Value What You Have. Don’t Take People for Granted. Appreciate all the good things in your life, including yourself! Value what you have inside of you!

Value What You Have. Don’t Take People for Granted. Appreciate all the good things in your life, including yourself! Value what you have inside of you!

*Dear Friends, please remember to value what you have, and appreciate all the good things in your life. Please, don’t take the people in your life for granted ~ We must always remember to give honor to whom honor is due (Rom 13:7).

11/10/2010
Our 5 year old recently started kindergarten. We are naturally all very excited and very thankful to God for this milestone. My little guy has graduated from pre-school – Yippee! 🙂 Praying and continually trusting God for the best for the entire family as everyone takes each new step.

Fortunately, our 3 year old also has a big milestone to celebrate this year – he started preschool just a week after our 5 year old started kindergarten. Yay to graduating from being a toddler to being a preschooler! 🙂 It’s been a very exciting time for us as we’ve settled into our new routine. We are all absolutely loving their schools and all their new friendships and experiences. For instance, my 3 year old announced yesterday as he recalled everything that happened in school – “I’m a smart cookie Mommy”! Oh really?, I replied. Did your teacher tell you that? “No she didn’t, I just know I’m a smart cookie.” Amen to that! 🙂 ! lol…

One day, during the first couple of weeks of school, I was picking my 5 year old up at the end of the school day. We were all still getting to know each other, so I was meeting (or speaking with) many of the parents for the first time that week. I took my son’s hand and was about to walk to the car when I noticed one of his classmates coming out to meet his mom. He just looked sooo handsome in his cute little outfit and his contagious smile. So I turned to his mom and said – “Your son is so handsome”!
She smiled and replied, without skipping a beat – “Thank you. He looks like his dad, and his dad is very handsome.”

I don’t know if she even remembers saying that now – but if she does, I don’t think she knows what an impact that simple statement made on me that day. All I did was smile… and then we exchanged a few more words before we said our good byes.

But as soon as she replied, a song I know immediately came to mind – “Oun Ani la’ngbe laruge”. It’s a Yoruba song, and it essentially means “We should value and give honor to whatever is ours that is good.“ By the way, Yoruba is a beautiful language spoken in many parts of West Africa. 🙂

So simple and so true – isn’t it? If we have something valuable, something good – should we not honor it before others? Should we not continually value it? If we don’t, yes – it will probably remain valuable, but its value will continually diminish before our very own eyes. We take its value for granted, and eventually we may not even realize how valuable what is right under our nose is.

“Oun Ani” ~ I am being reminded to value myself, as well as to value the people God has placed in my life. Our spouses, parents, children, siblings, in-laws, relatives, friends. It is sometimes easy to become so familiar that we take so many things and people for granted. Yes, everyone has their flaws (we all have that in common lol), but if we sit down, reflect, and find that the very good in our loved one far outweighs the not-so-good, and that the not-so-good is getting better every day – then we have a whole lot to be thankful for.

For example, instead of constantly reminding people of your spouse’s flaws (jokingly or otherwise), how wonderful would it be to remind them of all the things you love about your spouse? Or just taking the time to reflect and think about it from time to time – you will most likely think about so many things that you had even completely forgotten about… and I hope it will make you appreciate them even more. Same thing goes for all the other people in our lives. What happened that day reminded me to continually value and give honor to whatever or whomever I have that is good! It is a great exercise, believe me! 🙂

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