There is Bright to Be Seen: Story Three.

Today is a short story.

Just one moment last week.

One morning last week I walked into work, again trying to push past my tiredness and get the job done. I walked into the house and started getting the little girl I work with ready. After I put in her cochlear implant and hearing aid I went to say goodmorning to her…I bent over to her saying “hello” and sang her name to her over and over. I then watched her throw her head back with a big smile on her face that broke into laughter at the sound of my voice.  

             

   In a moment I was shaken back. 

    I love how her smile can do that.

There is Bright to Be Seen: Story Two.

  Last week one of my professors told me a story of when she was working with a little girl who had scoliosis so bad that her hip was permanently up at her ribs. The little girl could not say anything more than “yes and no”, so whenever the staff needed to know more than an answer to a yes or no question then she talked with a board. One night my Professor put the little girl to bed, but she kept hearing her stirring. She went in to see if she had forgotten something, and went through a list of things with her to see what she wanted…

“Do you need water?”
“No”

“Do you need to go to the bathroom?”
“No”
“But you want something?”

“Yes…”

“Another pillow?”
“No.”

And it continued on…finally she landed on what the little girl wanted; “her prayers.”

 So my professor went and got the little girls board and asked her what she wanted to pray for. 

"I want to thank God”  

“What do you want to thank God for?” my professor asked.


The little girl the then began to give her a list of everything imaginable from the home she lived in to rocks...

”Thank God for my mom, my dad, the sky, the home, the birds, the sun, the butterflies, the flowers…”

My prof said she learnt that day not to assume the quality of someone’s life.

The little girl was happy. She was thankful. She may have been in enormous physical pain; yet, she focused on all the little blessings in her life and couldn’t sleep until she thanked God for every single one of those little blessings. Again….Perspective. 

Thank you God for flowers in their intricate detailed beauty

Thank you God for placing a single tree in the middle of a field
& Thank you God for constantly reminding me these things are important to thank You for.

There is Bright to Be Seen

            It is said that your situation is unchangeable. You are where you are. The only thing that is changeable is your outlook; your perspective.

My dear Fiancé, bless his beautiful heart, the other night said to me (oh how I love these moments)...“Either you aren’t being fully real with me all the time or you are just the most joyous person…ever.” It got me thinking because I couldn’t immediately say which one was true. I began to analyze how I look at things and how I deal with the things around me. I was trying to see if I do hide those things that are hard to deal with or if I really am just simply content with them.
           I am not here to say which I figured out was true about myself; I am still not totally sure. It’s probably a balance in between the two, but that’s not what my goal in writing this was.

It was just that it got me thinking;
A positive perspective is one of the greatest virtues.

I see and work with people all the time that would seemingly have a nightmare of a life to those looking in. But I see moments of total bliss and true happiness ALL the time in them; even pure contentment.
So I decided for the next few days I would post a new story that has taught me about proper perspective. These moments seem to always come so timely when I have been working with people, I’ll feel a lack of peace or discontentment with something and then God gives me a holy slap in the face…

           The first story comes from when I recently had to look at the life of a middle aged man that was developmentally delayed and write a paper on his strengths for an assignment.
Something that stood out to me was this quote of his…“I like candles and lamps and light fixtures and sunshine and something bright to be seen in our world and street lights and everything.”

Something bright to be seen in our world. He may not have been able to do a lot of things for himself, he may never be able to do anything close to what we feel is a normal life, but he stopped in wonder at anything that had light and had a belief that there was something bright to be seen in our world.

Yesterday morning as I walked to work at five a.m. in the rain and dark, tired and cold and in a bad mood I suddenly had to stop and look at the Christmas lights on some of the houses. I smiled thinking of Carl and the joy he would have found in that moment.

I feel I am the luckiest person on earth for getting to be around people who have such an amazing perspective on things of life. It constantly shakes me awake to the beauty God has placed on Earth.

That beautiful perspective is in a moment with Geoff where we are watching Sharon, Lois and Bram on my laptop and he reaches over to hold my hand, or when I give him some yogurt and he spits out a “thank you” in between fits of giggles.

I think of the joy children find in bubbles and wish we could carry that throughout our life.

It’s all about focus.

Do you focus on the bad, the mundane, the ugly;

Or do you focus on the Beauty of God in the light fixture and the bubbles.

Jean Vanier once said......

“Can we reasonably have a dream, like Martin Luther King, of a world where people, whatever their race, religion, culture, abilities, or disabilities, whatever their education or economic situation, whatever their age or gender, can find a place and reveal their gifts? Can we hope for a society whose metaphor is not a pyramid but a body, and where each of us is a vital part in the harmony and function of the whole? I believe we can, because I believe that the aspiration for peace, communion, and universal love is greater and deeper in people than the need to win in the competition of life.”

Oh..this time of year again.

There is just something about this time of year;

Something that makes us feel like kids again

Something that almost allows us to believe in something magical

Something that allows half the world, whether they realize it or not, to celebrate the birth of our savior

It is such a beautiful time.