It's the Little Things

It’s the Little Things
I woke this morning after a very restless night I will blame on my pastor next time I see him. I had one of those nights where nightmares haunted me, must have had something to do with the sermon yesterday, I am sure it did. However, it was also a good thing, for good sermons that have us restless and later pouring our hearts out to God, also have us thinking about whom and what really matter. So after I shook off the bad dreams, I began to think of all the blessings in my life.

Today, I am off work and while I can blame the economy, for I am home without pay, I can also be thankful for the peace and quiet. I can be appreciative for time to pray for those on my heart today and the list is long. Time alone is so infrequent and very much a blessing when I get it, for time alone with God is precious. So I had a long talk with God today, well I did it in spurts and I imagine He and I will speak more as the day goes on.

I found myself smiling over several things and all before ten o’clock this morning. As I went about my chores, thanking God for this day at home, I found little messages of love everywhere. It is the little things that bring me to smile, to see God’s blessings everywhere, to see the love of family surrounding me. That for me is the true meaning of my life.

My husband, bless his heart, let me sleep in a bit, such a wonderful little thing to do, but so appreciated. That few extra moments of laying still as I listened to him get ready for work, for our son to shower and the dogs barking outside reminded me of all I have in this world. What joy my heart did sing! As they both left, my son not quite so cheerful, my husband wishing he too could be home, I wished them a good day and smiled.

My son surprised me with a clean room without my asking him. I was amazed and texted him, despite my dislike of using texting to communicate to thank him and tell him I loved him. He answered back with his own words of love and my heart swelled again with joy. Anyone who has a teenager must know that these words are very much sought after and coveted by a mother. I almost thought I would cry from the blessing of his text and may have to save them for awhile.

There are countless little things in our day to be thankful for, many that we hardly notice in the hustle and bustle of our days. Some days we are so frustrated, so full of ourselves we don’t take the time to pause and give thanks or notice. It really doesn’t take much to make me happy, I am sure my family would think differently but if they really knew my heart, read my words today they would know me.

Today I had the joy of calling my grandchildren before their first day of school and wishing them a great day, listening to their voices made my day a little better. I stood out on our deck in the chilly morning air as I spoke with them picking tiny red cherry tomatoes, the kind I know my granddaughter so loves and breathed in the morning air. I took in the view of God’s handiwork in the cotton candy clouded sky above and watched as He painted streaks of pink across the horizon with the rising sun. What beauty in the day! I might have missed this had I not been off work and truly opened my eyes.

Any day can be turned around, no matter how bad it seems if only we would stop and see the little things that truly make our lives big. I could have gotten very frustrated today as my well laid plans to stay in P.J.’s and relax were set aside by calls from work asking me to help out. I made the calls, ran my errands and along the way ran into some very friendly people who offered me great customer service. It was the little way they did their job that made me happy to do mine from home today.

So many things turned my day into a day of beauty, too numerous to list here. I nested something I don’t get to do too often. I even managed to cook my family a good old fashioned meal instead of calling for pizza. It felt good to do this out of love for them. I enjoyed the many little things I did today and took joy in my life. I found it was all in opening my eyes and my heart; it was adjusting my attitude and praising God for the day. I pray I have many more days like today. When I see my pastor again on Sunday, I will share this story with him and how my restless night he hoped for lead me to pray for those loved ones and count the many little things in my life to be grateful for once again.

Teresa Gale
8/31/09

Bring Back the Good Ole Days

Bring Back the Good Ole Days


I am sitting here on a Sunday morning frustrated. This is not a good way to start a Sunday, a day in which I love, a family day, a day where I normally start with the Word of God. I should be full of praise, peace, goodwill towards man and getting ready to shower and dress for Sunday Worship. Instead, my blood pressure is steaming and I am contemplating a complaint letter to the world.

What have we done? Have we gone completely insane? Or am I just so bogged down by a hundred different passwords, user-names, secret codes that my mind can’t hold any more. As soon as I have them stored in the memory banks of my already over loaded head, “times up” the bell rings, change it. I need a password just to log into my home computer that is to keep sticky fingers and teens from crashing my coveted PC. At work, I have a password to open up, a password to get to the server, a different password to get to my work email and a password to get into our work station to begin to log in sales orders. Hard as I try to keep them all the same, every 90 days give or take, I have to change them.

I am swamped, over-loaded with passwords, even on my cell phone and work phone to pick up messages. On occassion I keep track by keeping a notebook filled with the many different passwords but am constantly forgetting where I put it or not updating it enough to keep the score. What is a person supposed to do? How do you keep track of all the numbers, names and secret knocks in your life?

Modern technology is supposed to make our life easy right? Right? We have email, cell phones, instant messenger, texting, Face Book, Twitter, Digital cameras and endless other ways to keep our loved ones and friends up to date. Yet we still have no time, we still cannot manage to stay in touch, we are too busy, too tired, too on the go to sit still long enough to have a meaningful conversation.

