Saturday, June 4, 2011

The Miracle of Love

This morning as I was working, cleaning the house, I was thinking how thankful that I am for all 10 of my children. How thankful that I am that everyone gets along. None of us are perfect. We all have our irritating traits, but we all love each other and accept each other for who we are and for that I am thankful. (Sorry, but I am feeling thankful and sentimental this morning.) What started all this thinking was thoughts of birthdays and birthday gifts and celebrating birthdays and that being someone's special day during the year because yesterday at work I was talking to one of my workers and she feels the same way about birthdays that I do though they celebrate 1/2 birthdays in their family and yearly birthdays, too, and I thought how could we ever do that in our family when everyone is so busy and I was wondering if I had ever hurt any of you in any way by forgetting to do something for your birthday that I had done for someone else. I have always thought that a gift, cake, and eating out or making a special meal shows you that you are special and loved and I have always tried to do that for everyone. I like to make sure that someone is getting at least 1 cake anyway (now when we are older, 1 is enough :-) and sometimes we get to celebrate with extended family, like this year, we had the pleasure of being invited to celebrate Greta's and Meghan's birthdays with their parents. Now when everyone is so busy and the family is growing, it's hard to get together more often than we do and I don't always remember if we have gone out to eat for your birthday or not. (I know that we did not get out to eat this year for Denise's birthday.) We had talked about getting together monthly to celebrate birthdays. I want each of you to know that if I ever hurt or upset you in anyway I am sorry and in the future, please let me know as otherwise I won't know to do it differently or what I have done. If there is something that I forget, please remind me. I am going to pray that we would always be considerate of each other and accept each other for who we are and that we would all be able to talk to each other honestly and in love if we are ever hurt.

Then I got this strong urge to read the next reading in our book and it wouldn't go away, so I finally decided to sit down and read it.

I don't know who all is reading the book yet, but I would encourage everyone to read this story or if you talk to someone and they haven't read this story, encourage them to. It's a good true story that could happen in any family and I have read this story before. It's about unconditional acceptance and love. The scripture reading 1 Corinthians 13, we often hear at weddings, but don't take the time to read it very often. It's about love and it's a scripture reading that I know I should be reading often.

2 comments:

  1. At work, we are going to be doing a Wooden Leadership course this fall. A lot of material developed for this is from John Wooden, a basketball coach from UCLA who won the championships several years in a row in the 60s/70s. He also emphasizes that love is the most important thing in everyone's lives - second is balance. He lived his beliefs in both his personal and professional life - a man who truly lived what he said. Several times in his book, he said that what's important is the journey, not the inn. Winning a game was secondary to every player trying their best. Wooden saw success in a game where they didn't outscore the opponent if the team tried their best. We saw this in this story too - it was being a team and everyone supporting each other and trying their best and the love for each other that was important. And our journey as a family is full of love - and we all need to try our best to be there for each other and as long as we try our best, that is all we can do! I can say - I'm enjoying the journey and love you all very much!

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  2. When reading this story I couldn't help but think how witnessing something like that could really open your eyes to what people are capable of. It seems like you don't find many people who are willing to go out of their way for others. I love hearing stories like this of people coming together.

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