[For the next few days we will feature some of the BEST ‘serious’ and
heart-touching Grif.Net messages from the Christmas Seasons of the past 16
years. May God bless YOU this Christmas week as you focus on what is
important in this life and eternity!]
My heart has been sick all weekend. Faces of 20 little children senselessly
slaughtered in a school and parents crying for one more time to give their
child a hug. Funerals of soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Memories of my own
Mom & Dad who thought “someday” about taking special trips and enjoying
life, only to have cancer cut off the future before most of the hoped-for
retirement dreams could come true.
A sweet lady wrote, “Too many people put off something that brings them joy
just because they haven’t thought about it, don’t have it on their
schedule, didn’t know it was coming or are too rigid to depart from their
routine.
I got to thinking one day about all those women on the Titanic who passed up
dessert at dinner that fateful night an effort to cut back. From then on,
I’ve tried to be a little more flexible.
How many women out there will eat at home because their husband didn’t
suggest going out to dinner until after something had been thawed? Does the
word “refrigeration” mean nothing to you?
How often have your kids dropped in to talk and sat in silence while you
watched Jeopardy or Matlock reruns on television?
I cannot count the times I called my sister and said, “How about going to
lunch in a half hour?” She would gasp and stammer, “I can’t. I have clothes
on the line. My hair is dirty. I wish I had known yesterday, I had a late
breakfast. It looks like rain. And my personal favorite: – “It’s Monday”.
She died a few years ago. We never did have lunch together.
Because Americans cram so much into their lives, we tend to schedule our
headaches. We live on a sparse diet of promises we make to ourselves when
all the conditions are perfect:
We’ll go back and visit the grandparents when we get Stevie toilet-trained.
We’ll entertain more once we replace the living-room carpet.
We’ll go on a second honeymoon when we get two more kids out of college.
Life has a way of accelerating as we get older. The days get shorter, and
the list of promises to ourselves gets longer. One morning, we awaken, and
all we have to show for our lives is a litany of “I’m going to,” “I plan on”
and “Someday, when things are settled down a bit.”
When anyone calls my ‘seize the day’ friend, she is open to adventure and
available for trips. She keeps an open mind on new ideas.
Her enthusiasm for life is contagious. You talk with her for five minutes,
and you’re ready to trade your bad feet for a pair of Rollerblades and skip
an elevator for a bungee cord.
My lips have not touched ice cream in 10 years. I love ice cream. It’s just
that I might as well apply it directly to my hips with a spatula and
eliminate the digestive process. The other day, I stopped the car and bought
a triple-decker. If my car had hit an iceberg on the way home, I would have
died happy.
Now, go on and have a nice day. Do something you WANT to . . . not something
on your SHOULD DO list.
If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make,
who would you call and what would you say?”
And what are you doing wasting time reading to the end of this Grif.Net?
~~
Dr Bob Griffin
[email protected] www.grif.net
“Jesus Knows Me, This I Love!”