So, I am fifty years old, and as I thought that just now, I realized I’m just a baby in all ways that matter. I’m just beginning to take my first steps in the areas of truth and open-heartedness. I’m just absorbing the fact that I have created the life I live now, and if I want differently, then I have to make it so. That I was gifted with certain abilities that were given to me to be shared with the world because we are all God’s voice. We are His painters, his writers, his sculptors, his healing hands, his psychologists, his chefs, his mothers of all children, his righters of all wrongs, his songs in the midst of every sorrow, his comforting arms to bring relief to a hurting world. I’m just a baby. I have so much to learn and do and change and watch bloom!

We are each a different expression of God himself. Just as no two poems or stories of mine are the same, neither are we exactly the same expression. But we are from the same heart. We are from the same mind, existing in one world to form a beautiful tapestry that can never be duplicated. If you do not offer your gift up to the world because of some crazy ass belief that it’s not good enough, then you short-change the world-you lessen the beauty of the tapestry of life, you die incomplete and cheat us of your beauty expressed from God and get to begin again another time and place. So you get to give again, but you’ve stolen your gift from us. The one that would have opened that heart, changed that thought pattern, eased the pain in that soul. Dammit, I’m pissed, because what you held back may have changed me!! How can you do that??

We spend entirely too much time pondering and pontificating on what we are not. Such bullshit. We ARE all that. And more. Every one of us. We each have purpose we were born to and gifts we were given, and we have NO STINKING RIGHT to hold those gifts from the world because of some ego-driven crap to make ourselves feel noble and humble, that we are not good enough, no one really wants to hear what we have to say, our offerings mean nothing to anyone…CRAP.

I will guess that most of us suffer from “little heart syndrome” a name I’ve given to those of us who are afraid to shine our light out there in the big, bad world. We minimize our importance, not realizing that we are calling our God gifts small and insignificant. I have a husband who is taking his years of experience to teach our future protectors to be safe as well as keep the public safe. He apologizes for his negative view when that view he has is used to prepare our future police to operate safely for their own benefit and the benefit of the public they protect. One of my best friends wants to stay at home and care for her family, but she can’t so she shines her creativity and light on me and the others who work for her. Another is building a new and gracious life after the loss of her spouse, letting herself bloom on the hard topsoil of that grief and loss. My son thinks he’s an average Joe, nondescript, unassuming, quiet. But he’s an amazing phenomenon of heart and logic and straight thinking. Open-hearted, open-minded, with a soul as big as the Grand Canyon. I have a friend who teaches yoga, and she has NO IDEA that she is a changer of lives, an initiator of tremendous change, a builder of souls, a transformer of lives. Jesus, people, you are such lights! Who you are illuminates the world you inhabit. You are a gift as is, and you all haven’t begun to tap into the wonder of you!

We all hide behind what we think we are perceived as…much lesser than the truth, lesser than our created capacity, lesser than the Universe created us to be. Shine, shine, shine people!! And in honor of your courage, I will also shine my light for all to see!