HOW ABOUT A LIFE MAKEOVER ?

I was thinking about Bernie McCullough's death this morning and how stunning it was for his fans. The media reported that he was being hospitalized for a medical condition but did not report that he was in dire condition.

This news report caused me think about my cousin who died in her 50s. She was recovering after surgery (that was not supposed to be dangerous) and she died in the hospital two weeks later. The family members didn't even know she had gone into the hospital for the surgery! She had not told anyone because she expected to be home within a week.

I am sure that many of you have stories to tell about knowing someone who died unexpectedly. Today, I want to talk about why black women must be serious about embracing life! Most of the blogs that I have visited tend to point out all that is destructive in the black community and all that is against us as black people. I have had many discussions at this blog to examine various problems in order to produce solutions. I believe that examination is important.

People who live with optimism are usually much happier than those who live with cynicism. I want to spread as much optimism to as many black women as possible. I think that black women are extraordinary. I love my life as a cleric because it allows me to spend my life reaching people. I love seeing miracles in people's lives.

What is the meaning of abundant living for black women?

What do you feel should change in your life right now so that you can be a happier and more fulfilled person?

Are you doing the work that you love each day? If not, why not? You can change paths, professionally! It's never to late to take a new path.

May I tell you a great story?

This is a story that you won't get on the CNN Bogus Report on Blacks in America.

I had a friend who had a dream of being a doctor. After she graduated from a prominent university, she discovered that her GPA was too low to get into medical school. Her MCAT scores could not make up for her mediocre GPA. She researched all of the ways she could find a medical school that would accept her. She talked to everyone she could who knew about the medical school admission process so that she could take every avenue possible. She exhausted every single path that was recommended to her. She continued to get rejection letters.

Deeply discouraged but undaunted, she did the unthinkable. She decided to go back to college and redo her entire Bachelor's program at another university. She decided to focus on achieving straight-As. She enrolled in a college that was not as prestigious as the one she had graduated from. While all of her peers were entering graduate school and launching careers, she was a freshman repeating her undergraduate program. In two years, she graduated with a near perfect grade point average, took the MCAT and was accepted into a medical school. Today, she is an obstetrician.

A couple of years ago, there was a reality television show that a friend of mine told me I would like a lot. (I don't own a television so I am not sure if it is still on television.) The show was called "Starting Over" and the objective was to help women with a "life makeover". My friend mentioned it to me because she knows how often I have worked with those who are committed to achieving a "life makeover".

Years ago, I was preaching a sermon one night in a homeless shelter. The sermon was titled "Make A Choice". I encountered a homeless lady who had arrived in this country with huge dreams. Everything had gone wrong for her after she arrived. She felt that she could not correct her mistakes from her past in a way that would produce a "life makeover". We had many discussions about what she felt her life purpose was. Initially, she wasn't certain what her life purpose was. There was a new book by Rick Warren that was creating buzz at the time called The Purpose-Driven Life. It was a book with light content that many preachers found useful to present as an appetizer to deeper exploration.

I asked her if she wanted to have a weekly one-on-one session with me to discuss the book. She was feeling hopeless but she agreed.

Over time, she began to understand some of the ways she could begin to steer her life in a new direction. I told her that is impossible to return to a specific age of our lives and start over but we can start right where we are.

I asked her a question during one of our sessions: "What if we tried something radical? What if we decided that tomorrow, you would focus on the best decisions for you - and not discuss your mistakes anymore? What if every day, you decided to make three "right" decisions that would directly contribute to the goals we wrote down?"

I believe that a life makeover does not involve fixing everything that has gone wrong in your life. A life makeover requires taking a series of steps in order to forge a new path.

This blog has an objective of focusing the attentions of black women on a new path and a new paradigm. We take a lot of time to look within in order to change our outlook on what we need to do differently to create different outcomes for the collective. Our discussion on "Qualifying The Commitment To Our Self-Preservation" is an important one.

Whenever we decide that we want to change the direction of our lives, we have to identify the imperatives that will produce the level of change we seek.

That homeless lady that I mentioned? The one who had two degrees and was using drugs and completely demoralized by her past mistakes? There were a few nights that I would show up at the shelter with my comforter and my pillow and sign in. She and I would stay up all night sitting on the mats in the dark and whispering while everyone slept. We would discuss the book we were reading while crafting her "purpose-driven" life. I bought clip-on book lights for us and we would both read in the dark and then stop in the middle of the page when we had a thought and start discussing a point in the book. We prayed a lot and studied different scriptures together.

After a couple of years, she left the shelter. She had a plan in motion when she moved out. She is no longer using drugs. She found a partner from her home country to help her start a little neighborhood restaurant that served cuisine from their country. Her partner applied for different loan programs. They found a little space in the ghetto and decided to fix it up. She had fabric from her home country that she had stuffed in bags while she was at the shelter. She starched the fabric and sewed table cloths by hand. I spotted a huge broken mirror outside of a fancy restaurant in a ritzy part of downtown. I put it in my trunk and brought it to her restaurant. I told her to tilt it to the side so that it would look like it was a piece of art. She put it on the wall and we grinned conspiratorially. I collected household knick-knacks from all of the ladies in the church who had items cluttering their homes. I brought them to her so that she could decide what she could use for the restaurant tables and throughout the restaurant. As I unpacked boxes of donated items from my car, I said: "Don't worry about everything matching! Just make every table look unique! Be eclectic!"

She created the menus and found suppliers. We glued African fabrics to poster board for the menus and they looked fantastic. The restaurant is a tiny place that's dimly lit and has about eight tables in it. I don't think that place can seat more than thirty people. But it's hers. I remember the first time I came to eat at her place. She brought me my food with such pride, then she went to greet a customer at a nearby table. She came back and I was eating my food with tears streaming down my face. She asked me if something was wrong with her spices and if I wanted her to take the food away and bring out another dish she had made.

I shook my head no. She asked, "what's wrong?"

I said that this was the best meal that I ever had.

I invite those of you who have achieved a life makeover to share with other women who visit this blog. Someone who is reading this feels stuck. There is never just one path that all must take but there is always a way out of a situation that may seem as though there is no new course to identify.

We can always do things better than we are doing them right now.

We can always make changes that will produce new outcomes in our lives.

We can always decide that our present situation can become radically different.

How about a life makeover?


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