Catching My Second Wind - Confidence And Pride

Catching My Second Wind - Confidence and Pride

A thousand words will not leave so deep an impression as one deed. —Henrik Ibsen

I’M INTERESTED in what you did in your twenties and thirties.

How many of you were PTA moms who could organize and run the Halloween carnival better than P. T. Barnum himself?

How many of you were office managers, delegating, motivating, and negotiating better than the most experienced politician on Capitol Hill?

How many of you were sales reps, representing your company’s products or services and fixing problems as smoothly as a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat?

Do you remember those days when you commanded a room? When you were proud of the service you delivered to your children; your employer; your customers? Remember when you were really confident in your abilities? Remember that feeling of pride that you had for a job well done?

Draped in confidence, a woman named Pearl knocked on my front door. I was a teenage mom who had just moved away from my family and the only home I’d ever known to a suburb of Dallas. Since I had no family to support me, Ms. Pearl, about fifty years old at the time, waltzed into my home (after a bit of sleuthing on my part to determine if this woman was for real) and shared her wisdom with me and her lap with Shauna. This woman literally saved my sanity (and probably Shauna’s life—I hadn’t a clue what I was doing). When I asked her a couple of years later how I could ever repay her, she said, “Sometime in your future, you will come across a mother who needs you. Make sure you share with her what you’ve learned and be available.”

Pearl didn’t invest twenty hours a week in a mother/child development course; she volunteered her mothering and grandmothering services to Shauna and me for about two hours a week. For 120 luxurious minutes she took Shauna or sat with her in our home, giving me the only two-hour break this very young, very poor, very inexperienced mom would get all week.

Here’s one of only about a hundred things I learned from watching Ms. Pearl: She recognized a need and she took action. She wasn’t timid. She had caught her second wind and realized that her second-half contribution to society would be one mother and one baby at a time. Don’t think that sounds life-changing? It was to me.

Just as the body is dead without breath, so also faith is dead without good works. (James 2:26)

Whether you volunteer your managerial services to a nonprofit, share your gifts of event planning with your church, or lend a lap to a neighbor’s child, catch your second wind. People need you. Your second wind will fuel you with confidence and pride when you step out and realize you really are making a difference.