Gratitude Archive

You may think this title has a negative connotation but that is not my intention.

We are at the beginning of a three-day weekend and I woke up this morning with the intention of being selfish and spending these three days doing whatever I want to do.  I am taking care of myself first this weekend.

I live an extremely busy lifestyle.  I am a business woman running two full-time business entities.  I am a grandmother that craves seeing my grandson so every minute I can squeeze in holding him I will.  I am on a board of directors that requires me to answer several emails a month and attend meetings.  I blog weekly and speak.  Lexie and I do podcast sessions, plan workshops and attend events promoting Grateful gratitude.  We are also keeping up with multiple social media platforms.   I am a devoted wife that takes care of our home.  Below are just a few things from last week.

Now stop and reread the things I listed in my life.  You probably are doing the exact same amount of things and more.  Be selfish and take time for you first.  When you take care of yourself your life will be more fulfilled and believe it or not you will have more time in the day.  You will be relaxed which will make you more production leaving you guilt free for being selfish.  Let’s remove the word selfish and replace it with giving.

It’s okay to be more giving to yourself.  Does that make you feel better and eager to give to yourself as opposed o being selfish?

When I give to myself it requires little thought.  I love to read, write and meditate so these go on my list for these next three days.  I love to pray and communicate with God and I am going to up my prayers during this time.  I love doing laundry, look out closets, bedding, family room blankets and anything else that is washable.  Let’s don’t forget my passion cooking and eating.  Let’s look at my indulgences more closely.

I have many friends that have recommended a book title to me many times over the summer.  It is called “Girl Wash Your Face” by Rachel Hollis.  When I read the intro to the book it just didn’t hit me in the face like many other books do.  But I look at the subtlety of it all to see more insight.  Many friends have said it is amazing and every time I am looking to read a new book I see someone post it on social media about this book or it pops up on Amazon when I login.  I get it!  I am going to start reading it this afternoon.  The good thing with a book is that if you aren’t enthralled with it in the first few chapters you can always put to down for another time.  I am selfishly going to read!

Writing has been a passion of mine since I was in the fourth grade.  My teacher, Mrs. Demullins had us write a short story on construction paper pages dividing the story up on eight pages.  We then took two pieces of cardboard and covered them with fabric scraps  The last step was to have her punch holes in the left side of the cover and we would lace up and tie off yarn to hold the book together.  This is one of my favorite childhood memories of school.  This was my first book.

I also had a teacher in 9th grade that taught us how to journal.  Miss Klatt was a very unique lady.  She had dark, curly hair that was very unruly and most times looked uncombed.  She had a mustache that needed waxing and talked very loudly.  I think I loved her so much because of her quirkiness.  She would always say to “pour your heart out in your journal and make it your best friend.”  This message has never left me.  Here I am selfishly writing my blog and delighting in giving back to myself.

Meditating is vital to my existence.  When I silence myself I can not only hear God’s whispers in my heart but I feel my blood pressure lower.  A beautiful calm comes over me and my heart beats contentedly.  I meditated this morning when I got up around 6am.  I love centering myself with my breath in the early morning.  It sets my intention for the day and I feel healthier.  I am selfishly going to meditate multiple times this long weekend.

After mediating I am more open to pray more effectively.  I am more calm and I can put my words together more completely in prayer.  I can really focus on asking God for His guidance and strength with issues I am facing.  I get so much more from sincere, honest words when praying.  I am personally more fulfilled.  I have two alarms on my phone to remind me to stop my day and thank God for all His blessing through prayer.

On a lighter note I do love to do laundry.  I love sorting clothes, adding nice smelling detergent and most of all folding or hanging up clothes.  I would do laundry for the world if I had it in me.  I think I really like doing the laundry is because it represents becoming clean again.  I think in my life I constantly need cleansed.  It may be because I pass judgement on someone or maybe waste time.  The laundry gets soiled throughout the week in many ways.  I spill on myself when I eat most days. Our cats lay on our blankets in the family room and get them covered in hair.  I inserted a picture of our cats on one of the blankets below.

I feel so satisfied to toss things in the washer, have them rotated around by the agitator and have them come out clean.  I also relate this to attending church.  I walk in each Sunday feeling a bit soiled.  I listen to our amazing preachers speak (rotating my mind like the washer’s agitator) and then walking out of church brighter and cleaner.  Everything is getting washed this weekend including my soul.

