Relationship Success

I have a feeling that this ugly Covid19 situation is going to be either really good for personal relationships, or really bad. It’s just a theory I have. If you’re relationship with your spouse is kind of shaky anyway, and now you’re faced with all the trouble caused by the Coronavirus, your relationship could easily fall apart. But if you’re relationship is really strong to begin with, chances are problems are only going to bring the two of you together as you tackle your troubles as a team.  That theory got me thinking about my own marriage.

It’s late Sunday evening and I’m struggling to I get this story ready for Monday morning. However, tomorrow is my wife’s birthday and I am totally stressed out! First, you have to understand that I absolutely adore my wife, so I always want to show her my love on her birthday by taking her shopping and letting her pick out really nice gifts. She always fights me on it, but over the years, I’ve managed to talk her into things like a diamond necklace, earrings, and even a vacation to Hawaii.

But that was back when times were good and there was no world-wide pandemic going on. So, I’m stressed now because I can’t go shopping like normal and I can’t even take her on a nice vacation. Plus, she keeps insisting that I don’t spend money on her this year because money is tighter than ever. But that’s also one of the reasons I love her so much. She never thinks about herself because she is always too busy doing nice things for other people. So how do I demonstrate my love to someone so deserving when I can’t take her shopping like normal?

Then it hit me - relationships are all about communication! In fact, I believe that communication is the single most important factor for creating a successful relationship. So maybe I can’t celebrate her birthday as I normally do, but I can definitely communicate my love to her… in writing! I know it might not be as fun as a vacation, but it will certainly last longer and possibly mean more. Truth is I’ve written her lots of love letters, but this year with how difficult everything has been, she deserves my absolute best effort. So, I poured my heart out to her using my very best prose and I’m hoping it will brighten her day tomorrow. And I thought, “What if there’s another guy out there struggling with communication?” If that’s you, take a look at the “Love Letter Template” attached. Maybe it will give you some ideas… that will lead you to relationship success!  

Love must be as much a light as a flame.

~ Henry David Thoreau

LOVE LETTER TEMPLATE

 

My Dearest _______ (Fill in your cutest pet name for her) ___________,

Thinking about you reminds me that I have someone in my life that I love very much who actually loves me back. Which is quite the miracle! Our love is very ___ (special, unique, tempestuous) ___ , for you express your love very clearly to me every single day. And I am always trying to show you my love as well through my daily _____ (words, deeds, mistakes) _______.

We’ve been together now, hand in hand, truly in love, truly and fully committed to each other, for ___ (20 years, 20 months, 20 minutes) ____.  There have been far more good times than bad, far more happy moments than problems. And yet even during the toughest times, I have always known your heart and you have always known mine, and our love has grown stronger with each passing _____ (year, day, minute) _____. For that I feel very blessed!

Is it crazy that my eyes still light up and my heart still skips a beat, every time you ____ (enter the room, leave the room) ____? Is it crazy that I can’t be away from you for even a few hours without missing you and wishing you were by my side? Is it crazy that I am willing to confide my deepest thoughts and silliest fears to you, despite always wanting to impress you with my ____ (strength, courage, hot dog eating ability) ____? Is it crazy that I am willing to share my sensitive side with you, and yet know fully and without a doubt that I would give my life without hesitation for you in a heartbeat? It’s not crazy, it’s called true love!

      ·         I love it when we sleep ___ (in together, through movies, in separate rooms) ___.

·         I love it when we go for bike rides and talk about ___ (our love, our in-laws, nothing) ___.

·         I love it when we spend time together with ___ (our children, neighbors, the police) ___.

·         I love it when we ____ (hold each other, kiss each other, smack each other) ____.

·         I love it when I go to sleep with my __ (arms, legs, lips) ___wrapped so tightly around you.

·         I love our love, for it is like no other.

As your ___ (husband, lover, boyfriend, best friend, best friend’s husband) ___, I promise to try hard to be everything you want and need me to be. I will try to remember that you have your own personal struggles, your own pains and worries, and make sure you get my best attitude and my best love every single day. And I want you to know that this will not be a hard promise to keep because I enjoy it very much. But then again, isn’t that what true love is truly all about.

Thank you for your love and for all the sacrifices you continuously make for me!

 

All my Love,

                                                                                                     

Your __ (Fill in the name you wish she would call you) ___                                                

                                                                                                  

 

 

Fear Less

My wife and I ride our bicycles up and down Beach Road almost every day. We have been doing that ever since the Coronavirus hit. We can’t really go places like we used to and we can’t visit with family and friends like we love to do, so instead we go for bike rides and talk a lot. And we have these really great talks, about life, about love, about our hopes and dreams and fears. I joke that we try to solve the world’s problems during our bike rides. And I do so wish we could!