Modern technology has even made it possible, for a small fee, to pay our bills online, that is if you can remember your password, username and personal secret code. Which is what brought me to write this blog today as I spent the better part of two hours trying to log into one account, reset my password only to find the computer generated blankety blank is still rejecting my user id.The very user id that they sent me the verfied changed password to, can you hear the growl in my words as I hammer on the keyboard?

Don’t get me started on Customer Support that is a whole other blog for a whole other day. Suffice it to say, there is no such thing as talking to a real live human being any more. It is no wonder we are out of touch with our world we live in, no wonder we have become a frustrated society that has no time for anything or anyone. No one has time for us; we have succumbed to being nothing more than a computer generated email, a text message sent to verify we exist.

Take me back to the good ole days when we actually sat down and spoke face to face to each other, or how about writing a real honest to God letter that had actual words in it. I have grown weary of trying to decipher short-handed words such as (lol, idk, jk). Take me back to real customer service served with a kind voice at the other end of the phone and real help, not a computer generated email that keeps circling me around and around, or an automated voice that is requesting I push number 1 or 2 when I really want to scream.

I miss telephone calls from friends on real phones, even though we don’t have a land-line anymore and have been won over by the world of cells. I miss taking walks and really listening to words being spoken, letters in my mailbox, the kind that is out on the street and not inside my electronic computer. I love holding a picture in my hand and seeing it up close. I miss the good old days where human contact made things so special.

As I take a deep breath, letting the steam out of my highly frustrated body and relax a moment, this is not to say I am ready to give up my computer, or Face Book, for I do enjoy the instant gratification of seeing all those I love that has linked me to them. I don’t Twitter as I had to draw the line somewhere, my texting is minimal and I do enjoy emails. I still long to return to simple times, I think we have really lost something. Something of great value in our society and I really worry about what our children and our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren will never get to experience. The value of human contact and slowing down to enjoy one another, which is what life is really all about.

Just a small piece of mind, thanks for listening.

Teresa Gale
8/29/09

Mine Alone

I struggle to make a poem out of my thoughts.

Words tumble and scrape inside my mind,
screaming to be cut loose from the chains that bind.

Yet, the perfectionist in me, bridles the poem,
Keeping it locked tight inside, binding it closer.

I pray, giving life to words.

Words escape to pen,
spilling out on paper, liquid thoughts.

These words, mine alone,
Breathe life onto what was once blank.

Letting go of fear that once held me prisoner

Do not look for meaning to your life by reading
My words, they are owned by me…alone.

Teresa Gale
8-16-09

Mommy Worries

It began as soon as I became pregnant, the worrying. I worried if the baby would be okay, if he/she would have all their fingers and toes, if the heart was forming right and would the delivery go well. Once I gave birth, many other things happened that couldn’t be reversed. First, I fell head over heels in love with this tiny being, my body changed in ways I never thought possible and my heart began to worry over every little thing and didn’t stop. I have found that being a mother has been one of the greatest rewards in my life and a role that has given me the most joy. It also has created endless worry.

Before I had children I never imagined that I would ever become a prisoner of worry. I thought I would raise a family, be the perfect mother, have the perfect children, watch them grow into perfect adults and scoot them along into their own lives. Wrong! Little did I know that from the moment they were born fear would grip me. I would begin to worry over real and imagined things. Things such as were they getting enough to eat to were they eating the right things. I wondered if they were too hot, too cold, could they fall out of bed and harm themselves, what kind of germs surrounded them and should we take a trip to the grocery store if one had the sniffles.

All kinds of worries started nagging me with the first child; others came along with the second child. Did she feel I loved her the same, enough, was I giving them both the attention they needed? On and on it went. I did learn to relax a little; I didn’t jump quite so much with the cries as I learned to discern which were the calls for attention and the ones for help. Still the worries stayed on and grew as the children grew. More children came along and with them new worries evolved, never enough time to devote to each child, not enough money, too many illnesses, juggles of a large family, my list of worries grew larger and larger.

Worry changed form; it became a dark monster as the children turned from toddlers to school age to teens. Let me tell you the teen age worry monster is one of the worst, the ugliest, and scariest of all the worries. Those dark days haunted me as I became the mother who had thought her sleepless nights of having a newborn were over, began again as soon as they turned into a teen. I sat by the phone or window now instead of by a crib or in a rocking chair. Now instead of holding my child to my chest and soothing them, I longed for someone to sooth my worry.

Many times, long past curfews, long before cell phones, I sat waiting, often pacing, always praying for their safe return, alternating between prayers and anger. I waited for the sound of car door slamming to announce the return home from a date, party or football game, safe and sound. It would be then I would realize I could breathe, let go of the air that had built up in my lungs as if holding it would mean they were alright.

