significant illness

Potential Wise Saying For the Day: "You can only be young once. But you can always be immature." Dave "the emotional pundant" Barry

While cleaning out the "workroom" in our basement, I'm struck (yet again) with a thought: I want to be significant. Not just a "Hey, she was OK" mentioned kindly in front of my casket..., but a change-the-world kind of infuence that is remembered and recounted. A benchmark impact that other events/people/moments are compared. More of a Steve Irwin-Billy Graham-George Washington-Alfred Hitchcock sort of iconic hugeness than a me-at-my-mid-forties-in-the-midst-of-the-mundane that is my reality.

Kevin My Video Husband might say that I'm not achieving greatness because I don't want it bad enough. Perhaps. I mean I certainly don't have the drive and passion these men had. I also don't have certain masculine parts, but I don't think that the key to this whole matter.

My mother might remind me that even great people have tons of mundaneness to wade through each day-- She's kind of a "everyone puts their pants on one leg at a time" sort of woman. But somehow--at the end of the day, or at least at the end of their live--their mundanity was shaken away to leave something stunning.

It might be argued that great people don't know they're great. That could be true. However, George Washington struggled with the weight of expectation and the understanding that history hung on his every action and decision. So did Abraham Lincoln. Even Steve Irwin urged a reporter to follow him as he went into the bush saying, "If people can see how amazing wildlife is, they might try to save it." He knew he was the Spokesperson for the Unspeaking.

I guess the bottom line is that, perhaps, at this moment, greatness is the foremost desire for me here...With truly great people there is most always another driving force: helping people, saving the nation, reaching the lost, making a better movie, saving wildlife, which offers the vehicle that brings greatness as they do the best they can in the area they are driven, or called, or placed.

Another obvious difficulty is that I'm a Christian. And Christians aren't supposed to want to be significant. My understanding of faith is that by giving myself to Jesus, this means I am to relinquish that desire for greatness housed within me. I am to be motivated by a higher calling, an eternal understanding, a deeper sense of who I am in the body of my Savior.

There are days when I "get it" enough to be OK with that. But other days, like today, as I try to make sense of the boxes of cloth, picture frames, files of stuff drug around for more than 20 years, I wish I could know that this effort will mean something more someday than a checkmark off my never ending list.

So much for being spiritually mature, huh?

Right now

Thought for the Day

“If you don't like my opinion of you, you can always improve.” Ashleigh Brilliant

I'm Now Withit

So I've started this because I've decided that trying to be clever, witty, and interesting occasionally in a newsletter isn't enough but instead I should have the added pressure of being clever, witty, and interesting several times a week. Kevin suggested I also should be profound as well. I'm thinking that profound sounds almost like profane...which seems much more do-able and like me.

We shall see.

So "Good night" my audience of potential millions. Rest knowing that I will be sleeping along with you and not attempting any prose in the dead of night. Not yet anyway.