Unfortunately, we can’t. But the one thing we can do, is we can stop worrying about things and stop being afraid… but yet still be smart! At first, we were really fearful of getting the virus and/or spreading it and that’s normal. We were scared for our children, our parents, our friends, ourselves. But over time we’ve come to realize that worry is a wasted emotion and  fear is simply weakness. So we’ve switched from being afraid to simply understanding what we can and can’t do and make it a point to be careful, wear a mask, and social distance at all times… while still making the most of life.

Yesterday, as we rode our bikes, we talked about how living through this pandemic has changed our lives. Not all of it has been for the worse. It has made us smarter and stronger. And we’ve learned some really important life lessons. Mainly that we don’t have to live in fear, we simply need to be smart about how we live, while protecting other lives at the same time.

Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood and now more than ever is the time to understand more, so that we fear less.

~ Marie Curie, Physicist, 1920

Passion Play

Growing up I attended Fallbrook High School in San Diego County, so over time I became a huge fan of the San Diego Chargers. My friends and I attended a lot of games at “Jack Murphy Stadium” and the San Diego Fans were super loyal and insanely passionate about their team. The San Diego Padres were the other team that we all rooted for and I’ll never forget how fun it was getting together with good friends and good food around a big screen TV to watch the games, yelling, screaming, and living vicariously through our favorite players.

Later on, after briefly attending Cal Berkeley, I moved to Orange County because College turned out to be something I didn’t really have a passion for. So I started trying to build a new life for myself with a new job, new friends, and new sports teams to root for. I guess I was hoping to finally find my passion and finally… come alive! I immediately fell in love with The Angels and went nuts when they won the World Series in ‘02. We didn’t have a local football team back then, but we do now. In fact, we two LA Football teams to root for. How great is that! Except, as much as I love my sports teams, and as much as I love the players, I totally live and die with each and every game. Being a Chargers Fan meant never getting to see my team win a Super Bowl. The Chargers only went once and were blown out by the 49ers. Being a Padres fan meant never seeing my team when a World Series either. The Padres did make it to the WS twice but were blown out by the Detroit Tigers in 1984 and the Yankees in 1998.

Which got me thinking… The problem with loving sports and being passionate about a team, or passionate about anything for that matter, is that you can often get your heart ripped out. Kind of reminds me of the pitfalls of life in general. You know that you can never count on things going the way you want them to, but yet you hope they do, and then you have to live and die with the good and the bad.  Basically, being passionate about anything is like being on an emotional roller coaster.

But is that such a bad thing? Yesterday, something happened in my world that has never happened in all my 65 years of living. The San Diego Padres had to play a double header against the SF Giants and won both games! The Angels had to go up against the Colorado Rockies in Colorado and yet got the win when Albert Pujols hit his 660^th career home run! The San Diego (I mean Los Angeles) Chargers started their first game of the season with a brand-new quarterback and surprised everyone with a 16-13 victory! And the Los Angeles Rams, who started their season in a brand-new stadium against a very tough Dallas Cowboys Team, also got themselves a sweet victory! Incredibly, every single team I rooted for yesterday won their game!

So what am I saying… Being passionate may have its ups and downs, but life without having passion for anyone or anything, is no kind of life at all.

Don’t ask yourself what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive? And then go out and do that. Because what the world needs is people with passion who have come alive.

~ Howard Thurman

He Work Hard

I have always admired and respected people who work hard. It might have started with my Grandpa Joe who had a distinguished military career, enlisting out of High School and making it to the rank of Major. Even after he retired, he kept working, mainly as a Sunday School teacher at a church near his home in San Diego. I will always remember how scarily impressive he looked in his Marine Corps uniform and yet how kind he always was to me. When I was young, he would let me sit on the arm of his big recliner and rub his bald head while we watched old-time western movies together. He was always smiling and giving me good advice about working hard and treating everyone you meet with respect.

The importance of having good work ethic that Grandpa Joe swore by made sense to me. So when I started my first company I looked for people with solid work ethic. Once a quarter, my wife and I would even send around an employee questionnaire, asking them to nominate the best employee for that quarter. I’ll never forget one questionnaire that was filled out by an employee whose job was to dig trenches for underground conduit. Nazario didn’t speak much English, so he handed his questionnaire in to me personally. It only had three words on it. He was voting for his fellow ditch digger, Crispin Gonzalez, and it simply said, “He Work Hard”. And Nazario was right about that!

I was reminded of Nazario and Crispin this past weekend when the temperatures soared, and our A/C went out. We had our A/C checked a month prior and the technician, who only spent 20 minutes on it, said nothing was wrong with it. He was right, it worked fine while he was there, but it went out again 5 minutes after he left. When we tried to get him to come back out, he made excuses, said he was really busy, and that he couldn’t come back until the end of September. So I called a different company this weekend who said they would send a man out the very next day.