I am going to cook meals for the week on this long weekend.  I have a relationship with food that it becomes my best friend when I am stressed.  Yes, I am the dreaded stress eater.  I have to constantly do a reality check before I put something in my mouth.  Below is a picture of me just two and a half years ago.  I was hovering near 200 pounds and was far from healthy.

I got to this extra weight by stress eating and bingeing on food.  My biggest fault was eating after my family had gone to bed.  They didn’t know I was consuming around 1,000 calories in my late night binges.  I now only eat 1,200 calories a day to put that in perspective.

When I become selfish or giving to myself in the kitchen I can prepare healthy snacks and meals to have ready when I get home from a busy day of constant running.  I am tired and hungry when I get home and this opens me up for overeating or snacking before dinner.  When I go to the freezer to start dinner there are all my healthy meals looking back at me.

Now you may not think this is selfish but it is because I prepare meals I like and my husband always graciously eats them even though I know some are not his favorite.  You see I substitute all high fat cheese with low-fat cheeses which don’t melt very well.  I also use spray butter instead of full fat butter which compromises on flavor.  I have to be selfish when I do this because I can’t go back to that unhealthy overweight person.  I can’t serve others effectively when I am in that place.

I really hope that you strongly consider being selfish (or giving to yourself if you like that better) soon.  You whole life and existance relies on you taking care of you first.  Turn to God and say, “Lord I am going to take care of myself and let you guide me in giving to me so I can be the best I can be to serve others.”  God would love to hear you say these words.  You will be better for yourself, your family and the world around you if you just be a little selfish today.

Blessing to you!

My gratitude & love-LoLo

1 Corinthians 3:16, NIV Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst?

Once I was approached with a job offer.  A job that was very prestigious and paid what I thought was a lot of money.  I was a single mom at the time and it would increase my pay to three times what I was making at the time.  I was relocating and needed to have a great job with benefits since I was a single mom.  The job provided everything I needed so I accepted it.

Shortly after I moved to Dallas and started my new position I soon realized my new bosses hadn’t really described the job accurately in my interview.  The job was originally presented to me as a hospital manager running the day-to-day operations of a veterinary hospital.  I had eighteen years of experience and this would be a breeze for me.  I knew every aspect of making a veterinary hospital profitable and efficient, just as they had asked.

At the end of the first week, the owners met with me and handed me a laundry list of things I was to get done in the first three months of my employment.  I will never forget that list.

1. Hire a new doctor that had the funds to buy out the current owner so he could retire.
2. Fire and replace all seventeen employees that were currently employed. Those employees had been at this practice from one to fifteen years.
3. Rebuild the computer system to move from Macs to PCs and train the whole staff.
4. Write and implement a new employee handbook so it would make it easier to fire employees without paying unemployment benefits.
5. This one was a doosey.  Take the practice from $1.2 million to $2 million.  This one they gave me six months to complete.

Now looking at this list I knew this was an impossible feat but I needed the money and benefits.

In my heart I was not happy with this position.  I would be putting many loyal employees out of work.  One employee had been there fifteen years and hugged me on my first day saying, “I am so glad you are here.  You are an angel to us to help the practice rebuild.”

The owners wanted to save on payroll so they wanted me to document every infraction so they could remove employees and hire new employees at a lower pay grade.  They wanted the new handbook so detailed that almost every thing employees did would fall under an infraction.  Three infractions and they were dismissed.  They even sent me to a two-day seminar to learn the employment laws inside and out to beat any unemployment filings.

I do have to say that probably half of their staff did need to be removed legally because I saw on premise drug use, medication shortages, malpractice and cash shortages.  I didn’t have an issue relocating these employees to the parking lot legally.  The ones that were good sound employees were the ones I lost sleep over.

There was a lady that had been with the client for years that drove 45 miles every morning to be at work to open the clinic, fire up all the computer, set the surgery suites for the daily surgeries and walked and fed every animal in house.  She was the highest paid employee but in my eyes the most valuable.  Her employee record was impeccable but she cost them too much in payroll.  I am happy to say I fought to keep her on staff and the owners gave me this one concession.

Every  week we would have an owners’ meeting.  I guess I should tell you that the only people in attendance was myself and the doctor that hired me and his wife.  The meetings were at their house and each time we met there would be a new list of which employees had limited amount of time left, costs they wanted cut and updates on the process of hiring doctors that were creditworthy for over two million dollars to buy out the practice.

