Dear Friends,

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last blog because I am doing what y’all are doing in the chaos and quarantine:

Resilient Response #7  Accomplishments are Often Achieved by Steady, Unromantic, Persistent-Plodding

Sometimes those accomplishments are GINORMOUS and sometimes they are SMALL but our life’s pursuits are contingent on this resiliency.

When I think about my pursuit of a Bachelor’s Degree, it honestly took me 17 years from start to finish. A few college classes out of high school and then a 10 year gap before I started up again. By that time I was a divorced, single-parent sit-down mom of three, five and under. I plodded persistently along, taking one class a semester, until my youngest was in first grade and then I raced to the finish line in… TWO more years.

When I picked up the sport of wheelchair tennis, eleven years after my injury (during the same time as my BA pursuit), it took me months just to get comfortable and adept at pushing a wheelchair with a tennis raquet in my hand. You never place the raquet on your lap and push. It was weird. It was strange. It was uncomfortable. Besides that, it took weeks of repetition to connect my raquet to the ball and eventually execute a shot. Talk about steady, persistence. Month after month, ball after ball, forehand after forehand, backhand after backhand, serve after serve, I worked my way to becoming a skilled player. Eventually, I went on to win, nine years later, the U.S. Open Singles and Doubles Wheelchair Tennis Championships.

Life, is more often than not, hard work!

Just the other day I watched a wonderful episode on Apple TV+ titled Home. Home is a new documentary series that offers viewers a never-before-seen look inside the world’s most innovative homes. Each episode in the nine-episode first season unveils the boundary-pushing imagination of the visionaries who dared to dream and build them. The first episode featured a Swede who dreamed of building a log cabin for his family in the traditional way until he stumbled upon a magazine that featured a home built inside a greenhouse, called a Nature Home. I don’t know the entire timeline of this project from dream to completion, but I could ascertian from the documentary there was at least a seven year period between building and occupying.

Accomplishments are Often Achieved by Steady, Unromantic, Persistent-Plodding!

If you read Resilient Response #3 to Chaos and Quarantine, I talked about recalibrating our routines: The Good, the Bad and the New. This was written well over a month ago when our nation began to shutdown and my population group was told to shelter-in-place. A lot of good, creative ideas have been, and are being, birthed in this horrific pandemic. I hope you recalibrated your routine and started something NEW. If not, there’s still time. We’re not out of the woods yet. I encourage you to dream, create, and plod….because beautiful things come out of that combination.

And speaking of ingenuity, are you in need of prayer? If you live here locally, Starting Point Church, situated next to Bed, Bath and Beyond outside of the Gateway Mall, is operating a DRIVE-THRU PRAYER TODAY from 12 noon to 3:00 pm. They will stay a safe distance from you but help you get closer to God!

if you are interested in A BIGGER DOSE OF RESILIENCE, I am discounting my book and my Inspirational Cards by 10% and donating to our counties hospitals, the YRMC Foundation Area of Greatest Need Fund. 

“Yet there is one ray of hope: his compassion never ends. It is only the Lord’s mercies that have kept us from complete destruction.Great is his faithfulness; his loving-kindness begins afresh each day.” Lam. 3:22-23

As always, praying you find a new mercy today and everyday,

Nannette