When Saul arrived, he was very professional. He wore a mask and politely asked me where he should park. When I explained that our A/C unit was on the rear upper deck and that he couldn’t come through the house due to the Coronavirus, he said, “Then I will go over the roof with my ladders and drop down onto the deck from above with my tools.” And off he went, just another day climbing ladders in 100 degrees heat. Saul spent 30 minutes diagnosing the problem and then explained to me that our unit couldn’t be fixed due to multiple bad inverters. But he also said, “Let me see if I can at least get it working temporarily for you.” After another solid hour of effort, Saul explained that it wasn’t going to be possible to get the unit working, but that he wouldn’t charge me for any of the extra time he put in.

After Saul climbed down from the roof and brought down all his tools, he only charged me the standard $95.00 diagnostic fee. I gave Saul the $95.00 and then I handed him a crisp new $100 bill as a thank you for his strong effort. Actually, the reason I gave him the tip…. He Work Hard!

Without labor nothing prospers.

~ Sophocles

Good Values

I was always good at math in school, so it’s funny that the one thing I never did when I got older was create a personal budget. I’m not sure why, probably because I always worked hard, made good money, and resisted going into debt. But finally, two years ago, with retirement looming and lower income around the corner, I decided I needed to put myself (and my wife to her great dismay) on a budget.

It was a great idea that I wish I would have implemented as a young man. But oh well, better late than never and the best thing about a budget is that you get to tell your money what to do instead of finding out afterwards what your money did on its own. And if you budget properly, it greatly reduces stress!

Then the pandemic hit and everything about our budget changed. Obviously, like most people, our income went down due to a slow-down in our business income. But the good thing was that a whole lot of our expenses went way down too. We stopped driving as much, stopped going on vacation, stopped going to the movies, and completely stopped eating out at restaurants. Our restaurant budget alone was huge and now it’s zero. Yay for that! Even though we always looked for restaurants with good value, it was easy to see looking back that the best value of all, was always at home.

And that got me thinking… What is my value to society and what are my own personal values? I wonder if people who are my friends think they are getting a good deal by having me as a friend? I wonder if my kids think they got a good deal when they got me as a Dad? And I wonder if my wife thinks she could have done better? (Even though she told me when we met that for sure I was her destiny!) I hope they think they got a good deal, but I can’t control what they think. I can only control what I do, what I say, and what I think.

So… here’s what I think about values. I think everything we do is influenced by our values because our values determine who we are. So, if we take the time to figure out which values are most important to us and pick values that are lasting and stick to them, those values will help guide us to a great life. For example, early on in my career I decided that core values like honesty, integrity, and respect are super important. In fact, I felt so strongly about it that I actually had those three words embroidered onto every single uniform shirt at all four of my companies. But that can get a little tricky. If your shirt says “Honesty” on it, and you tell a lie, people are going to call you on it really quick. But that’s the point. Your beliefs determine your behavior, and your behavior determines what you become. Maybe I was right when I was talking about budgets at the start of this story… the best values really do start at home!

A true test of character is not how you are on your best days, 

but how you act on your worst days.

~ Anonymous

Pillow Talk

September 9^th, 2004 – This is my tenth night in a row sleeping on a beat-up old metal cot. I roll onto my side and look over at my wife. The smells of a hospital room are all around me and there are machines humming, a heart-beat monitor beeping, and multiple IV’s sticking out of her arms. There is also a big ugly chest tube poking out of her side. It looks like somebody drilled a hole into her and then pushed the tube into her lungs. Wait… it doesn’t just look like that, that is exactly what the doctor did! It looks ugly and painful because it is, and yet, she has never looked more beautiful and never been more precious to me.

I rolled off that cot and walked over to the side of her bed. I got down on my knees and begged one more time, “Dear God, please don’t let her die. Please help her, God. She is a wonderful woman, a good mother with three young children to raise. You know she is bold, and you know she is strong, but she needs you now more than ever. And I need you God, now more than ever! I will do whatever you want, Lord, just please don’t let her die.”

The tears started again, my sadness becoming so overwhelming that my body shook with despair. I didn’t even try to stand up, just crawled back and collapsed into that stupid little cot. My heart was aching as I looked over at her sweet little face, etching it permanently into my memory, fearing the worst but trying to have faith that my prayers would be answered. As I reminded myself how important faith is, I noticed something strange about her pillow. It had funny littles wrinkles on the side of it that almost looked like a word. I stared at it for several minutes and decided it wasn’t a word, it just looked like two letter B’s. I closed my eyes and tried to relax but I couldn’t sleep. I rolled over and gazed at her face again and there were those two little B’s staring back at me. I smiled just a little thinking those wrinkles should be D’s because she has always been my beloved “Debby Dollface”. But they weren’t D’s, they were B’s. What am I supposed to do with that God? Are you trying to tell me something?

