A Different Kind of Amazing

The first words uttered to My Dearest when I met her 12 years ago was that she was AMAZING...she was amazingly beautiful, an amazing dancer, had an amazing air about her which I couldn't quite grasp other than to know that I wanted to breathe that air along with her.

She is all that today, but AMAZING has taken on a much stronger and greater meaning. When I first saw her, I didn't know all that she had overcome to bring her to the place where we first met. I didn't know the tough, strong decisions that accompanied her journey, the challenging pathways she had traveled, the roads that she had taken that I, myself, don't know if I would have been able to endure. I had my own roads of course, but hers were much rockier and with an unfair adversity attached.

When you look at My Dearest, who I and many others refer to as "supermodel pretty", you'd just never envision the cast-iron will and strength that she is made of. The will and strength that has pushed me so far beyond my own comfort zone to grow, change, and achieve...the same courage that keeps us together today after a storm of epic proportions, the integrity that serves as a mirror for me to reflect and learn from. Her strength has taught me to BELIEVE in things that my eyes can't see and to TRUST in things that my mind can't seem to envision or grasp otherwise. Her FORGIVENESS is something that she has extended to me for my wrongs where many others would surely have failed. She has shown me what FAMILY looks like as she has given me hers and what FATHERHOOD looks like as she has birthed our three children. Without her, I don't know that I would have known either...

Some of us closest to My Dearest refer to her as a little lazy given her love to sleep and roll around in the sheets through the morning hours. We even pick on her for her huge appetite for creative information and networking that she acheives through the internet and her many electronic gadgets; but how could "lazy" fit the work that she has done to arrive here today, the glue that she represents which keeps our family together, the willingness to show up everyday to help others with no materials other than Spirit and Faith passing through her like radio waves through an antenna. We all have our work, our contributions to this Universe and to our own little families and surrounds...and I now recognize how AMAZING My Dearest's collection of work, through her young life, contributes to the greatest good of this world, and particularly in my own small world. Like many of us, she often gets paralized thinking and wondering what her potential is...but not realizing that she has risen up many times in her life and achieved greatness. Thus, in a time when she feels as if she isn't achieving anything, to me she is overcoming and accomplishing everything in spite of what has been thrown her way.

Elizabeth, today you continue to show me AMAZING...and I love you more today than ever before. Thank you for being YOU and for all of your hard work. You saved my life...and now I shall mirror your AMAZING and GREATNESS back for you to see.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?' Actually, who are we not to be? You are a child of God: your playing small doesn't serve the world.

Nelson Mandela