MOG #102: 30 Little Smiles

This week's post comes from our friend Andrea. She sent it to me last Wednesday and I've been waiting all week to post it. However, I don't think I can post this article without mentioning Elijah Marsh- the 3 year old boy from Toronto who escaped from his apartment into the tremendously freezing temperatures in the middle of the night and froze to death. You can read about it here.

Elijah's story stands both on it's own and ties in well with Andrea's connection about life, death, love and ultimately, gratitude.

So let me start this off plain and simple, a little frank if you will - someone died.  Not someone I knew, not even a friend of someone I knew well, in fact I'm not even sure how well they knew the person. But the fact of the matter is that someone died, someone's family is reeling, someone's young life is over, in an instance everything has changed in so many people's worlds and yet here we are, working, whining, worrying.

This morning as I expressed my condolences to this person who's friend had passed away, I stopped to look around to see if I could muster up something positive to say to her, something encouraging in that moment, and I was lucky enough to see about 30 children playing on a snowbank. 30 children laughing, fighting, playing, smiling. 30 fresh new lives just barely getting off the ground, just starting to learn about life. Today they will go to school, learn something absolutely useless, they'll go on a field trip, and they'll make a new friend.

At that moment I turned to see coworkers who are truly incredible, caring individuals that have come to be my friends. I saw so much happiness, that in that moment, right there - I was so thankful. It may have taken a sad awakening to just pause and see it but it was such a beautiful moment and it's so wonderful to live a life where I can press pause, look around and be fortunate enough to see smiling faces EVERY SINGLE DAY.