Don’t worry, the wait is over. Here is the continuation of the lessons I learned while fundraising:
The daily practice is what counts
Did you know approximately 183 million people play the lottery at least once a year in the United States? [OneLotto, 2016] That is over 50% of the population! And in the UK about 70% of adults buy the lottery on a regular basis. [Lottoland, 2018] Those are staggering numbers. The point I am trying to make with these statistics is that we pretty much all have the same tendency to wish for a miraculous event. We all, at some point in our life, have hoped for the big miracle to save us or the big change to occur to make us happy. It is, of course, important to dream big but what is equally important is to have the commitment towards making the effort on a daily basis to bring these dreams into reality.
While fundraising it was often easy to dream of getting a big donation in order to reach your goal. That way you wouldn’t have to work as hard. Well no, that wasn’t the only motivation, for this sort of thinking. We also wanted to dream in this way to expand our believe that anything is possible! That even goals, seemingly beyond our ability and beyond reality, can be achieved. Again, though, it was crucial to couple huge goal setting with consistent, daily effort. It was this effort made every fundraising run, with each person, again and again, that brought you to your goal and allowed the “impossible” to happen.
A mentor of mine once explained this point to me in a really eye-opening way. He asked me if I had ever imagined myself as one of those heroes in the movies who jumps in the way of the oncoming bullet, or who dashes onto the street, at the risk of their life, to save the child from being hit by the speeding vehicle. I’m sure this image in some way has crossed every day-dreamer’s mind. He continued by explaining that that act of heroism does not come in a single moment. We won’t suddenly be bestowed with the immense courage and heart required. He told me bluntly that I, and most people, would freeze if any of those moments described above happened in real life. Because the ability to lay your life down for another comes from making it an ever-present thought in our mind. And you’ve got to make sacrificing for others a common action for yourself. Soldiers are a real-life example of this type of heroism, and it develops with this sort of mental and physical training everyday.
On a different note, he helped me to see that in order to be grateful and to feel proud of the life you lived at the end of your life, you need to start with today. Did you end your day feeling grateful and feeling proud of yourself? Did you act and speak in a way so that you could be? If you don’t do that everyday, how can you expect yourself to have this outlook and feeling, miraculously, when your time comes to pass on?
The potential that is in each day is unlocked by offering it up.
Everyday is a new start. However, it does feel sometimes like you are starting each day back at zero again, as if all the things you accomplished or the positive experiences you had in the past didn’t matter. Ultimately, though, that depends on you. It all boils down to this question: do you receive the lessons from yesterday- lessons that sometimes are born in the difficult experiences? Because only when we do that can we move forward into the new day on the foundation of the day before.
Believe me, many days of fundraising felt like I was starting at zero, and sometimes below zero. We would often do periods of fundraising that ranged anywhere from three weeks to six weeks. And I’m talking everyday. So, of course some days I woke up feeling like I was Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day”! Fortunately, we were guided to make the intentional decision each day to begin anew. And this process actually began the night before.
We had this common saying on GPA, “claim the victories”, which basically meant choosing to look at your experiences with a perspective to find what you can learn and what you can be grateful for. This is usually the complete opposite of our typical viewpoint, especially in less-than-favorable circumstances. Isn’t it true that we often remember much more of the negative things that happen in our day? But what a shame to throw out the whole basket because of a few bad apples! Especially if this has become our norm everyday. Practicing “claiming the victories” at the end of every run and, specifically, at the end of each day helped reshape our mind so that it became our new habit.
In the subtitle I included another phrase that may be new to you, “offering it up”. I would say that this is sort of the final step in the process that I described above but it includes a little more. What do we do if we try our best to see the silver lining but just can’t? It is completely understandable; sometimes there are days that sadly have really painful or bitter experiences. What do we do if we really messed up that day and don’t think you can forgive yourself? In either case to begin letting go and moving forward, the best thing that has been proven to work is to offer it up. This can be through sharing this to someone you really trust and who loves you, and/or sharing this in prayer. And you’ve got to be honest. Ideally if you can share this to someone older than you they can help you to digest this experience through their wisdom and through their sincere care for you.
Another way to look at the process of offering it up, is by imagining yourself as a cup. Throughout the day, we are filled. Filled with the experiences of that day. In order to be able to receive the following day we have to first empty ourselves. All the things we learned, all the things we were grateful for, and all those more sensitive things I mentioned in the paragraph above, we should offer up every night. And then we can truly begin the next day, fresh and one step ahead of the person we were the day before.
Through this practice, even if you didn’t have a past good day, or week, or even several years, you can start anew right now.