Being a Mother meant that part of my job was to become a protector and I was fierce at it. I would allow no one to harm my children and was quick to take them out of harm’s way. What I found out, was that once the children were past the toddler stage, past the grade school age and sought independence they would not always be within my sight to protect. I had to rely on faith, faith that somehow I had given them enough to get them through the outside world to survive.

Part of being a mother is learning to let go and that is also the hardest most gut wrenching part of being a mother. I once watched a mother bird kick her baby out of a nest to fly, her wings fluttered just a moment as if she wanted to go after the baby, but she waited, she watched. The little bird at first fell, fluttered its wings, dropped to the point even I wanted to run beneath it to catch it and then suddenly, the little thing just caught on and flew. I watched as the wings caught the wind and soared back up into the nest next to mommy and chirped loudly. Each day the little bird ventured further and further away until one day it was gone.

I must trust in this that I can raise my children to do the same, to fly upon their own. They will flutter, they might even fall, but I have faith each will soar high, even higher than I could ever imagine. This however, does not mean my worry ends, I am sure of this very thing. For I will invent new worries, I am good at that. I once asked my father when do you stop worrying about your kids.

He looked over at me, his eyes crinkling up into a smile I knew so well. “How old are you?” he asked.

“I am fifty Dad.”

He chuckled softly, turning back to looking over the golden field in his back yard watching the sun dip low in the sky.

“I’ll let you know.”

Teresa Gale
August 9, 2009

Dancing in the Shadows

Dancing in the Shadows

Traveling home recently to a family reunion, I took a side trip down memory lane, to places only I could travel. Family reunions are meant to gather together all those living relatives and share good times, swap favorite tales, catch up on news and remember those who have passed on. Reunions, at least for me anyway, have a way of dredging up the haunting past.

The night before the reunion, my brother and I sat and shared some happy memories, went through some recent photos of a joint trip we took together to Israel and then he brought out a video made by a family member of our ancestors set to music. I sat mesmerized for over an hour and viewed familiar and unfamiliar faces as they rolled across the screen. I became spellbound by the photos of my grandparents in their youth, then their children and my mother.

I felt sad when it ended, I found myself hungry for more. Many of the people in the video, my mother included, have passed on. Death has gripped my family many times over and visions of this danced in the memory banks of my mind during the rest of the night. My brother and I were both reluctant to end the evening and go to bed, so we sat and shared memories until the wee hours of the morning.

During the long drive to the reunion the next day, I thought of who I would be seeing and those who were not be attending. Memories flitted in and out of head, as we talked during the ride, it had been a long time since I had come back home. It was an exercise I did often, dredging up the dead; not unlike scrapping open a scab and letting it bleed, very painful at times. It didn’t help much that our first stop of this trip would be to the cemetery to visit the graves of our mother, our brother and our sister.

I have faced many losses in my fifty-one years, and I have lived in the shadow of death and grief most of my life. My very first taste of loss would come before I was even born, a sister who died tragically at three weeks old. Her ghost would haunt me for years. I grew up in the shadow of who she might have been, the broken dreams of my parents, the child I could never be and she became the sister I never knew.

I mourned over her, cried over her and wondered why she had to die. Since I never knew her; she became this romantic figure in my head. I fantasized about my big sister since I was surrounded by little brothers who could never begin to understand the ways of a girl. I longed for someone to share clothes with, whisper things to and share a bedroom together with just as my two brothers did. I was the only girl, the outcast and grieving over a loss of something I could not even fathom.

Long into the night I would feel as if something were missing, often feeling empty and alone, I would curl myself into a ball and sob at the cruelty of the loss of my sister who would forever remain a mystery. Her ghost haunted me and I carried around the single picture taken of her. The black and white photo taken close up of her sweet angel face lying asleep in her coffin outlined her delicate features so fragile and porcelain. I carried this tiny snapshot until the edges showed signs of wear and tear from looking at it so often, imagining our fictional life together.

My sister’s death was only the first in a long series of losses I would face in my life, some came more sudden like my brother’s did when he was killed in an accident at the tender age of 19. Other’s came with calls from Doctor’s delivering news in robotic tones, some with a telegram, another came with a stranger stuttering the words out.

None of the instances are easy to deal with, whether you have time to prepare or if you never knew the person, grief is grief and it lingers like an unwelcome guest forever. It comes back without notice often, just when you think you have rushed out the door and slammed it shut, it comes knocking again, suitcases packed and ready to stay.

Death is never done, he will come knocking again. As I look around me, I don’t fear it, I cherish what I have, I treasure these moments with those people I love. I will grieve again, of this I am sure, but I do not want to waste a moment of this life in grief over things that do not matter or what I cannot control. I am just now beginning to learn this and trying to learn to let it go.

As I stood beside the tiny grave of my sister I didn’t feel that sense of loss for her anymore, for I knew she was in a good and happy place. As I looked down upon the graves of my mother, brother and others who have passed along I felt at peace. I will dance in their shadows.

Teresa Gale
8/1/09