Tag Archives: Albert Lea Tribune

Thankful 365 Days Of The Year

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Grandpa thanksgivingSometimes we should express our gratitude for the small and simple things like the scent of the rain, the taste of your favorite food or the sound of a loved one’s voice.      — Joseph B. Wirthlin

There is always something to be grateful for even in the darkest of times. We may have to reach deep down into our soul to find it amidst the turmoil in our life, but when we do grasp it and hold onto it and keep it close, that glimmer of gratitude helps us get through our days.

I must admit I didn’t quite get it when many years ago Oprah encouraged everyone to start a gratitude journal. But, because Oprah said, I bought a gratitude journal and recorded the things I was grateful for every morning before I left my house to go to work. I would be lying to say it wasn’t a challenge to sit down each morning and take the time to be grateful. I found when I did my days hummed along a little better and my moods were more optimistic.

Through the challenges of life I would put aside my gratitude journal only to return to it months later or maybe a year later. I could look back through my gratitude journey and see where I had been. Off and on through the years I have kept a journal, but during the struggles and the dark times of my life it was harder to write so I would just grasp at words and things that I could find to be thankful for. And some days when I would sink into the abyss of life and busyness I could not find that tiny glimmer. When that happened I would pick up my journal and be reminded that I did have things in my life to be grateful for.

These days, since I don’t leave my house to go to work, I find it easier to start my morning with prayer and gratitude. I find if I miss a morning my day doesn’t always feel complete. I find also it is easier to keep it up because I have friends who I trade gratitude thoughts with each night through messaging, and I also have many friends who share their grateful moments online. It is easier to be grateful and have an optimistic attitude when you hang out with optimistic people. Gratitude changes lives.

This is the week we remember to be thankful. On Thanksgiving we give thanks for all we have.

This year has been a challenging year. There have been losses in our life of family, my brother-in-law Evan and friends. For a few months, funerals seemed to be the order of the week. Loss isn’t always about death. Loss can be health, divorce, friends moving, jobs lost, a way of life diminishing. Holidays can be challenging because of the loss that has happened in our lives throughout the year.

Our Thanksgiving tables may look different because of loved ones who no longer share our holiday because of death, divorce, distance. And on the day we are supposed to be thankful and excited about the holiday, we can’t help but mourn those who are not at our table. Families change, and the change is thought about as we sit down to be thankful for all we have.

My family is no different. We won’t all be here this Thanksgiving. I think back to my childhood and still miss my mother, father, grandmother and aunts and uncles and cousins. Some of my family will be celebrating elsewhere, and others who were here in the past will not be at my Thanksgiving table again because of life and relationship changes.

I used to have a hard time on holidays because of the changes, and I would ruin my Thanksgiving or Christmas by being sad. I chose to not do that anymore. Instead, I chose to be grateful and thankful for having these people in my life for whatever time I did.

I am grateful for those who will be here. I am grateful because I had holidays that I shared in the past with my family and my husband’s family. I am thankful for those people who were members of our family in the past. They will always be cherished. I am grateful for friends who have dined at my table.

Lives change, but this Thanksgiving I am grateful for what has been in the past and what will be in the future. I am grateful to have celebrated Thanksgivings past and present with those who have shared our lives.

In this topsy-turvy world I am grateful to have 365 days a year, not just Thanksgiving to be thankful for something big or small that makes our journey a little easier.

Happy Thanksgiving.

 

Funeral Directors and Pastors Need Hugs Too.

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Something About Nothing by Julie Seedorf

Published in the Albert Lea Tribune and Courier Sentinel week of Oct. 19.

Living in a small community, everyone knows what you are doing, sometimes before you know what you are doing yourself. That is not necessarily a bad problem to have. It also means in times of crisis the people of the community bond together to support each other.

Recently our community has experienced many deaths in a short span of time. Some were expected and others have knocked us to our knees. We grieve, we share memories and we attend funerals to show respect for those who died and to support their families.

We turn to the same places for help during this difficult time: our pastors and our funeral directors. We forgot our loved ones are also their friends. The pastors and the funeral directors are burying their friends too.

Time after time when we walk into the funeral home we are greeted by the funeral directors kind faces as they reach out with a kind word or a hug to make us feel better. In my community we have been blessed to first have the Heitner’s, then the Brusses and now the Nasinecs taking care of us when we experience the death of a family member or a loved one.

We have had other funeral homes in my community, but the ones mentioned above are those I have had personal experience with.

Maynard Heitner helped my children understand what happens during a funeral and to a loved one when they die. My 4-year-old daughter made the comment after meeting with Maynard, “My grandpa’s going to have a new body when he’s up in heaven.” I asked her how she knew that and she said, “Because he’s with God.” She learned this from Maynard. During his years as funeral director, he lost his best friends, and he buried all of them. And yet as he grieved, he made others feel better.

The Brusses, Stan and Kathy, were no exception. They too handled everything for a family to make our time of mourning easier. They grieved right along with us as they carried out the service they provided while hiding what they might be feeling for the sake of the families,  adding touches that made the families’ experience easier.

