”. Sometimes you have to step back…or be forced to step back…to find your real path and gather those who will walk with you, rather than pulling you toward their path.You may lose a meaningful someone just as I lost many of my staff. You may lose others watching from the outside that become experts on your relationship and are saying you need to try to find something you should have “done” or “become” to explain your current state of affairs. Our company lost customers during this transition of staff coming and going, and it was not unexpected at all, although it has been quite a challenge. But in losing some, I have realized not all customers and not all staff are meant for our company….and that’s ok for all concerned. We don’t desire just any customer or just any staff…we want something more…we want extraordinary. We want those who walk this good path the Lord has given us, with us, not against His flow and His vision for our company.
And this brings me to today and accepting and embracing the fresh breeze blowing through my life now….
I have a general idea of my path today. I know where I am to live, I know who I am to love and spend time with, I know I am to grow in personal areas as a grandmother, mom, daughter and wife. I believe part of my professional path is to begin coaching cleaning business owners who want to strike out on this journey of service provider. Who better than someone who has been in dark and difficult places and then burst through to the other side?
But the most real and true thing I know about my path is that it is to be all about gathering bits of extraordinary. The year 2012 for me will be about sitting on my deck with a cup of tea and watching the birds eat from my feeders….. because I had the ability and time to offer something extraordinary to those who needed something I had to give. It will be about stopping to bury my nose in the downy softness at the back of our new babies’ necks…and giving others permission to stop and just breathe in and enjoy the extraordinary opportunities and gifts of hard work, unending love, and a contented life. It will be about walking the block with my granddaughter picking up stones, shards of colored glass and leaves and pasting it into a magnificent picture…all fragments found along our path but becoming an extraordinarily beautiful work of art.
And I have every reason and hope to believe when 2013 arrives, I will reflect on 2012 as a year filled with bits of extraordinary. I vow to show up for my own life, where maybe I have not been in such good attendance in the past…and I hope you will show up, and begin your gathering, too.
It’s my next to last night at the beach. I had felt a need to get away alone, reflect, write a bit, think some, regroup mostly. And the trip has been a wonderful opportunity for this, along with enjoying near perfect weather, meeting a few new friends, and getting some use out of my Kindle.
I meandered out of the condo about 7 and headed toward a local Mexican restaurant where I planned to sit and read the Kindle, people watch, and have dinner and one of their nice margaritas. But instead, at the last minute before my turn, I thought “Chinese buffet sounds a little better.” I had planned all week to go tonight to the Mexican place, so it was kinda funkily weird for me to change my mind at the last minute, but isn’t that what vacay is all about?
I sat down to a yummy dinner which included some really great sushi and was thinking I had made a good choice. A few tables emptied out, some others filled in and across from me a 40ish woman and two pretty teen girls sat down to have what appeared to be a Girl’s Night Out together. I had finished my dinner and lingered over a small bowl of chocolate pudding for dessert and was making my way through the last of Cybill Shepherd’s book on the Kindle.
“I just…well…I am just confused…”. I heard this drift over from the girls’ table, and even though the voices were quiet and subdued I could hear enough to know one of the young girls wasn’t a daughter of the woman, but her daughter’s friend. She was in a relationship, and the words “sad”, and “breaking my heart”, and the reassurance of the daughter and mother “we will be there for you if you decide to break this off” piqued my interest. Something inside me remembered, and I felt a sudden sorrow for this young girl.
I sat absently peering at my Kindle, but not reading, for the next half hour as the mom, with much wisdom, told the girl that the boyfriend was controlling her, and using her affections for his own purposes and not for her good. I heard how the Christian boy talked about things that were important to her when they were alone, treated her well, said and did all the right things, made all the right promises “I am sorry, it won’t happen again, I know this isn’t what ‘we’ are supposed to be together”…but when they were in public he shunned and ignored her, and treated her as if she had no worth. This young girl with an aching voice told of several times that she was trampled on by this young man doing things or saying things that he knew were not edifying her or their relationship, but he felt he could get away with the bad behavior because she was a person with a “good heart” and forgiving. Then the mom and girls went over to the buffet and began to get seconds.
You know how you will deep down know you are supposed to speak, and you begin to fight with yourself saying ” I don’t know them, they will think I am crazy or nosy”. But the feeling is so strong, it rushes over you and your insides start swirling and tumbling as you feel like there is a universe-ordained moment that you will miss if you don’t choose to voice what thoughts are in your own mind?