Before taking the job I was around 155 pounds and was fit.  I noticed as I worked this job I began stress eating and adding weight rapidly.  I couldn’t sleep, my skin looked dull and my health was not optimal.  Wine became a huge part of my nightly ritual to cope.

At the end of three months I was evaluated on what I had completed.  I had found a credit worthy doctor and employed her.  I had 7 of the seventeen employees legal fired without unemployment benefits paid and new employees hired.  I replace all 11 computers in the hospital and installed remote access at the owners home and on my computer to be able to work all hours of the night.  Revenue was up  $150,000 (this was not hard when charges were figured correctly and no more in house charge accounts were allowed.  I thought I was doing a remarkable job even though I was miserable.

My evaluation went well and I received a raise.  I knew I would never last the eighteen months I was contracted for but I was determined to provide for myself and my daughter.

I continued working for another twelve months when I finally had all I could take.  Everyday was a day of executing employees, squeezing budgets tighter, sitting in meetings that produced no good outcome.  I felt like I was under the power of the enemy and was losing all my values and work ethic.  I called the owners and requested a meeting.  I had to give my letter of resignation.  I couldn’t live with myself anymore and was unhappy with personal compromises I was allowing to happen.

I offered to stay on through the terms of the contract and to hire a qualified replacement for my position.  I was told I could stay two weeks and receive a severance check plus three months Cobra insurance.  I agreed.

It was my last week and the owners told me my replacement was starting that day.  She was a highly qualified hospital manager from one of the local emergency clinics.  I decided I would go out on a high note and help her the best I could to acclimate her in one week’s time.  I lasted the day with her!

She arrive at the clinic with quite an attitude of entitlement.  She wanted nothing to do with me or anything I could help her with.  I grinned and smiled all day watching the clock for quitting time.  I wanted to walk out that door for the last time.

During that last day I went to one of the private offices upstairs and prayed.  I asked God to please give me tolerance with this person and allow me to grow stronger through the experience of the day.  Lord please guide me to where I need to be and cleanse me of all the blood on my hands from this job.  Make me new again and forgive my sins.

After walking out the door and heading home I felt the warm sunshine on me through my sunroof.  My shoulders felt lighter and I felt taller.  My heart still hurt from fifteen months of focusing only on profits and money.  I was not proud of my work even though I did and succeeded in what was asked of me.

I learned so much about greed and life at this position.  I took this job for the money.  I was blinded by the all mighty dollar and not what God would have me do.  I turned my back on God because I was ashamed of my work.  Every dollar I spent from my paycheck left me empty.  There was no gratification because there was no God.  I let Him down and myself down.

The wonderful thing about God is He forgives us immediately and forget our indiscretions.  I am sure He expects us to learn from our mistakes and never fall prey to that temptation again.  I must please Him by allowing Him to forgive and forget and make me whole again and start new.

I will never work for anyone before I work for God.  He knows my path in life and He rewards those that put Him as the center of their lives.  I know with all my hard work even if the paycheck is small I doing what God wants and good things will come to me.

If you are working in a position that leaves your heart empty and doesn’t put God first then I pray for you to feel God’s touch and be healed.  He has a plan and path for you.  Just trust and all with be fine.  Serving others in God’s name will leave you fulfilled even if it just doing a job that you are kind to others.  God just wants us to love one another and be kind.

I pray for each of you reading this every day to feel God’s love for you.

peace, love and my gratitude for you, LoLo

“When you go through deep waters I will be with you.”  Isaiah 43:2

In the last 6 months I have learned and lived this bible verse.

Matthew 6:33 “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.”

The message is simple, always put God and His will first and you will be rewarded.  I have had so many examples of this.  Clear, obvious examples.

When I decided to create Grateful gratitude to begin a simple blog post about how I practice gratitude with recognizing God’s love for me I have daily seen my life and business explode.  This is all due to God’s love for me and His blessings he is bestowing on me.

Since starting Grateful gratitude my health has been healed, our platform to talk about God and His love for us has gone from one platform to nine in less than 6 months.  One little blog on March 12th has led us to weekly ten minute podcasts, Facebook and Instagram posting, public speaking engagements, workshops for women, teen girls and mini girls between 8 and 11 years old, a YouTube channel and now a book in the Kindle Store.

