The Best Gift I Ever Received

Welcome to A New Life podcast with Pamela Jean, where it's all about empowering women to empower more women. Get ready, friends, to create a new life. And here is your host, Pamela Jean.

Hello, my friends, and welcome to this week's episode of A New Life podcast. I'm your host, Pamela Jean, and I'm so glad you're here with me today. I know your time is really valuable, and I'm grateful you're investing your precious time with me today. So I thank you so much. If you would do me a favor, please share my podcast. You're going to find it on Apple, Spotify or visit my website@pamela jeanneanewlife.com Spread the word, my friends. Don't keep such a good thing a secret because I know you know someone who needs to hear this topic. Today, I want to share with you something really, really special. And you know, we're just a couple of weeks away from Christmas, and I wanted to share with you some of my most precious gifts I've ever received in my lifetime. At the time of this episode's recording, it's the middle of December, and I just have to ask, how are you doing with the craziness of Christmas? Do you have your shopping finished? Are all the gifts wrapped and tucked neatly under your tree? How are you doing with all of that? I want to just give you a gentle reminder that the Christmas season is not meant to be stressful. It's not meant to be hard. It's not meant to be anything but absolute, pure joy wrapped around our Lord and Savior who's born to forgive our sins and take away the sins of our world. So if you find yourself stuck in that holiday Christmas craziness, I just want you to take a deep breath, breathe in, breathe out, and just be a gentle reminder that the Christmas season, this spirit of Christmas right now, today, is not meant to be stressful. But if I have to ask you what is your favorite? What is on your Christmas list? What is your favorite thing that you've ever received for Christmas? Well, I wanted to share a couple of things with you, and they're not what you think they're going to be. I didn't ask for the greatest gifts I've ever received. And these gifts were the things that I didn't even know that I needed, let alone the things that I wanted. So are you intrigued? A little bit. I hope so. The greatest gifts I have ever received in my lifetime have all come from tragedies, loss, and disappointment. The greatest gifts I've ever received in My lifetime were not the ones that came wrapped neatly and tucked under the tree with a pretty bow. They all came from tragedies, loss, and disappointments. So I'm going to start with this one first. Seventeen years ago in 2006, my dad died of kidney cancer. He was 58 years old. His cancer had been misdiagnosed after multiple times of going to the doctor. And once it was discovered, the tumor was actually at stage four. Stage four cancer. You might wonder, you might be wondering, how could such a loss, losing my dad, be a gift? Well, friends, the gift is what I learned from that loss. The gift is what I learned while watching someone I cared for deeply die from a horrific, horrific disease. I knew the meaning of a miracle to me. A miracle to me was that my father was going to be cured. That's a miracle. When I think about the miracles that I know have happened in our Bible, God raised people from the dead. Jesus healed people in ways. And to me, a miracle was my dad being cured. And he would still be here with me today in his 70s. But I realized a miracle is in the eye of the beholder. When speaking to the doctors about that, my doctor said, his doctor said, you experienced a miracle. Your dad lived years with stage four cancer. That is a miracle. That was an aha moment for me because to me, miracle was, you know, cured, cured, still living, still here today. Selfishly, that's what I wanted for me. But I understood that I already experienced a miracle and I didn't even know it. I learned through losing my dad the importance of letting go of anger and hurt from the past. Life is really, really short. I realized that I'm 55 years old. I turned 55 in August. And if I think about my dad's lifetime, his lifespan, I would only have three years to live. And if I'm only given three more years of life, I hope to live my best life every single day to the fullest. Filled with gratitude. And don't sweat the small stuff, understanding that as hard as that experience was losing my father, and I know many of you listening, you've experienced loss. You know what I'm talking about. And I've always thought I could be really bitter about that loss. I could be really bitter about the bad things that have happened to me. But the bitter isn't going to serve me. If I can take this bad experience of losing my father to make me a better human being, to look for the gifts and see the gifts, then that's one of the best gifts that I could ever have. Life is too short to be angry. Life is too short to hang onto hurts from the past. Life is too short to worry about what everybody else thinks of you. Just stop for a second and think about what were some of the best gifts and lessons learned that you've received because of tragedies and loss and disappointments. Because I'm sure you have things as well that if something bad hadn't, if you hadn't lost your job five years ago, you wouldn't have started your business. And now you have this amazing, incredible business and losing your job was the push that you needed to start that new business. Those are the types of gifts that I'm talking about. And I would love it if you would really start thinking about the hardest times that you've experienced in your life and sift through those hard times and find the diamonds that are in that rough. Because the diamonds are there. I promise you they're there. There's a silver lining through every single thing that you've experienced. My next gift that I want to share with you is being bullied in school. I will be honest. At the time, this was the absolute worst. I didn't want to go to school. I wanted to be invisible every day. I was self conscious about everything about me. So self conscious. I was stressed about what to wear to school because I would get ridiculed for what I wore. If you listened to last week's podc, when Taylor Swift said, you know, they said that I'm singing way too many songs about a breakup song. So I stopped and sang more about friends. Well, then people didn't like that about her either. You can't be a country singer anymore, so you switch here. So no matter what she did, it was never right for everybody. I felt that way in high school. Anything I did, it was never right. And someone always found something