Post-it Notes from the Creator

I hesitated to share this here, because it feels way too personal. But one of my circle of wise council says that it needs to be shared..so...

This past weekend I spent at a woman's retreat at a campsite west of Nashville. Beautiful blue October skies, turning foliage, warm sunshine and nippy evenings, with comfortable rooms and great food. A hundred and a half beautiful women, each on our own spiritual journey, but sharing very similar paths. A wonderful 'vacation'... but the real gift of the weekend came in the form of a post-it note from the Creator

(Yes, my God gives me post-it notes as reminders!)

Saturday morning there was a workshop called "Blisters to Blessings"... how the painful events of our lives can turn into the greatest of blessings. Many beautiful women shared how their pain had turned into their blessings, and I felt called to share the story of the birth of Nature's Gift. How in 1994 I was told I was totally disabled, and would never work again...and how that terrible painful frightening time held in it the seeds of the life I had today, because it gave me time to read and learn and study my two passions - the healing power of the essential oils and online communication. The World Wide Web was new to me, and I had to learn how to design my own page. And then a friend commented on one of my blends..."this is wonderful, you need to sell it!" and somehow Nature's Gift was born.

I sometimes feel uncomfortable sharing that tale for fear it will come across as "how wonderful I am"... it's not about that. It's about the fact it is not humanly possible to get from where I was to where we are now. And the fact that I always wanted to be a "healer" and that has not been my gift - but because of what we do here, we get to participate in the healing journeys of thousands of people.

At any rate, I shared my "blisters to blessings" story, and several women said, afterwards, that it gave them hope. (Of course throughout the rest of the weekend, others kept coming up to me and asking "do you have something that will help with ____?" and I shared what I knew, but that's a different story.) As it worked out, a fair amount of the time this weekend was spent talking about what we do here. Which was just fine... it's my favorite subject!

But it still made me a bit uncomfortable to be talking so often about the oils and their healing power on what was designed to be a spiritual weekend.

The true gift, though, came Sunday morning. During the closing ceremony there is an exercise done with affirmations. Perhaps 40 of us in a group, and each of us drew a sealed slip of paper, the affirmation we would be working with, and sharing throughout the morning.

I opened my sealed piece of paper and felt my eyes fill with tears.

"You are doing God's Work"