The Greatest Men I Ever Knew

Hi Everyone,

Today I want to talk to you about someone who was very special to me.  He was one of the greatest men I ever knew.  His name was Thelbert Sanford Rawle and he was/is my grandfather.  I say was/is because he was my grandfather while he was here on earth and he is still my grandfather.  He is in both my future and my past but not my present.  Confusing?  Well that's a different opinion altogether.  Let me tell you a few things about my grandfather.  He left us a few years ago and while he was here, I really didn't understand how great he was.

Well let's start with what he was not.  He never owned a large company, never wrote a best selling novel, never went to law school and never had a lot of money.  See, when most of us consider what success looks like - fame, power, money, etc., Sanford Rawle would not have been considered all that great.  Notice I didn't call him Thelbert.  No one did that I know of.  He didn't like his first name.  So why is he the greatest man I have ever knew?

Well, its funny that the older I get the more I realize why.  While Granddad didn't do things that would put his name in the paper, he did something that most people don't do enough.  He impacted other people's lives.

This Labor Day, we had a gathering at my cousin AB's house.  They were so gracious to have us and I really enjoyed it.  But while we were sitting around telling stories and laughing and getting extremely loud (that's what Rawle's do), I could see him there.  He would have been telling stores and laughing harder than the rest of us.  If you looked closely into his eyes, there was always a sparkle but more importantly, there was always love.  He was the image of what I think love should look like.  He wasn't flashy, he wasn't always trying to get attention, he just went about living life and loving his family.  He was married to one woman, my grandmother, Margie, for 68 years.  I can't even imagine that.

When I look at what he was able to accomplish, I am astounded.  See I have a lot of formal education, he had a lot of informal smarts.  He didn't have people to teach him how to do stuff, so he taught himself.  If something needed to be fixed, they didn't have the money to get it repaired so he figured out how to fix it himself.  I never in all my life saw him ask for a handout but he always had hand out to help someone else.

I remember one time my house needed a new front door.  Granddad heard about it and came over to help me put one on.  Now I didn't just need a new front door, I needed a new door frame and the whole works. Granddad was in his seventies at the time and he just showed up for work one Saturday ready to help his grandson.  Well, we got the door jam and all out and it was laying in the front yard.  Since I had never seen him fail at fixing something, I just knew he would be able to help me fix this.  So I asked him, how many of these he had done before.  After all, he had 70+ years experience at fixing things.  This shouldn't be any big deal.  I was shocked to hear him say that this was his first time.  True to Sanford Rawle form, we got the door put in right.

Here are some things I learned from him.
1.  Laugh often and laugh a lot - It didn't take much to get him started and once you did, he would laugh for ever.  If you look at pictures, he almost always had a smile on his face.  I learned something about that smile.  It was contagious.  You didn't get around him for very long before you were smiling too.  As a matter of fact, if you were around him for a very long time, your jaws would hurt from laughing so hard.

2.  Love isn't a language or words, its a life.  Granddad loved his family and almost everyone he came in contact with.  He didn't just say I love you, he lived I love you.  He was the type of man who was there for you when you needed him.  We all know people who say, call if you need anything and then always have an excuse why they can't help.  He wasn't that man.

3.  Your family is important.  This is something that most of my generation has lost.  His brothers, sisters, and wife were his best friends.  They went on vacation together, the spent holidays together, they played games together.  Not only that but he loved his kids and grand kids.  He was always patient with us.  I only hope and pray that one day I can be more like him, especially in the area of patience.  He was always giving to his family.  While he didn't spend large amounts of money on us that I remember, he gave me things that are far more valuable.  He gave me a joker (this is a card and marble game) board that he made by hand.  He gave all of his children wagon replicas of the one he used as a kid to all of his children.  Mom, Unc and Unc, how much money would it take to buy that wagon from you? They may not read this so but I feel pretty confident I can answer - The wagon isn't for sale at any price.  I still have a tool box that we built together when I was probably six or seven.



3.  Granddad taught me a lot about gossip.  He didn't ever that I remember.  Enough said.

4.  Mind your own business.  My granddad never got into my personal business unless I asked him.  Because of this, when I did ask, I was much more apt to listen to what he said.

5.  Don't eat your own.  Too many times in a family we have a tendency to talk badly about each other.  We think we know what everyone else should do and how they should do it and we aren't afraid to tell them exactly what we think regardless of whether or not it helps or hurts.  My grandfather wasn't like that.

6.  THIS ONE IS HUGE - Have a tender heart.  I often saw my grandfather's heart touched.  He hurt when his loved ones hurt and he was happy for them when they succeeded.  It didn't take much to touch him and I desperately want to be more like that.  As he got older, he knew that his time here was running out and I can remember many times that he would tear up while praying over a meal.  Those tears were almost always for the family that he loved so dearly.