I felt that moment. And I chose to share her tears.
I dug out my phone and looked up a website quickly, wrote it on a notepad, along with the verse of Psalm 37:4 “Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.” And I waited for them to return.
I gathered my things, and when I was sure I could give the information and then bolt, I said ” excuse me”. All three looked up and for the first time I saw the girl’s face and my heart was torn out of my chest. Beautiful, blonde, cheerleader-type. Her words, even about this young man who was treating her cruelly were soft and kind and gentle sounding…but her face was worn with sadness, engrained with rivulets of tears that stained her tanned cheeks. I recognized that face…it had been my face, more than once, over the last 51 years.
“I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable but I couldn’t help overhearing some of what was said…” The mom said ” Oh, I am sorry, I talk so loudly.” But I stopped her…” No, you were very quiet and discreet…I am a mom, and moms have sensitive ears.” They all smiled, even the tear-stained girl for a brief moment. ” I just wanted to give you something…I have been where you are many times in my life, and I felt moved to give you something that helped me know how to make the hard decisions at times.”
I handed her my paper with the website for The Awakening by Sonny Carroll. I told her to get alone, read the poem and keep a copy with her and read it whenever she needed redirection. “In the middle of a relationship, it’s not always easy to see it for what it really is, and what it really isn’t”, I said. She teared up and said very quietly…”Did you have to leave someone you love even when you didn’t want to, because you knew it was better for yourself?” “I told her yes, more than once. She said ” How can you do that though, how do you know when to leave?”
I asked her to give me the paper back, and scribbled something on it and said “Keep this as a reminder, you will always do what is best for you if you look at it often.” I had written ” When is it time to go? When the pain of staying is greater than the pain of leaving.”
As I drove back to my condo…and the young girl crawled under her covers alone in her room tonight…I imagine once more…we shared each other’s tears.
One of the things I look forward to most this time of the year is our company staff party. The last several years I have made the event a brunch and fed the staff, then they went out to their day as usual. This year we decided to schedule lightly, have the party and brunch and then everyone was finished for the day, phones were closed down, and we could just visit some at our leisure. What a difference in the party atmosphere this year!
We laughed and talked, and some even tarried a little at the end before reluctantly leaving to go home or to some last minute shopping. In the type business we have, many of the personnel are on the jobs solo, or in small teams, and we don’t often have the luxury of getting to know each other. Two of the staff found out yesterday that they have relatives that live on the same Native Indian Reservation. We were able to find out about the children of three of our new hires, one tech shared her family’s struggle with her spouse’s cancer recovery, and another shared how God had blessed her husband with two jobs to replace the one he had lost this time last year.
This has been a year of many ups and downs for my family personally. Below is the letter I sent to my customers and friends. I have had so many touched by the events in our home and encouraged by something I penned here. May you possibly be blessed as well by the reading…the world becomes very small and intimate when someone chooses to open up and share their story. It’s a nice feeling.
