I have been telling the girls a lot… ‘darlings, if you give good, you will get good’. It sometimes, I think, is hard for them to understand. Last night, we had the perfect opportunity to show them and speak to them more about these words.
As I shared through our Be uninTIMidated Facebook page, in just a 24 hour period of time, we were contacted by two families impacted by this terrible disease. They found us because of the awareness we all create by talking about Tim and his journey and by promoting Be uninTIMidated. The website is truly a gem.
One of the families is a local family that lives in Greece. They came to our home last night for dinner and we spent about 3 hours talking and talking and talking and sharing information. We sure hope it helped… they said it helped. They will calling Dr. Sardi and Dr. Tejani’s offices today. I also contacted their offices, on their behalf, to hopefully help facilitate these appointments.
The reason I’m telling you this is because I want you all to take pride in what you’ve done. You have helped us to do this and we are continuing to help people. That is exactly what we said we wanted to do in the beginning of this and it is a wonderful feeling to know that we are accomplishing what we set out to do.
I also share this with you to let you know how much the girls are growing and how they are really grasping Give Good…Get Good. It is difficult at the age of 9 and 11, to get home from a full day of school, rush to get homework done by 5:30pm, to have dinner with ‘new friends’ and to give up your Mom and Dad for the evening. I thought of that as our guest Mary said to the girls last night “Thank you for giving us your time tonight as I’m sure you’d rather be doing something else with you parents right now”… and you know what – they just smiled and said ‘oh, it is okay’. They never complained once. My heart… it was full… my eyes are full of tears as I type this to you right now. I am so proud of our girls. They listened to more of the conversation than I thought, as at bedtime, they were full of questions. All they kept asking was, “do they like Daddy and us”… “are we helping them”… and I told them, this tonight was Giving Good and Getting Good. If you keep giving where and when you can and sometimes even when it seems like you can’t – you do… and if you make this part of who you are, then you will Get Good. They of course wanted to know what the Get Good was… and for me, I told them that hopefully Daddy will be here for many years to come so that he can keep giving and keep helping and that we also “get” new friends. We “get” to keep meeting these beautiful people that we never would have met before. We “get” to keep being reminded every time Tim tells his story and cries while he does, that you cannot walk past the small things. That you really need to enjoy everything that life has to bring. We “get” the beauty of really seeing life as it should be. We “get” the opportunity to live life so that we never look back and say ‘if only I had’ or ‘I wish I would have’… We “get” to feel full.
We are full. There is no emptiness inside us. There is no need to ever compare to others, to look for fulfillment in something else. Never, ever did I imagine that by giving, by helping, you could become so entirely complete. It is the most beautiful gift I ever could have received.
We love our new friends. We love our old friends. It is great to love.