to ridicule me for. And it was really difficult. Fortunately or unfortunately, however you look at that, I carried so many insecurities for many, many years. I carried them way, way too much for way too long and allowed people to have power over me because I was afraid of what people thought of me. I invested in the opinions of others while ignoring, deep down, what I knew to be true. Deep down I knew, and I know today, so grateful that I'm a good person. I know that I was criticized for being a goody two shoes. How is that wrong? By doing the right thing, not wanting to party and get in trouble. How is that wrong? But I was ridiculed for that. How is that bad? I Don't understand. But the gift through that experience of not want. I didn't want to go to school. I wanted to graduate early. I just wanted to be gone and done. But the gift from that experience is that I learned pure empathy. I learned empathy. And I have the ability to see the wounds of others that most people don't see. I can see the wounds of other people so transparently. Transparently. And that is just an awesome, awesome gift that I have. That experience has made me so much better at my job. The ability to coach at a deeper level, whether we're doing mindset work or confidence boosting or strategizing for business success or sales strategies, this has been such a great gift for me. My intuition is stellar. I sense what many do not sense. And for all of those reasons, I am grateful for the experience of being bullied. Now, do I want to go back and live that over again? Of course not. No. Of course not. But I also have the confidence and the emotional maturity to be able to look at every single circumstance, every single thing that I'm faced with, whether it's a complication in a relationship or. Or complication with, you know, just whatever it is, and look for the silver lining every single time. Okay, God, what am I supposed to learn from this? I know you're not torturing me. I know I'm not being reprimanded here. I am meant to learn something from all of the hard times in life. If you're faced with a life challenge and every time are saying, why me? Why does this happen to me? Why is it always me? Why not start saying and asking this question, why not me? Why not me? Immediately seek the purpose. Dig out the lesson. You know, sometimes things in our lives have to be burned completely to the ground for us to see the pathway to rebuild. And if it doesn't get burned to the ground, we don't take the time or make the effort to grow in a way that we're meant to grow. The message you need to learn is that as you're growing, as you're elevating yourself into the missional person that you're meant to be, it's going to be messy. It truly is. The message is in the mess. And remember, growth is really, really hard. If it was easy, nobody would grow. Because think about it. If life is going smoothly, what are you learning? How are you growing and stretching yourself? You're not. And I wouldn't be either. That's just human nature. But when we're faced with hard times, then we're Faced with truth, we're faced with challenge. We're faced with, okay, how am I supposed to learn? Where am I supposed to go with this? Growth is painful. That's why it's called growing pains. Now without pain, the reality is we're not going to choose the opportunity to grow, so we have to do that. I want to give you a little bit of a challenge. I would encourage you that if right now, today, you are going through a really, really hard time, and I know many people are. We're just a couple of weeks away from Christmas. This can be such a stressful time, whether it's financial or relational. Maybe this is the first year that you're having Christmas without a loved one. This is the first year that you have an empty place at the table. That's hard, man. That's hard. But instead of shutting down and shutting out the world, what if you thought of a creative way to celebrate the person that you're missing? What if you made that person's favorite dessert and you cut a slice of that cake or that pie or those. Made a pile of cookies and sat those at the empty place in their honor? Or maybe if it's your mother and she loved a certain type of flower, why don't you just decorate the whole table or the whole house with your mother's favorite flowers so you know she's there with you in spirit and that you're thinking of her, you have two options. One option is to be sad and wish the day away and pretend it's not happening. Or you could find a way to honor that loved one that's not there with you. That really is a choice. Sometimes we choose to stay miserable. We choose to stay sad. We choose to stay stuck friends. I know that. I know what it's like. The first Christmas without my father was dead difficult. It's still difficult. And it's been over 17 years ago. It'll be 18 years next in May, and it's still hard. I still miss him, but I can either honor him or I can be sad for me and ruin the whole day for everybody, because I'm sad. So just think about that. Think about. My challenge for you is to write down some of those really, really hard times in your life, and maybe you're going through them right now and start digging and sifting and looking for that silver lining. Look for that golden nugget, because it is there. It really is there. And the next conflict that you come up against, the next hard time that you experience, instead of going, oh, great, here we go again. It's happening again. Just say, okay, what am I going to learn from this? How do I need to be stretched? Because you're going to be stretched in ways that you didn't even know you needed to be stretched in, and you just don't know what the purpose is going to be behind it and how it's going to evolve into something really, really beautiful in your life. My friends, just another reminder. Christmas is a couple weeks away. It's not meant to be stressful. It's not meant to be a season that you're wishing it away. Push the pause button. Just push pause on your life. Push pause on all the chaos and breathe in the spirit of this time of year and how important and impactful it is. Take some time to think about the ultimate gifts that you've received, the gifts that have shaped and molded you into the person that you are today. I know they might be hard times to go back and remember and retrace, but if you can learn your lesson and from that messy time, I promise you it will serve you well. My friends, I really appreciate you being here with me today. I hope you have an amazing week and I'll see you right back here next week. Take care.

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