You’re gonna miss me…

                                    “You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone.”

The New Year is careening towards us like it’s on a racetrack and I think we will all breathe a great sigh of relief to see 2020 in the rear-view mirror! In thinking of this today I had a memory I want to share with you, just to remind us of how important each and every day is…

I was in the kitchen cooking and instead of the TV being on the Hallmark Channel, where I have been watching Christmas movies since before Thanksgiving week, it was on TBS, the classic movie channel. I wasn’t paying much attention to what was playing but suddenly a phrase caught my attention and clutched at my heart. I turned around to see what was going on, it was a dad talking to his son about dying and he made that statement…

                                       “You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone.”

The backstory on why that stopped me in the midst of pressuring chicken and cooking meat for tacos is this: One day, not long before my daddy died, I went into my parent’s room to take some things and as usual I was in a hurry. Daddy said, “Haro, sit with us for a while and talk to me.” I stopped and looked at him leaning forward in his recliner looking up at me and said, “Daddy I would love to, but I need to go back downstairs right now.” He smiled and looked up at me and said…

                                     “You’re gonna miss me when I’m gone.”

I can’t tell you the times I have heard that phrase in my head and every time I have I do exactly what I am doing this minute as I write, I cry. I look back and try to remember what was so pressing that I couldn’t stop and sit for a few minutes when it seemed so important to him and for the life of me, I don’t know what it was, it couldn’t have been that important. 

There is nothing I can do to bring that moment back and change it, so why dwell on it or let it eat into the thoughts of my mind? 

I think the importance of remembering things that we have done that we aren’t happy about is so that, knowing that we cannot change the past, realize that we can change our future.

It’s not that one day, December 31, 2020 into January 1, 2021 will make any more difference than yesterday did to today, but it is a marker, a starting point, like day one after your birthday starts the beginning of a new year for you. There is no startling revelation, no bells or whistles but it is a new day, and a new year for real, a time for us to make some realizations about our lives and what it is that we want from it, what we want to give to it.

I am giving you the gift of taking something that I greatly regret and learning a lesson from it for yourself. Is there something that you greatly regret? You don’t think you can change yourself or make a difference? Philippians 4:13, “ I can do all things through Christ which strengthens me”.  

Make a change so that today won’t be the yesterday you regret tomorrow, and I am hoping that 2021 will be a happier time for us all…