I witnessed a miracle this morning!
Choose Your Word for the Year
We think in words.
Our thoughts determine our actions, which guide our actions.
Therefore, the words we choose determine our lives.
At the beginning of each year, my wife and I sit down at a local coffee shop and we make plans for what we’d like the year to look like. At that meeting, we:
- Set our goals for the year
- Determine our priorities
- Set our intentions
- Picture what we’d do “if money were no object” (I can assure you I’d be writing this from a tropical climate if that came to be)
- Determine what we are releasing that served us well in the past but no longer fits (including grudges, resentments, habits, and material clutter)
What might be the most important item on our agenda is choosing a word for the year. Call it a theme if you wish.
In 2014, we chose “Prosperity.” In 2015, we picked “Abundance.”
This year we opted for “Gratitude,” a feeling or attitude in acknowledgment of a benefit that one has received or will receive.
Five Things to be Grateful for (That You Might Not Have Considered)
Look for a lot of MMMs in 2016 that deal with Gratitude and Forgiveness (but more about that next year).
In the interim, I am providing five things we can be grateful for that we might have thought about.
In no particular order:
National “Give a Compliment Day”
It’s national “Give a Compliment Day.”
Okay, I lied.
I am not familiar with any holiday by that name on any date but I figured it couldn’t hurt to make one, could it?
So, how do you celebrate it? [Read more…]
Driving Prosperity
Note: Over the last short while, I’ve received amazing feedback on my previous pieces about the path on which I find myself in rebuilding my faith and prosperity. I’m touched and humbled because, although I always aim to be transparent, these last few have been extremely personal and I was nervous about sharing. Your feedback has been reassuring; moreover I’m amazed by how many people feel the same. This column brings that journey to a stop sign — at least as far as things stand today. Thank you for coming along.
With that as backstory, we have two cars.
One was a 1997 Pontiac Sunfire; a low-end economy car with 122,000 miles. People oft-times are shocked when they hear I possess an 18-year-old auto with so few miles. They are thrown further back on their heels upon learning our second car, which is 19 years old, has merely 75,000 miles. (I joke that it still has its original tires.) What can I say? We walk a lot, and as you might remember, until a car hit me a few years ago, I rode my bike a great deal. In addition, we are loyal, not quick to discard that which is still usable.
Yet, driving to clients in a peeling grunting, clanking, banging automobile which wheezed and creaked more than a dilapidated, broken-down, gasping pipe organ not only gave me great concerns about safety, but — as vain as it may sound — didn’t fit the image I want to portray. Bottom line was I needed (and wanted) a new car. It was time. The problem is that in the last almost-two decades, the technology of cars has improved significantly. Yet, despite that, no one has figured out how to remove car payments. Sigh…