I enjoyed a classic Live with Flair moment yesterday when my oldest daughter decided to check her Spam folder from her gmail account. She found a vital email from a university involving a scholarship application that was due on the very day she happened to check her junk mail. She quickly filled out the application and sent off the email, but we realized a valuable lesson:
Not everything deemed junk or spam actually is. We review the category; we look carefully at things we might have dismissed. Quite possibly, things we quickly count as worthless, an inconvenience, or malicious might, in actuality, serve as a source of blessing and joy.
Living with flair means we keep our hearts and minds open. We review our assumptions and categories. We embrace possibility and give people a chance and even our full attention–especially those others might cast off.
And, in a deeper sense, we think of our own identity as valuable, relevant, worthwhile, important. I know people–especially younger women (and on the other hand, retired men and women)–who’ve designated themselves into a junk category when they need to move themselves to a different folder. They need to star themselves, move their worth from irrelevant to the very top as a child of God and a treasured possession. In gmail, when you finally delete all the spam, you see a little message that says, “Hooray, no spam here!”
No spam here!