Realizing God’s heart
To imagine we could understand what it is like in the everyday life of God would seem to be pretty inconceivable, right? For one, you reading this now may not even believe that God is real. Secondly, how could we, mere humans, understand the feelings and thinking of the “omnipresent” and “omnipotent” God? Well, first we need to come to the understanding that God is our parent. He created us to be His children. Therefore, His goal from the beginning of time has been to love us, embrace us, allow us to experience the beauty and wonder of life, and to reach our fullest potential, to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect”. If we can recognize that and believe it to be true then, actually, we can see that everyone can come to understand the heart of God, when they become a parent. Because all the joy and excitement, and heartbreak and pain, that you can feel as a parent or caregiver is what God feels and has felt too.
Boom. It is incredibly powerful to know the depth of this point. And, even if you are not a parent, but just a young adult like me, you too can experience God’s heart. And He can definitely understand your heart, your feelings, and what you are specifically going through. Allow me to explain.
When fighting for a goal, especially one that is for the sake of something greater than yourself, you can make the connection of what it is like for God to have the goal of bringing peace and unity in this world, for our sake. When you try to love and care for someone who doesn’t fully appreciate it or misunderstands you, you can connect that experience with God because He definitely knows that feeling. That is what was so valuable about experiencing fundraising. Especially, when you’ve reached that point where you feel despair, where you feel that you’ll never improve, where you feel it just is too hard to genuinely greet another person, that is exactly the moment when we can be closest to God. There is such an incredible experience of love and security that can wash over you when you surrender and allow God into your heart at those moments. Then with time and practice, we can have this experience on a daily basis, moment by moment.
This for me was the most meaningful part of my fundraising experience. It would be convenient if we could meet God in the comfort of our homes doing only what is agreeable to us, but that is not the case. The same is true about developing ourselves. Knowing this has allowed me to be less afraid of being challenged. Allowed me to get up quicker after I have fallen down, made a mistake. If God, my Heavenly Parent, loves me unreservedly and will continue to do so for the rest of my life, what do I have to fear? And what could I do to give back?
***
The daily practice is what counts
Did you know approximately 183 million people play the lottery at least once a year in the United States? [OneLotto, 2016] That is over 50% of the population! And in the UK about 70% of adults buy the lottery on a regular basis. [Lottoland, 2018] Those are staggering numbers. The point I am trying to make with these statistics is that we pretty much all have the same tendency to wish for a miraculous event. We all, at some point in our life, have hoped for the big miracle to save us or the big change to occur to make us happy. It is, of course, important to dream big but what is equally important is to have the commitment towards making the effort on a daily basis to bring these dreams into reality.
While fundraising it was often easy to dream of getting a big donation in order to reach your goal. That way you wouldn’t have to work as hard. Well no, that wasn’t the only motivation, for this sort of thinking. We also wanted to dream in this way to expand our believe that anything is possible! That even goals, seemingly beyond our ability and beyond reality, can be achieved. Again, though, it was crucial to couple huge goal setting with consistent, daily effort. It was this effort made every fundraising run, with each person, again and again, that brought you to your goal and allowed the “impossible” to happen.
A mentor of mine once explained this point to me in a really eye-opening way. He asked me if I had ever imagined myself as one of those heroes in the movies who jumps in the way of the oncoming bullet, or who dashes onto the street, at the risk of their life, to save the child from being hit by the speeding vehicle. I’m sure this image in some way has crossed every day-dreamer’s mind. He continued by explaining that that act of heroism does not come in a single moment. We won’t suddenly be bestowed with the immense courage and heart required. He told me bluntly that I, and most people, would freeze if any of those moments described above happened in real life. Because the ability to lay your life down for another comes from making it an ever-present thought in our mind. And you’ve got to make sacrificing for others a common action for yourself. Soldiers are a real-life example of this type of heroism, and it develops with this sort of mental and physical training everyday.
On a different note, he helped me to see that in order to be grateful and to feel proud of the life you lived at the end of your life, you need to start with today. Did you end your day feeling grateful and feeling proud of yourself? Did you act and speak in a way so that you could be? If you don’t do that everyday, how can you expect yourself to have this outlook and feeling, miraculously, when your time comes to pass on?
The potential that is in each day is unlocked by offering it up.
Everyday is a new start. However, it does feel sometimes like you are starting each day back at zero again, as if all the things you accomplished or the positive experiences you had in the past didn’t matter. Ultimately, though, that depends on you. It all boils down to this question: do you receive the lessons from yesterday- lessons that sometimes are born in the difficult experiences? Because only when we do that can we move forward into the new day on the foundation of the day before.
