I answered the phone last night and the voice on the other end said, "Sandy, I don't know what my God-given gifts are!"
For the next 2 1/2 hours I asked questions and Larry D-U-G deep in the buried recesses of his head - and heart, and exhausted we started laughing. We uncovered buried treasure!
It is amazing that we live in this body of ours - our temple - 24 hours a day, and we don't know who we are. If we don't know who we are, how can anyone else know us?
Our God-given gifts are the things that are so natural to us they are like breathing air. They are the things that give us energy; the hobbies that we spent most of our time on when we were growing up.
To some it may be that they loved - and still love to draw, paint, sing, be creative. An artist? An artist can express his/her creativity in many ways, not merely the obvious one, like having work in a gallery or being a musician on stage.
You played teacher when you were growing up? Maybe a consultant, speaker, pastor, or even...a teacher?
Take a piece of paper, make three columns, and put these headings at the top of each section:
Personality Traits, Hobbies, Experiences
Under each column, with no humility, but honesty and openness fill in the blanks. For example under the heading of Personality Traits I put: loves to laugh - loud laugh, great sense of humor, big smile, funny, love to read and learn, cherish girlfriends, too loud sometimes, love to talk, love people, love music, good writer, organized, etc. You get the picture. It took awhile to put the wall of humility down and jot down who I was: like saying that I am funny.
But I started to see who I was created to be: working with people, teaching, laughing, loving. Bingo! An inspirational speaker...teaching people to uncover their dreams.
Who are you? What are your God-given gifts?
s we hung up the phone Larry was humming; he was excited about exploring how toi use his gifts that have always been there and are breathing or the first time in a long time.
Dig deep inside of your soul...who were you born to be?

No Rainbow Without Rain

As I sit here at the computer I have the windows wide open and I am enjoying the soft sound of the steady rain as it hits the rooftops, rain gutters and the ground. The streets are silent as weary workers sit at their dinner tables or are plopped in front of the TV, trying to leave the stress of the day behind.
I peek out my window and I can't help but stare at my flowers - all over the yard - looking like a symphony of color - all separate by themselves but living in harmony.
I can't help but think how much we are like flowers. We start out as seed and we grow as we are watered. Many times in life we are not watered and we hesitate to get water for ourselves so we stagnate. And we lose our colors and our leaves and petals begin to droop.
We dread the rain in our lives but without it we would never see a rainbow, we would never get the growth that we crave.
I listen to the rain and I smile as I feel my spirit being watered.

Take a Brick Out of the Wall That Stops You From Your BIG Dream

We spend our lives building walls around ourselves,trying to get to know who we are and mixing more mortar while insulating ourselves from the people who are waiting outside for the gates of our hearts to open up.
Some of us take a long time to allow the walls to come down, but when they do...
I grew up in a family of 12 kids ("Cheaper by the dozen", my dad would chuckle, "It's a lie!")
I found that I developed into the person that my brothers and sisters perceived and created me to be. And somehow I lost myself along the way, bit by bit.
A year ago I started getting tired of looking at people over the top of the wall. So I began the journey of my lifetime with the first step and have been walking blindly down the path of my life.
I have the same life that so many others have lived: growing up without knowing that dreams can come true, marrying a man who showed up for the wedding but not for the marriage - and verbal abuse rears its ugly head after a couple of years and gets progressively worse - and I put up with it!, 30+ years of compulsive overeating and a daughter in an eating disorders clinic; not to mention DUI's running rampant among my siblings, and multiple eating disorders among my sisters. On top of all of that a gaggle of family members that live life among themselves and have ostracized me, the 'black sheep of the family', the 'different' one.
As I moved away from my siblings, divorced the man who beat up my esteem and 'thought' I had left the past behind. I started to find out who I am. Oh, not without pain.
And then I got it...everything I had gone through was to help others overcome their walls, fix the scrapes from their brick scrapes and teach them how to fall madly in love with themselves - the way that I learned to find, accept and love the woman that I was created to be.
Brick by brick, the pain subsided and my pain became my power. Once the lessons are extracted from experiences, the pain is gone, and you have a story, a lesson to pass on. Your life is used to make others lives better...and that makes every hurt worth the pain.
How many bricks do you have up? Are you tired of trying to see outside of the wall that you have built? Are you ready to break through your wall, one brick at a time, so yu can run free...wherever you want, being you, magnified?
What are you waiting for?