Life is a series of individual moments in time that make an impact on who we are and who we will become. In this BLOG I hope to explore the small moments in time that we all experience, and uncover how far they reach.

Let me start by defining what I mean by a moment in time. There are the “big” moments that include things such as marriage, births, big promotions, deaths, and the like, but there are also moments that are less obvious, but just as meaningful and powerful if we are paying attention.
Can you recall the precise moment when a friendship was actually born? That moment in which a story is shared or a crisis occurs; a kind deed or gesture is offered, and the relationship between yourself and another changes forever. How about the moment when you took a risk and offered up some advice that you normally would have kept to yourself, and the person receiving the advice took it and actually made a change that impacted their life in a big way? As I’ve gotten older, I’ve taken more time to store the details of these moments in my head and my heart. I try to acknowledge them while they are happening and I’ve become accustomed to inventorying them with such vivid detail, that if I close my eyes, I can almost re-live them.

Through this recent Christmas season I experienced many moments that I will treasure and store in my internal vault, but this year there is one moment that will stand out from the rest. My family, like so many others, spends time together baking special holiday treats during this time of year. This year, due to the fact that we were a bit ahead of our normally chaotic schedule, we had the time to bake some extras with the hope of dropping off some baskets of goodies to some friends in the neighborhood. We had a blast baking and decorating the goodies as well as the baskets, attempting to make them as festive as possible. When they were all created we looked at them with pride and gathered our coats and mittens to head out into the snowstorm to drop them off.

In our rush to accomplish the task of baking and delivering the cookies, we rediscovered something we had missed, and for me it is summed up by our visit with “Mrs. L." Mrs. L. is a sweet lady who lives alone, just a short distance from our house and who, in all honesty, we don’t know as well as some other people on our delivery list. Regardless, in our few interactions with her she was lovable as could be and we hoped that this little gift of sweets might be well received. As we approached her door, she saw us coming and jumped up from her chair to come see what in the world we were doing there. Once my daughters presented her with the small token of the season and wished her a Merry Christmas, it became evident that the cookies and other sweets were secondary. Don’t get me wrong, she loved the basket, but what became clear to me at that moment, in the expression on her face, in her absolute joy, in the way she hugged us all, was not the Christmas cookies or the bow on the basket, but the realization that we were there and that she was being thought of. Mrs. L, like all the other stops we had made, was so genuinely surprised and pleased to see us, that it kind of woke me up. At every house we visited that day we were welcomed, not because we were holding sugary treats, but because we were sharing something I had not even consciously acknowledged. It was the gift of time.

Inside every door that opened that day was someone that said; “come in, take your coat off, come sit and visit." We had rushed around to make these little tokens of the season and at the end of the day, in some way, the gift we thought we were giving, turned into just an excuse to spend a little bit of time with people ~ little moments in time.