I could go on for many pages but I will finish with one that is very close to his family.

7.  "Make us ever mindful that there are people in this world who have need and have less than we." - When Granddad said the blessing, he finished each prayer that I ever remember with those words.  The funny thing is, he meant them every time he said them.  Now he meant this when it came to material things - ask anyone who didn't finish their meal about those Ethiopians.  But he also knew something that it took me 40 years of life to understand.  True riches aren't measured in what you have, they are measured in who you know.  While he will not go down in history as a man with much material wealth, he will go down as one of the most wealthy people ever because he knew how to love and realized early on what the real treasures of life were - people.

Granddad, I don't know if you can read this in Heaven or not but I want you to know that you are one of the greatest men I have ever had the privilege of knowing.  I can only hope to measure up to the standard you left.  I love you very much and hope to make you proud one day by being more like you.

To everyone else, I want to leave you with the lyrics of a song -

I've lost loved ones in my life
Who never knew how much I loved them
Now I live with the regret
That my true feelings for them never were revealed

So I made a promise to myself
To say each day how much she means to me
And avoid that circumstance
Where there's no second chance to tell her how I feel

Cause if tomorrow never comes
Will she know how much I loved her

So tell that someone that you love
Just what your thinking of
If tomorrow never comes

The Opinion of the Minion

Why Minion?

Today, I want to talk about something that is extremely important - Why we do things.  I don't want to focus on what motivates you to go to work or school or do clean up after yourself, although all of those things are very important.  I want to focus for a few minutes on what why we do things for other people.  What is our motivation?  I can already hear some of you thinking, I don't really do anything for other people.  But I think you probably do and don't know it.  The question I have today is why?

Is our motivation for helping others just purely to help them or is our motivation for helping other people so that we can get something in return from them?  Sometimes it is very difficult to distinguish why we do things.

Let me illustrate.  Part of the time I was growning up we lived on a street called Sherwood in River Oaks, TX (Mom, it's definitely not Tulane as you will see).  Now my brother is about 4 years younger than me and it just so happened that we had friends who lived down the street who were the same age as us.  We played together a lot.  When the weekend came, we always wanted to spend the night and basically asked my mom to do a kid swap.  One weekend, I would go to their house and my brother's friend would come to ours and the next weekend, we would switch.  So we would try to con our mother into letting us do this.  How did you con her you ask?  (Disclaimer - we were not exactly the world's smartest con men in those days.)  We decided that if we cleaned the house top to bottom to "bless" mom that she would be in a better place to let us go.  Notice that our motiviation was never really to bless mom but to get our way.  Little did we know that all she wanted was for us to help and she would let us go anyway.  As I said, we weren't the smartest cons and mom laughed at us all the time.

That's really cute because we were little kids right?  Well, let's grow things up a little and you will see that this manipulation can really be a problem.  As I have said before, I am a giver.  I really like to give to others of my time, money, etc., and this is a very good thing to do.  But what would it look like if I was "giving" something to someone with the expectation that they would do something for me in return?  That is a really bad place because it's no longer a gift but a tool used to manipulate someone to get my way.  I constantly have to check my motives to make sure that I am just giving to help.  Does that surprise you?  It shouldn't.  We are all that way.  We all have a mind that wants what it wants and it can be very easy to get off track with why we do things.

As a matter of fact, I caught myself doing this several weeks ago.  It wasn't intentional on my part and when I figured it out, I was more than a little bothered.  There was a situation that I really wanted to see go a certain way.  Now my way wasn't a bad way to do things and ultimately I might get what I wanted all along.  But during this time, I recognized that I was putting a lot of pressure on the situation and might have caused someone else pain because of it. I didn't even really understand what I was doing until I stepped back and took a look at the situation from a distance.  Once I did, it was pretty easy to see what I was doing and I immediately put a stop to it.

Worse than that, I hear people tell me that their motivation for doing a certain thing is to get even with our hurt someone else.  This type of conduct is terrible.  I know of a certain situation where a guy says hurtful things to this other person just so he can humiliate, intimidate and manipulate them.  Folks, that type of behavior just shouldn't be.

So let me ask you this.  What is your motivation for the way you treat other people?  Are you doing things strictly for their good or is there something inside you that is trying to get what you want from them in return?  You may not even know that your motivation is wrong.  When is the last time you took a step back and looked at your motiviation for the way you treat others?  I bet you don't think about it much but it's important. 

And that's another Opinion of the Minion