Believe me, many days of fundraising felt like I was starting at zero, and sometimes below zero. We would often do periods of fundraising that ranged anywhere from three weeks to six weeks. And I’m talking everyday. So, of course some days I woke up feeling like I was Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day”! Fortunately, we were guided to make the intentional decision each day to begin anew. And this process actually began the night before.
We had this common saying on GPA, “claim the victories”, which basically meant choosing to look at your experiences with a perspective to find what you can learn and what you can be grateful for. This is usually the complete opposite of our typical viewpoint, especially in less-than-favorable circumstances. Isn’t it true that we often remember much more of the negative things that happen in our day? But what a shame to throw out the whole basket because of a few bad apples! Especially if this has become our norm everyday. Practicing “claiming the victories” at the end of every run and, specifically, at the end of each day helped reshape our mind so that it became our new habit.
In the subtitle I included another phrase that may be new to you, “offering it up”. I would say that this is sort of the final step in the process that I described above but it includes a little more. What do we do if we try our best to see the silver lining but just can’t? It is completely understandable; sometimes there are days that sadly have really painful or bitter experiences. What do we do if we really messed up that day and don’t think you can forgive yourself? In either case to begin letting go and moving forward, the best thing that has been proven to work is to offer it up. This can be through sharing this to someone you really trust and who loves you, and/or sharing this in prayer. And you’ve got to be honest. Ideally if you can share this to someone older than you they can help you to digest this experience through their wisdom and through their sincere care for you.
Another way to look at the process of offering it up, is by imagining yourself as a cup. Throughout the day, we are filled. Filled with the experiences of that day. In order to be able to receive the following day we have to first empty ourselves. All the things we learned, all the things we were grateful for, and all those more sensitive things I mentioned in the paragraph above, we should offer up every night. And then we can truly begin the next day, fresh and one step ahead of the person we were the day before.
Through this practice, even if you didn’t have a past good day, or week, or even several years, you can start anew right now.
Realizing God’s heart
To imagine we could understand what it is like in the everyday life of God would seem to be pretty inconceivable, right? For one, you reading this now may not even believe that God is real. Secondly, how could we, mere humans, understand the feelings and thinking of the “omnipresent” and “omnipotent” God? Well, first we need to come to the understanding that God is our parent. He created us to be His children. Therefore, His goal from the beginning of time has been to love us, embrace us, allow us to experience the beauty and wonder of life, and to reach our fullest potential, to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect”. If we can recognize that and believe it to be true then, actually, we can see that everyone can come to understand the heart of God, when they become a parent. Because all the joy and excitement, and heartbreak and pain, that you can feel as a parent or caregiver is what God feels and has felt too.
Boom. It is incredibly powerful to know the depth of this point. And, even if you are not a parent, but just a young adult like me, you too can experience God’s heart. And He can definitely understand your heart, your feelings, and what you are specifically going through. Allow me to explain.
When fighting for a goal, especially one that is for the sake of something greater than yourself, you can make the connection of what it is like for God to have the goal of bringing peace and unity in this world, for our sake. When you try to love and care for someone who doesn’t fully appreciate it or misunderstands you, you can connect that experience with God because He definitely knows that feeling. That is what was so valuable about experiencing fundraising. Especially, when you’ve reached that point where you feel despair, where you feel that you’ll never improve, where you feel it just is too hard to genuinely greet another person, that is exactly the moment when we can be closest to God. There is such an incredible experience of love and security that can wash over you when you surrender and allow God into your heart at those moments. Then with time and practice, we can have this experience on a daily basis, moment by moment.
This for me was the most meaningful part of my fundraising experience. It would be convenient if we could meet God in the comfort of our homes doing only what is agreeable to us, but that is not the case. The same is true about developing ourselves. Knowing this has allowed me to be less afraid of being challenged. Allowed me to get up quicker after I have fallen down, made a mistake. If God, my Heavenly Parent, loves me unreservedly and will continue to do so for the rest of my life, what do I have to fear? And what could I do to give back?
***
It has been a real pleasure to write these past two posts. It definitely got me feeling nostalgic! I am really grateful to all those who took part in creating these incredible experiences and who helped me to learn these things, and more- it’s true, I made a list on my phone and I’ve only managed to cover half of them. Some of them are simpler than others but they are all still very important. And the learning has continued to occur. Each day and through each new experience, I have the opportunity to learn something new and to improve myself. That is absolutely true for you too. Take delight in being the imperfect, growing person that you are. Enjoy the process, be hopeful and keep striving to become your best self. Thanks for reading!
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