Last week I spent a few days doing both speaking and mentoring session via video conferencing on Zoom with groups of students from multiple Universities across the country. During that time I was serving those students I wasn’t worrying about the pandemic we are facing, or the riots still going on, or the wildfires, or any other craziness or negativity in the world right now. I was only thinking about wanting to serve those students and help them to learn to excel in their own lives. And in that time I was serving them, I felt happy…
As I talked with my daughter today and she shared an experience she had while quarantined all alone in her apartment last week. She’d been feeling really down one particular day about her plight of being all alone when she felt prompted to start calling others who she knew may also be feeling alone to try and lift their spirits by letting them know she cared and missed them. As she did that she said she felt her sadness begin to dissipate and her happiness level increase.
These are terribly hard times we are all facing right now. The COVID pandemic is spreading like wildfire right now in while actual wildfires are raging in Utah as well. We’ve all experienced illness, death of friends or loved ones, separation from our families, anxiety, riots, financial stress, fear, isolation, uncertainty, earthquakes, and wildfires so far in 2020…we’ve all been bent to the point of near-breaking somedays…all of which makes it hard not to turn inward with worry and sorrow.
Several times last week I was reminded that feeling better inward takes turning more outward. The time we spend thinking and worrying about ourselves and our own lot, the worse we tend to feel. Whereas the time we spend serving and lifting others, the lighter our burdens are to bear. Not because our difficult circumstances have changed because they are very much the same…but because God blesses us with the extra strength to shoulder those burdens as we help others to shoulder theirs…
~Amy Rees Anderson (author of the book “What Awesome Looks Like: How To Excel in Business & Life” )