September 11^th, 2004 – Two day later. The doctor just pulled the thick chest tube out of her side. I could tell it really hurt her, but she didn’t cry out. In fact, she was smiling because the doctor had just given us good news! She was finally out of danger and might be going home soon. She was released that afternoon and when we got home, I put her straight to bed, our bed, with her head resting on her own pillow. I was so happy to have her home I couldn’t sleep. I just kept staring at her face and thanking God in my heart. But I also couldn’t stop thinking about those two little B’s that were outlined by the wrinkles in her hospital pillow. I know it might seem silly, but I believe that we humans are given signs at times in our lives that have meaning. Signs, symbols, pictures, thoughts, whatever you want to call them, but they’re there, and they have meaning if we are willing to take the time to figure it out.

December 25^th, 2006, Two years later – When you have a big family, Christmas time is always a wonderful time and this year is no exception. My wife is healthier than she has been for a long time and my kids seem happy and well adjusted, despite enduring all of their Mom’s health issues. As we sat down for Christmas dinner, I thought back to all that hospital time in 2004 and remembered the 70-day journal I wrote during that time period. I wrote it because I was trying to keep my mind off my wife’s illness, and I was also trying to pass along some “life lessons” to my kids. Writing that journal was therapeutic for me and kind of fun. As I thought back on it, I also remembered the pillow with the little B’s, and it hit me! It took me two years, but I finally figured out what God was trying to tell me! I took action the very next week.

January 8^th, 2007 – I wrote and published my first ever “Monday Message” today and sent it to my children, family members, and a few dozen friends. I explained to them that God has blessed me my entire life in at least eleventy-thousand (my youngest daughter’s expression) ways and I want to give back for all the grace He has shown me. So, I have decided to start trying to write thought provoking stories wrapped around things that happen in my life, bold stories that will perhaps inspire people, remind them of the important things in life, and hopefully draw them a little nearer to God.

August 24^th, 2020 – I wrote and published Monday Message #500 today, which incidentally now goes out to over 500 individuals each week and has over 26,000-page views on its blog. I never even imagined I would live long enough to create 500 unique Monday Message stories, let alone be bold enough to share my personal faith with so many people. To me, it has been a blessing because it keeps me focused when things are going right and picks me up when things are going wrong. It’s the least I can do to thank God for all He has done for me.

And to think it all began when I realized what those two little pillow B’s meant… Be Bold!

Debby, Joe, Andrew, Nikki, Andie, Penelope, Jack, Colin, Cameron, Shellsea, Brooke, Zac

Be bold in your faith and faith will simplify your life.

~ Joseph Thrailkill

Stain Free

There is something seriously wrong with me! And I think I’m going to blame my Dad.

Don’t get me wrong. My Dad was the best man I have ever known, my hero, and I loved him very much. But he had this problem where he constantly spilled food on his shirt. He was always a very good-looking man, clean shaven and usually dressed very sharp. Except, there would always be a small, sometimes hardly noticeable, sometimes very noticeable, stain on his shirt. It never failed.

We used to laugh about it a lot. But he warned me that I would likely get the shirt stain disease too, when I got older. Unfortunately, he was right, and I admit it. I do have the shirt stain disease these days. And I can’t figure out how it happens? I try to be careful and think I’ve gotten myself through a meal okay, until I look down and inspect my shirt and sh*%&*t… there it is!

And this crappy Coronavirus is only making things worse. My wife and I used to go out to eat at restaurants a lot and when I’m sitting properly at a table, I don’t usually get food on my shirt. But for months now, we have eaten every meal at home and a lot of the time I’m sitting in my recliner. And let me tell you, that is a really dumb place to eat a meal if you don’t want to end up wearing it. Just one more reason the Coronavirus is making my life miserable!

In fact, it’s gotten so bad that I now keep a large spray bottle of Oxi-Clean right there on my dresser. Every time I change clothes, I have to break out that stupid spray bottle and use it on my shirt. It’s embarrassing to realize I have been walking around with a noticeable stain on my T-shirt, but fortunately that Oxi-Clean stuff works really well!

And that got me thinking… I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life and committed sins that have stained my soul for sure. But I smile when I picture the Sinless One, standing next to me, the sin-filled one, spraying me with his own extra-large bottle of heavenly scented Oxi-Clean. Forever stain free!

Andie's clean T-Shirt says it all!

As a child my family’s menu consisted of two choices: 

take it or leave it. 

~ Buddy Hackett