From the desk of Rhonda:
It’s hard to imagine it is holiday time once again. The trees are going up, the decorations are hauled out of the attic, and the presents are slowly but surely appearing under our tree! Every day inches us closer to my very favorite holiday of the year when we celebrate the birth of the Savior and reflect on the moments of our year. 2010 was a year of many happenings at the Pressgrove house. Dwight came off the road as a truck driver at the end of 2009, and SirHandyman was reborn. Many customers, friends, and family members were so gracious in giving him work and he appreciated being able to serve them. My dad celebrated his 70th birthday, albeit in the hospital. He had a pacemaker for many years, and had been doing relatively well till the last couple of years. After a long diagnostic event it was determined he needed quad bypass surgery, which he went through well. We are all very thankful he has had a good recovery and is enjoying better health these days. My mom also suffered some unexplainable health issues this summer, and she has always been the healthier of the two parents. Through many months of agonizing tests, unsure results and even the possibility of cancer, she came through with a diagnosis that was much better than expected. She turned 70 this year as well, and looks remarkably young for her age…more like my sister. I am so thankful to still have both my parents with us as we enter a new year. My daughter Samantha still works for HMR as marketing manager and throughout this year was also cleaning on occasion. Her husband, Tracy, had lost his job in 2009 and they were spending the first part of this year recovering from that. I am so proud of my kids. They never asked for help and came back with flying colors on their own. Hardworking Tracy was blessed with a former position being reinstated, and he also has a second job that allows Sam to stay home again with 2 year old Lorelai. We are hoping their home, currently on the market, sells soon so they can move in down the street! Lorelai is a ball of fire and sunshine all at the same time. She calls me GiGi, I call her Sweet Pea, and her little voice is the sweetest sound I hear in a day. We had a scare with her this year also….a high fever brought on a febrile convulsion. There is no more helpless feeling than holding your grandchild while a paramedic looks on, waiting just like you for her to “wake up”. The Lord was gracious and she was virtually unscathed from the incident. She is saying all her ABC’s, knows her colors and many letters, and loves to sing just like her GiGi and Papaw (Dwight). One of her fave things to do at our house is play the piano and sing into the mics we have in our small recording studio. We must get her latest single recorded…”Jesus Loves Me This I know, For Dat Bible Tells Me Sooooo-o-o”. My stepdaughter, Katie had her second baby in the last few weeks. Cody is still in LeBonheur as of this writing and was born with the same serious health issue as his brother. Brendon, the older baby, is also still in LeBonheur, having turned a year old in July. He has never seen the outside of the hospital but is a smiling little sweetheart. Both babies are beautiful, and Brendon is taking his first tentative steps. We pray daily they will come home soon, but we know it is God’s timetable and not our own, so we continue to wait.
Help Me Rhonda had the most profitable year since opening its doors. This marked our 8th year in full time operation and we experienced many wonderful changes that have moved us toward serving our customers better and with more of a servant’s heart. We now occupy the entire center section of our building with 4 offices, a supply room and a recently added staff room. I thank God for this opportunity to serve Him through our work. I thank Him that we have been able to maintain an entirely debt-free business in a shaky economy. The loyalty of our family of customers has brought us through some years when industry peers have closed their doors, and for this, I am so grateful. I pray for each reader here to have the happiest of holidays, and may 2011 bring all the joy possible and the brightest of tomorrows.
Thanksgiving came and went, with little leftovers, except a slight case of indigestion from overeating. Dwight’s niece went into labor the following morning and tiny, beautiful Lily Marie was born. Sad part, baby’s grandmother had to stay home and miss the blessed event due to a case of pneumonia. She had posted on Facebook several times to her daughter as she was recuperating from the delivery. In her last post, she mentioned having a “tear” then said ” I will come by and see you tomorrow, even if it is only through a glass door.” I wonder how many of us woke up today and are in pretty much the same spot with our own lives. Days go by and life runs through our fingers like a stream of water from a faucet, we shed a tear here and there as we look at our life to be as if through a glass door.
We see what our life could be…we can almost reach out and touch it…the places we could be going, sights we could see, the things we could be doing, those we would maybe meet, the difference we could make…but it is only as if through a glass door.We feel something is blocking our way, keeping the things we desire the most, just out of our grasp. What is keeping us from the life we were meant to have? Is the glass door a difficult relationship that has lost its joy? Are we in a dead end job? Have we lost the motivation to dream the big dreams for ourselves? Are we stuck because too many changes must happen before the glass can be shattered for us? Or maybe we just need to just take a look at the door again…a door has a knob for a reason. And interestingly, the knob fits our own hand.
This was a week of many ups and downs…events almost daily gave many moments of reflection and reasons to regroup. Grandson Cody Ryan unexpectedly entered the world on the first day of the week, 6 weeks early. Stress tests have been a regular part of the pregnancy because Cody has short bowel syndrome and is health-compromised.
He is doing well, but will have a long road ahead of him, as will his young parents. Cody’s big brother, Brendon, was the couple’s first child and is also dealing with the same condition. Brendon has never left the hospital and is now 15 months old…so both babies will be under special care in the same children’s hospital. My mother’s 70th birthday was the following day and it is amazing to think of her at that age. Mom has been through a period of some ill health this year, but she is so active and eternally young looking, it is hard to fathom she is not my age. My daughter, granddaughter and I took mom to a chinese buffet and then thrift stores and goofing off, and by the end of the day she was still fresh as a daisy. I hope I can grow up to be just like her.
