God Never Blinks: 50 Lessons for Life's Little Detours 9780446556521, 0446556521

Citation preview

GOD NEVER

BLINKS

50 Lessons for L ife ’ s Little Detours

REGINA

BRETT

$21.99 1

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“It took me 40 years to find and hold on to happiness. I always felt that at the moment I was horn, God must have blinked. He missed the occasion and never knew I had arrived ... I ended up confused by the nuns at age 6, a lost soul who drank too much at 16, an unwed mother at 21, a college graduate at 30, a single mother for 18 years, and finally, a wife at 40, married to a man who treated me like a queen. Then I got cancer at 41. It took a year to fight it, then a year to recover from the fight. When I turned 45, I lay in bed reflecting on all life had taught me. My soul sprang a leak and ideas flowed out. My pen simply caught them and set the words on paper. I typed them up and turned them into a newspaper column of the 45 lessons life taught me.” —REGINA BRETT,

from the Introduction

When Brett turned 50, she added five more lessons, reflecting on all she had learned through becoming a single parent, looking for love in all the wrong places, working on her relationship with God, battling cancer, and making peace with a difficult childhood. She wrote them in her column in the Cleveland P'

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GOD NEVER BLINKS

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/godneverblinks5000bret

GOD NEVE BLINKS

50 Lessons for Life’s Little Detours

REGINA BRETT

GRAND CENTRAL PUBLISHING

New York

Boston

Copyright © 2010 by Regina Brett Ail rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Grand Central Publishing Hachette Book Group 237 Park Avenue New York, NY 10017 www'. HachetteBookGroup.com Printed in the United States of America First Edition: Apnl 2010 10 987654321 Grateful acknowledgment is made to quote from the following: Columns that originally appeared in the Plain Dealer are reprinted with permission of the Plain Dealer Publishing Co. The Plain Dealer holds the copright for columns written by Regina Brett from 2000 to 2009. All rights reserved. Columns that originally appeared in the Beacon Journal are reprinted with permission from the Beacon Journal Publishing Co. Inc. The Beacon Journal holds the copyright for columns written by Regina Brett from 1994 to 2000. All rights reserved. Lines from ‘A Father's Story” by Andre Dubus, The Times Are Never So Bad, copyright © 1983 (Boston: David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc., 1983) are reprinted by permission. The excerpt from Alcoholics Anonymous is reprinted with permission of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. (‘AAWS”). Permission to reprint this excerpt, which orginally ran on page 5£2 of ,the Third Edition, does not mean that AAWS has reviewed or approved the contents of this publication, or that AAWS necessarily agrees with the views expressed herein. A.A. is a program of recovery from alcoholism only - use of this excerpt in connection with programs and activities that are patterned after A.A., but that address other problems, or in any other non-A.A context, does not imply otherwise. David Chilton, The Wealthy Barber: The Common Sense Guide to Successful Fimncial Planning (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998). Excerpt used by permission. Pastor Rick Warren for permission to use the quote in Lesson 31. Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brett, Regina. God never blinks : 50 lessons for life’s little detours / Regina Brett. — 1st ed. p. cm.

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ISBN 978-0-446-55652-1 1. Life skills.

2. Quality of life.

3. Conduct of life.

I. Title.

HQ2037.B745 2010 646.7—dc22 2009027123 Book design by Giorgetta Bell McRee

For Asher and Julia my bookends

Contents

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Introduction

1

The Fifty Lessons

5

Lesson 1

Life isn’t fair, but it’s still good.

Lesson 2

When in doubt, just take the next right step.

Lesson 3

10

Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.

Lesson 4

15

Don’t take yourself so seriously. No one else does.

Lesson 5

7

19

Pay off your credit cards every month.

Vll

24

Contents Lesson 6

You don’t have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.

Lesson 7

Cry with someone. It’s more healing than crying alone.

Lesson 8

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It’s okay to get angry with God. He can take it.

37

Lesson 9

The most important sex organ is the brain.

Lesson 10

God never gives us more than we were designed to carry.

Lesson 11

47

Make peace with your past so it doesn’t screw up the present.

Lesson 12

42

51

It’s okay to let your children see you cry.

56

Lesson 13 „Don’t compare your life to others’. You have no idea what their journey is all about. Lesson 14

If a relationship has to be kept secret, you shouldn’t be in it.

Lesson 15

65

Everything can change in the blink of an eye. But don’t worry; God never blinks.

Lesson 16

70

Life is too short for long pity parties. Get busy living, or get busy dying.

Lesson 17

60

74

You can get through anything life hands you if you stay put in the day you are in and don’t jump ahead.

78

vm

Contents Lesson 18

A writer is someone who writes. If you want to be a writer, write. 82

Lesson 19

It’s never too late to have a happy childhood. But the second one is up to you and no one else. 87

Lesson 20

When it comes to going after what you love in life, don’t take no for an answer. 92

Lesson 21

Burn the

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7 Cry with Someone. It’s More Healing than Crying Alone.

I love going to movies. You can sit in the dark and weep away anonymously. Sometimes I cry over the film, sometimes over anything I’ve needed to cry about in the past few weeks. I use a good sad movie to catch up on all the tears I’ve stifled and held in too long. Anyone who knows me well has seen me cry. My daughter teases me because I cry over Kodak commercials, over sappy TV dramas where you can predict the ending even before they cue the schmaltzy music. All my life I’ve been a crier. Every day of grade school I cried about something. If an injustice was done to me or to anyone else, I cried. My siblings teased me for being a baby; so did my classmates and a few teachers. I couldn’t help it. When I felt something, it came out my tear ducts. For years I tried to hold in the tears. My goal was to get through a whole day 33

God Never Blinks of grade school without crying. I finally did it—in the eighth grade. I was in second grade when President John F. Kennedy died. The nuns at Immaculate Conception School held the First Lady up as a pillar of strength for not shedding a public tear. Jackie was the perfect widow, the perfect woman, the perfect Catholic. The world watched her in that black veil and saw a noble, dignified, and stoic widow who never broke down sobbing over his casket, not even when little John John saluted as it passed. The nuns compared her to Mary, the mother of Jesus. They told us that Mary didn't cry. Not even when she stood at the foot of the cross. Not when she held her dead son. Not at his tomb. Never. For years I believed them. Decades later, I read that Jackie Kennedy used to spend time alone on a friend's boat grieving over her husband's death. She waited until she was far out to sea, looked out over the vast ocean, and wept over how much she missed him. By the time I was done reading the article, I, too, was crying. How sad to have to hide your tears, especially tears of such deep sorrow. I wonder what those nuns would say about her now. Come to think of it, I don’t know if those nuns ever cried during my eight years of Catholic school. If they did, they never let us see it. Maybe tears were unholy under the old rules of the Church. Many years after grade school ended, the movie Jesus of Nazareth came out. I loved the scene where Mary stands at the foot of the cross in the pouring rain, crying over the death of her son. She's not just crying, she's wailing and weeping. This

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Lesson 7

Mary weeps like a mother who has lost her son, not a saint bowing to God’s most holy will. She weeps like all of us would want to but are afraid to. Most of us were taught that tears are a sign of weakness. If you get upset at work, you go into the bathroom to cry. You hide in a stall and muffle the sobs with gobs of toilet tissue. Read any business article about how women can get ahead in the corporate world and they all warn: no tears. Don’t ever let them see you cry. If you cry out in the open, people try to stop you. It makes