Giving Thanks for Our Miracles
November, the month of Thanksgiving, is a great time to focus on gratitude and the miracles in our lives. I’d like to share my own miracle story that is in my book Pathfinding: “I was in the final stages of producing a television documentary on Positive Aging in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. We were going to end the documentary with an older gentleman who was featured in the closing segment. He had brought photographs he thought would be perfect for the ending. When we disagreed about several of his selections, he became difficult. He finally stormed out of the studio, leaving me without a completed documentary and without very much time to find available talent.
I sat in the conference room wondering how on earth I was going to fix the broken ending, when the receptionist entered the conference room
unannounced. She was carrying a package addressed to me. I was flabbergasted. I only worked in the studio once a month. Any mail addressed to me usually laid in my in-box, awaiting my arrival. This particular package arrived and was delivered to me the day I was there.
The package contained a national press release from Houston, Texas announcing a senior sports classics competition. One of the people featured was the 102-year-old golfer named Harley Potter who you met in Chapter Five. He was from – you guessed it – Winston Salem. I’m sitting in a conference room at the Fox TV affiliate in Winston-Salem approximately twenty minutes away from an octogenarian who would be the perfect closing story for my documentary.
I called his 75 year-old daughter and she arranged for me to meet them at the local club where he played golf almost daily. The rest, as they say, is history – or should I say miraculous history. When events like this unfold, I believe there has to be a guiding hand that waves some sort of cosmic wand, which transforms ordinary experiences into extraordinary events.
