In this Young@ Heart article and video, I wrote about how passionate we SHEs are and how it serves us well.
There is nothing more true than this statement: SHEs (Sidetracked Home Executives) are passionate people. It’s true. We are! I’ve never met a real SHE that isn’t. Can you imagine Flylady or Kelly as passionless? Not in a million years! Oh! and we like to use exclamation marks too! One of my longtime SHE friends LouAnn was one of my guinea pigs for my Weight Loss book, The Mouth Trap: the butt stops here!
She reported to me:
“Who knows, maybe my “passion” for eating is a package deal with my “passion” for other things in life—a passion I would never want to be without. Somehow, I need to trust in the wisdom and love of my Creator to know this was the perfect “problem” for me and be thankful for it. I will never quit trying to look my best and take these pounds off, but I’m going to quit pretending I can do so without suffering.
I cannot. So, I’ve decided to turn this suffering into a prayer for others who are facing something worse. My neighbor works at Ronald McDonald House and has no shortage of stories about suffering far worse than a weight problem. I don’t have a child going into surgery today—but somebody does. My transmission is working—but somebody’s just went out—on the freeway.
So for today, I’m going to think about how wonderful it will feel to wear my “skinny jeans” again and go fill up on steamed cauliflower. I’m starved and lunch is not for another two hours and that’s the pits. But, guess what else I get to do? I get to go hug my two healthy girls in the next room. Zero calories. I’ll take it.”
When LouAnn wrote that to me she was still counting calories and being hungry all the time. Since she’s followed me into the world of low-carb living, her suffering has diminished considerably. Now she can have that steamed cauliflower drenched in butter and covered with cheese! So much for suffering with hunger!
There is passion in organization
Back to passion, the theme of this article. When Peggy and I got organized we both had the fear that we would lose our passion. In Sidetracked Home Executives we said, “Sure we could be two of those perfectly organized women if we wanted to but did our families realize what we’d lose: our creativity, our spontaneity, our laughter, and our vitality? We saw ourselves moving from job to job with no emotion, stripped of our zest for living:
“Daddy, why is Mom so sad?”
“Don’t bother her, dear. She’s organized—that’s the price we must pay to have hot meals and clean clothes.”
No more would we consider our child’s request to tell him a story or read him a book as the most honored invitation we had ever received. HA! “Move aside, lad, I’m cleaning the groove in the patio door.”
Is THAT what they wanted? NEVER! Of course they didn’t want us to change.”
Well, when we got organized our passion came right along with it. It was our passion for being organized that prompted us to write Sidetracked Home Executives. Passion is God’s gift to us and we can never lose it. When we have strong devotion to family, friends and self we get to bask in the stuff of heaven. Yes, we’re not in heaven right now, we’re in the world with its suffering, but our passion for life can keep us above the fray.