Thursday, November 27, 2008

Thankful for Email

By Nichole Giles

I have some friends and family members who love to forward me emails. And I love getting all their jokes, and poems, and pictures. Nothing makes my day more than opening an email to a funny joke or a beautiful picture. Plus, it’s a great way to waste time when I’m supposed to be writing a hard scene.

I generally get several of these a day, and even though my inbox stacks up awfully quickly this way, I don’t mind. I adore the people who remember me every day, and take a few seconds to show it. Anyway, there’s one poem I’ve seen probably a hundred times or more. But every time I open it, I love it as much as I did the first time I read it.

I’ll quote a little bit here:

People come into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime.


When someone is in your life for a REASON, it is usually to meet a need you have expressed. They have come to assist you through a difficulty, to provide you with guidance and support, to aid you physically, emotionally or spiritually. They may seem like a godsend and they are. They are there for the reason you need them to be. Then, without any wrongdoing on your part or at an inconvenient time, this person will say or do something to bring the relationship to an end. Sometimes they die. Sometimes they walk away. Sometimes they act up and force you to take a stand. What we must realize is that our need has been met, our desire fulfilled, their work is done.The prayer you sent up has been answered and now it is time to move on.

Some people come into your life for a SEASON, because your turn has come to share,
Grow or learn. They bring you an experience of peace or make you laugh. They may teach you something you have never done. They usually give you an unbelievable amount of joy. Believe it, it is real. But only for a season.

LIFETIME relationships teach you lifetime lessons, things you must build upon in order to have a solid emotional foundation. Your job is to accept the lesson, Love the person and put what you have learned to use in all other relationships and areas of your life. It is said that love is blind but friendship is clairvoyant.


I got this one again the other day. As it happens, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to this very philosophy. See, I’m feeling especially lucky this Thanksgiving. Lucky because of the people in my life. All of them. Those who have passed out of it already, those who are here temporarily, and those I haven’t met yet but who will add something special to my life. Especially, though, I’m thankful for the people who are here to be my friends and family for life and longer.

This week was my late mother-in-law’s birthday. It has been a little bit of a tough day for all of us since she died five years ago. I miss her. But while I knew her, Carol taught me a lot about being a mother, and a wife, and a good woman. She was a wonderful grandmother, mother and wife. I only got to spend ten years as her daughter. Only a season.

There are other people, important friends, who I’ve long since lost touch with for one reason or another. People who came into my life for a reason—even if that reason was to simply make me smile for a day or two.

The people with whom I share lifetime relationships make me smile every day. They teach me about life, and love, and—okay, I know it’s a total cliché, but I’m going to say it anyway—the pursuit of happiness.

No matter what role these people have played in my life, they’ve all given me something to write about. I am a writer, and I am able to write because of the people who have come in and out of my life like pebbles at the bottom of a stream, or sand on a beach, or leaves falling off the trees in a meadow.

So I’m thankful for the contributions of all those people. They are my inspiration.

I could bore you to tears with a list of the hundreds of other things for which I am thankful for today, but instead, I am going to thank you—the reader—instead. Thank you for reading our blog. Without readers, writers would be nothing but people chained to computers living in fantasy worlds that would never be shared with anyone else. Well, except by email. Which reminds me…I’m thankful for that, too!

Thanks for reading!

Happy Thanksgiving from the LDS Writer’s BloGck!