God is the only reason we are blessed and attained  such success in a short period of time.  We pray every day for God to show us His plan for us, to put the correct words in our mouths to share His word and to help and serve others through His will.  Everyday I see His clear guidance.

For example, the other day I was at a networking meeting and out of blue I felt Him guiding me to organize a holiday event.  He was strong and clear.  He said.  Do an event that will bring people together  to become aware of Grateful gratitude and the work we are doing in His name.  Bring together faithbased vendors to sell holiday items to kick off the holiday season.  Find two charities to benefit from this event.  Incorporate your soapstone hearts you give others to anchor themselves through practicing gratitude.  Do live remotes on Facebook during the event to raise more awareness.  You must use the hearts!  You must bring good to those who are suffering.

Anytime I feel that Divine inspiration it always is so clear and powerful.  It causes me to stop absolutely everything and focus on the task God has given me.  I become absorbed in the project and every detail flows to me in a bright light from the heavens.

This event will be called Hearts for the Holidays.  We will focus on raising money to buy 100 soapstone hearts that have been carved in Kenya and engraved with the words “God’s Love”.  One of our groups supports families that have a child with pediatric solid tumor cancer.  They do family events to help Families get their minds off the treatments, hospital stays, pain and tears.  They also provide gas cards to the families to help them buy gas for all the doctor’s appointments or hospital trips.  We intend to give a heart to each family member so they can all anchor to God’s love and continue their faith during this difficult time.

We have also chosen a charity who’s mission is to encourage and empower individuals with intellectual and developmental disablilities to compete for their place in society through employment and volunteering. We want to also give each of these “unique friends” as the founder calls these beautiful people a heart to hold and remind them how much God loves them.  Though these unique friends don’t have the day-to-day stress we thrust upon ourselves they do need to associate God’s love to their own lives.

When I went to bed this past Wednesday night I had no idea what God was going to present to me on the next morning.  The inspiration hit me at 8:30 am and by 11:00 the whole event was outlined and framed.  Everyone we approached regarding participating in the event said yes immediately and I felt God’s touch with each yes answer. Only God could inspire me to reach out to the beautiful faith-based people who would make this event happen.

You know I have always heard that God doesn’t call on the equipped, He equips the ones He calls.  I feel this so powerfully in my life.  Within 2 1/2 hours one morning He showed me how to touch at least 100 people by holding a two-hour event before the holidays.  He equipped me with the inspiration, the people who would be supportive and focus to get everything arranged with my daughter and business partner, Lexie.

He left me trusting that all would be fine.

Lexie and I anchor to our gratitude hearts every day.  They keep us grounded and secure in God’s love for us.  We hold the heart knowing God is protecting us and blessing us with an incredible ministry.  We feel Him so closely to us when we walk the path He has designed for us.  We feel him touch our thoughts and help us speak our words.  We give a heart to those that have touched us personally or may be suffering and needs the constant reminder they are loved.  When they hold their heart they can be comforted.

I am sure many of you are inspired by what God whispers to your heart.  You are understanding and fulfilling His plan for your life as you read this.

I am also sure there are many of you seeking and trying to find that whisper and that plan for your life.  You may be struggling or confused.  Know that God is always with you and all you have to do is release everything to Him and worry no more.  The sooner you can release the sooner you will feel more at peace.  Release that feeling that you have to be in charge and control every situation will give you freedom.  When I surrender to God my anxiety diminishes, my health improves, more income comes my way and my soul feels content.

Please take this one piece of advise from me.  Sit quietly and ask God to handle every situation in your life.  Stop controlling your spouse and children.  Stop trying to work harder to get a promotion.  Give up control of everything that is causing you stress and worry.  Give it to God and your life will immediately improve.  You can sit back and allow God to fulfill His plan for you.  Trust me on this.

Before you fall asleep tonight.  Quietly lay in your bed, hands folded, eyes shut and sincerely say to God, “Heavenly Father, I know you have everything planned for my life.  I am surrendering all control to You.  I am comforted that you are handling things for me.  I will worry no more.”

Say it multiple times and feel it in your heart.  I promise God hears all of us and He will put you on His path and you will be amazed at the awesome things He will do for you.

I pray for each of you every day won’t you join me in praying for you too?

My love, peace & gratitude always, LoLo