Calendar Your Blessings

Each week since the start of this year, I have been trying to find ways to use the gifts I have been given to be a blessing to others.  It hasn’t been easy though… because for starters, I’m not sure I personally have all that many gifts, and secondly, I’ve had several very stressful things to deal with the past few months.

But at the beginning of the year, when I first sat down to think about it, I realized something else as well. Trying to use my gifts to be a blessing to others is certainly a good thing, so I will keep trying to do that. But so is recognizing and appreciating the blessings I have been gifted with myself! Things like a loving wife, 4 kids, 6 grandkids, dozens of close friends and a job I truly enjoy. Those are obvious blessings that God has bestowed on my, but there are many other blessings as well. My health is excellent right now, I play on two different baseball teams so that’s really fun, I get to go golfing on a regular basis, and I even have time to work-out each week, which keeps my mind sharp and my attitude positive. Those are a lot of blessings for sure, but unfortunately, I don’t always remember to appreciate them like I should.

So with that in mind, I created what I call my “2018 Blessings Calendar”. I came up with colorful symbols to indicate some of the different blessings I receive each week and started posting them to a Calendar. A Black W is for work outs, a Blue B is for baseball, a Green G is for golf and a Red F is for family fun. It’s kind of eye-opening to stand back and look at the month of January for example and see all the blessings that I received in that one month alone. However, I also posted a purple heart  each time I made an effort to use my God given gifts to serve others. And you know what… the calendar makes it obvious that the blessings I am receiving greatly outnumber the gifts I am giving, so I better work on turning that around!

Counting our blessings is an exercise we should do on a regular basis. It will sharpen our minds and strengthen our souls. But if you think it’s easy to do when things are going well, it’s even more important to do when things are going bad. For example, my Mom has been extremely sick for months and sadly, she passed away a few days ago. My heart hurts and the loss is overwhelming at times, but when I look at that calendar, it makes me smile… and that’s a gift I definitely think my Mom would consider a blessing!

May flowers always line your path and sunshine light your day.

May songbirds serenade you every step along the way.

May a rainbow run beside you in a sky that’s always blue.

And may happiness fill your heart each day and guide your whole life through.

~ Old Welsh Blessing 

Lighting My Fire

The overarching theme of my Monday Messages this year is about finding ways to serve others. I am supposed to be figuring out what gifts I have been blessed with and then use those gifts to help others.  Well, the past two weeks were certainly filled with multiple opportunities, but for some reason most of them involved lighting, or at least lighting up people’s lives a little bit… as well as my own!

1. The first opportunity came when I received an urgent email from a friend that the lights for the Cross on top of Battle Mountain in San Diego were out. He asked me for help, so I grabbed my tools, drove to San Diego and climbed to the top of the mountain. It ended up taking several hours to disassemble the electrical components and troubleshoot the system, but I eventually found a burned wire buried below one of the lighting vaults. By the time I was done, I was hot, tired, sweaty and dirty. But when I stepped back to view the cross with the lights shining brightly, I got this warm feeling inside that’s hard to explain.

2. The second opportunity came when I noticed my neighbor’s hallway lights were burned out. My neighbor only comes out from Scottsdale 4-5 times a year, so when I heard he was coming out that evening I did a quick inspection of his house and noticed quite a few lights out. I didn’t have time to drive to my warehouse in Irvine, so I ran down to Home Depot instead. As I was putting the lights into my truck I noticed the lady parked next to me had a large bag of concrete in her shopping cart and was just standing there looking at it. She appeared pregnant, so I walked over and started to say, “I noticed you’re pregnant and need help”. But then I realized, hey… she might not be pregnant, which would be just like me to open my big mouth. So instead I just asked her if she needed help and she immediately said yes and started glowing with a big smile. So I figured if she was “glowing” then she maybe she was pregnant, but either way, I was once again got that warm, hard to explain feeling inside again.

3. The third opportunity came when my Father-in Law mentioned that an elderly friend of his needed help with the lights in her garage. She is a really sweet lady who has had some serious health issues recently. Then a few months ago her husband passed away, so life has been really hard for her. She lives alone in a house in Mission Viejo, so I grabbed my tools and drove over there. All of the fluorescent lights in her garage were in bad shape, so I replaced them with new T8 lights to save her money on her electric bill. It didn’t take me long to do the work, but it sure did make a difference. She had been wanting to clean out her garage for a long time and now she could finally see again! As I packed up to leave, she asked me what she owed me, and I explained that as a friend of the family, it was simply my pleasure to be of service. About that time she started to cry, and I mean really truly cry, and all I could think of to do was to give her a hug. As I drove away I felt that same warm, hard to explain feeling rising up inside me once again.

Like I mentioned above, it’s hard to explain that mysterious warm feeling that happens whenever you go out of your way to help someone. But maybe it too is related to lighting… lighting my fire!

Wherever a man turns, he can always find someone who needs him.

~ Albert Schweitzer