On Monday, an office staff member left, giving no notice. Just packed up, sat her office keys on the file cabinet and walked out the door. No prior incidents, no problems with her behavior or work perfomance at all…then just…gone, to the great surprise of both myself and my operations manager. Similar incidents have happened in the past and I used to take it much more personally than I do these days. I can see, from talking to others in business, that this is a rampant problem with most businesses. The days of company loyalty and personal integrity are fast becoming a thing of the past. In the interest of not having to explain their actions, many will choose to “look bad” rather than just say ” I need a change, I need to move on”. And so I decided to look at it as a chance to move forward with new blood myself. Funny thing, I had not one but TWO applicants that want to work our front office and they contacted us within 24 hours of the walk out. God knows what He is doing, and if I really believe this, then I know the company’s best is always on His heart and mind, even more so than on mine. So we move on, excited about our future, and the possibilities. It’s the same with the birth of Cody or the gentle aging of my seemingly forever-young mom. Sometimes what seems to be a sad situation or a hard place in our lives comes along and we can choose to shut down and say ” I quit.” Or we can know that Someone bigger than us is in control. Someone kinder than us cares about where we are, and where we want to be. Someone wiser than us knows what we would miss if the hard times didn’t come in our lives. Today was our Thanksgiving celebration with my daughter’s family and as I looked around the room, I reflected on how much I have in my life that is good and wholesome and worthy of a peaceful smile. I am thankful most of all for the Someone in my life. I am so excited to see what is around that proverbial bend for my family, my company, and me personally. And I am thankful and oh, so grateful I am not travelling alone. And I am especially thankful that Someone never says ” I quit.”
I had an ex-boyfriend once. When we began dating, things were nice and we got along and he gave me the attention and interest that I wanted and also deserved in a relationship. Once things got a little more serious, something kinda of “snapped” in his brain. He became overbearing and obsessive and the attention became something of a monitoring device, which didn’t go over really big with me. What was great, became rotten pretty fast, and needless to say that relationship went bye-bye. I remember one day toward the demise of the situation, I had gotten so fed up, I turned to him and said “You know, I cannot possibly miss you if you won’t GO AWAY.” Clever statement, I thought, in the moment. But it is an axiom that holds pretty true, kind of like the more common “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” This week my opps manager was out of the office on her last vacation of the year. And she was definitely missed.
I always appreciate her work, and the work of my other staff members, but I am pointedly reminded of their contribution when one of them is out of the office for any reason. I get to be them, (I do my best anyway), but this is a good thing for more reasons than appreciation. I am brought back in close touch with my customers and staff. It’s a good time to do their work, and maybe evaluate how certain programs or policies or procedures are working or no longer working for them and the company, and make plans to replace the things that are slowing us down. Sometimes a business owner and a company may look as if they are moving forward exactly right, when in fact they are headed down the wrong road, or headed at least in the wrong way toward a goal that is not their real goal at all. Many a complacent business owner wakes up one day and says ” how in the heck did I get here” and then they have to backtrack all the decisions and try and fix things, rather than keeping short accounts and changing things to support the ultimate goal and path as they go along.
Things did go well this week, and we were very busy. My young office manager displayed stellar performance although she was dealing with a sudden death in her family. Sad situation…her young cousin lost control of his car and lost his life. Odd thing, his flip flop was caught under the accelerator while his foot remained on top and continued to accelerate the car. He reached down to free the shoe, lost control, and the vehicle went off the road and hit a very small tree. He had no seat belt on, so he had nothing to stop him from bending down, from trying to free his shoe, from placing himself in the way of the tree that came crashing through the passenger’s side of the vehicle. I have thought about this several times this week. What if he had chosen a different type shoe? Did he forget that he had an emergency brake on the car? What if the seat belt had engaged and not allowed him to bend down? What if he had not been alone? Would the other person had been injured, or worse, because he had lost control? Or would the other person had been able to free his shoe for him… and the car…and the passengers…go home safely, with only stories of their misadventure? In relationships, business, and personal decisions, I realize a great need to wear the right “shoes”, wear a “seatbelt”, and have a “friend” along for the ride for my own safety and the safety of others. I must prepare to do the right things with the right methods (wear the right shoes), have self-discipline ( a seatbelt) in place to keep me in check, and have someone ( a friend or business associate) who holds me accountable but will go away from time to time to let me know the value of their friendship, advice, and relationship. We all need that, now don’t we?