These past weeks in my small community we have experienced many funerals. The Nasinec family handles funerals in the same caring tradition and service as the former owners. In a quiet moment I caught the funeral director trying to hide the tears. Yes, funeral directors grieve too, and in the midst of all the care for the families we forget that funeral directors need hugs and encouragement and care so they don’t burn out and fall into the abyss of sadness. All funeral directors need to be remembered for the heart they have and the dedication they have putting their feelings aside for all of us.

Pastors too, bury their friends. They listen to our problems, they help us find solutions and they keep their feelings under wrap to help us. But they, too, grieve right along with us but like funeral directors they put their feelings aside for us.

I dedicate this column to funeral directors and pastors who help us through a difficult time in our life. Consider this my hug and my thank you. You make our lives better, you make our lives easier and we are thankful for all of you  past and present in our lives.

Give your funeral director and pastor a hug today. You never can have too many hugs to keep you going.

 

How Did The World Get So Topsy-Turvy?

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Something About Nothing by Julie Seedorf
 Published in the Albert Lea Tribune on October 12, 2015

bad dayWe don’t live in an optimistic world; at least we don’t if we listen to ever-present media. There are days I want to say “Stop the world, I want to get off.” I do want to go on living in this world, but I can’t believe some of the things I hear or see. It makes me sad, and I want to stop and isolate myself from everything. The news drags me down, and it sucks the breath out of the optimism of life. When I let those feelings influence me, I quit seeing the beautiful world God created for all of us.

As humans, we spend our time arguing about happenings that make people so desperate they have to pull out their guns and massacre innocent people. We ask ourselves why our kids are so stressed and anxious, many having to be put on medication. We ask ourselves how sick we have to be before we can go to the doctor because we can’t afford it. We are scared to speak because it might offend someone or we might say something that is not politically correct, and we will be bombarded in the media for innocently not knowing what we said was not acceptable. Homeowners have to be careful what they build or put in their yards so as to not get citations or get ticketed.

We lock our doors and put in alarm systems to be safe. We lock down our schools. We subject ourselves to searches at airports because of terrorism. Movie theaters are now putting in safety precautions and we are talking about building walls to keep people out to keep us safe. We believe we need to own guns that are semi-automatic weapons; the simple shotgun or rifle or pistol are not enough because they don’t shoot out rounds of ammunition at one time, because it is our right to bear arms and we need to protect ourselves.

We accept all of this — in the name of safety. I think we accept all of this in the name of fear. Fear in our nation is spiraling out of control and putting restrictions on our way of life as we once knew it.

Yet, foul language on television and on the Internet and in the news is rampant. The violence on the shows on television glorifies automatic weapons and murder and violence. Reality shows where everything goes are popular viewing along with disrespect for every avenue of society. The more violence the better the show, or the more we peer into the personal lives of people, the more popular the show. We hang on all the celebrity news waiting to see who trashes who.  And now a new online site is opening up so viewers can critique people. You can give them one to five stars as you do books and give them a review.  We as a general public have filters, and the media does not.

We have turned things around from the ’50s and ’60s. In those days, television and news were censored. Today television and news and the Internet are not censored, but we, the common American person, are. Everything seems acceptable in the news, television and Internet media, but in real life people are censored as to how we can live, what we can say and can be tracked wherever we go.

A news article, yes I did read the news that day, noted a Twin Cities suburb where people were fined and hauled off to jail because they left a ladder by their house or their garbage container was sitting in front of their garage. I shudder to think what would have happened if they had painted their house an unacceptable color. In another city, a father had to take down a treehouse they had built for their son because it wasn’t accepted by the city’s building code. It was a common tree house, the kind we built all the time when we were growing up.

An apple farm didn’t think when they put up a sign that somewhat mimicked the Black Lives matter movement. I must admit I didn’t think anything of it when I saw the sign. I didn’t connect the two, but they were raked over the coals on the media.

In the workplace we have to be careful so we don’t call women girls. I am old and happen to like being called a girl once in a while. I thought nothing of it when someone would joke with me and call me a girl or blondie when they walked into the office where I worked.

I wonder if today we don’t take ourselves too seriously. There is a common sense line with all of these subjects but I wonder if we haven’t crossed the line in the other direction so much so that it impedes upon our freedom.

An article in my local newspaper, the Wells Mirror, highlighted a family of three generations of law enforcement, the Linde family. The first generation of this family was police chief when I was a teenager. I cannot tell you how much respect I had for this man and now have for the rest of his family. They work to keep us safe.

I also have a friend from a four-generation law enforcement family. Three years ago the fourth member, a Montana state trooper, was gunned down on a Montana highway while stopping to help what he thought was a stranded motorist. The man was lying in wait for a law enforcement official to kill. These are only two families of many that work hard to protect our freedoms. I was raised to respect that uniform and to thank them for their service, especially with the ever increasing danger they face today.

We again have turned things around in this day and age and many are trying to make our law enforcement agencies the enemy.

This old brain doesn’t understand. This old brain mourns for what our children do not know they have lost because they have never known the freedoms we knew. How did the world get so topsy-turvy?

The world I grew up in wasn’t perfect. Maybe it only seemed as if we had more freedom. Maybe the adults of the ’50s and ’60s felt the same way then when they were at the age I am now. I don’t have answers.  I only have questions.

 

“Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence. And it is fragile. It can be blackened by fear and superstition.” —Bernard Beckett