Every detour is a spiritual adventure

Enjoy this excerpt from my new book!

This is my first, and favorite chapter i

n my new book: Little Detours and Spiritual Adventures.

Life handed you a winning lotter ticket. Play it.

Gambling isn’t my thing, but I have won the lottery more times than I can count.

Maybe you win of dreaming the lottery. The truth is, Life already gave you a winning lottery ticket. You’re sitting on it. No, it’s not under your chair. I’m not Oprah so you don’t get a free car or a trip to Disney.

You get something better.

The lottery tickets I’m talking about don’t look like winners.

Your lottery ticket could be buried under your deepest shame. Mine was.

My family was BIG on religion. I come from a devout Irish Catholic family. We had a three-foot-high crucifix over the TV set in the living room, a huge, framed print of the last supper in the dining room, rosaries tucked under the bed pillows and an almost life-sized statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in my parents’ bedroom. It looked like a church blew up in our house. 

So when this “good” Catholic girl ended up pregnant at 21, it was a real shocker. I was a student at Kent State University, and I was on the parish council at Immaculate Conception Church (insert cringe).

How to tell my parents? I was a coward, so I wrote a note and stuck it under a refrigerator magnet (insert a longer cringe.) I dropped out of college. My parents let me stay there to get on my feet and loved being grandparents. That baby girl I had was the greatest gift of my life. Still is.

When my daughter turned 6, I went back to college so I could better support her as a single mom. After changing my major six times, I finished a 4-year degree in 12 years, graduated Kent State at age 30 and began my career as a journalist. In time, I wrote about being an unwed mother to make it easier for the next woman and her family.

Decades later, a woman who had heard my story introduced me to a friend, Sharon, who was in her 20s, was single, pregnant and needed support.

I’m like, that’s MY ticket! I got the unwed mother ticket!

I met Sharon and invited her over for dinner to meet my daughter. They became great friends. That Thanksgiving, I invited Sharon to join us. Thanksgiving morning, she called and asked, Can I bring my brother? Of course. Hours later, in walked Sharon and her brother, James, a handsome man with piercing blue eyes.

My daughter married him three years later.

My three grandchildren have those eyes. Their aunt is Sharon, the woman who got my lottery ticket. Her son is their cousin.

It’s amazing what happens when you play your lottery ticket.

Your lottery ticket could be tucked inside your greatest challenge. Mine was.

I didn’t marry until I turned 40. A year later, I found a lump in my breast. Stage 2 breast cancer. The fast-growing kind. The oncologist explained my three options: surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. Which do I get? All of the above, he said.

My chemo cocktail consisted of Adriamycin, Cytoxin and a drug called 5-FU. I think every cancer fighting drug should be called F-U. I was going to lose my hair 14 days after that first chemo.

I bought a human hair wig and took it to a salon to style it to look like me so the world would never see me bald. The salon ruined the wig and wouldn’t return my calls.

Meanwhile, my hair was falling out. I was eating cereal, and suddenly, my Cheerios had bangs. When I finally got the wig back, I couldn’t wear it. They had overpermed it and ruined it. It looked like roadkill on the highway.

So I went boldly bald. But most days I didn’t feel so bold. When I went to see the musical Beauty and the Beast, a child in front of me kept turning around to stare at me. I wanted to say, “The Beast is up there!”

After I survived cancer, I tried to turn my powerlessness into power for others. I started giving speeches to cancer survivors. I spoke at a fundraiser for the Cancer Services of Northeast Indiana and saw they had free wig salon!! I took photos, showed them to the head of The Gathering Place, a support center in my hometown, Cleveland, and urged her to create one. I gave her the money from my speeches for seed money.

We grew three free wig salons, one on the East Side, the West side and at MetroHospital in Cleveland.  You’re going bald from chemo? That’s my lottery ticket! I can’t cure cancer, but I can make the journey a bit easier.

Your lottery ticket could be hidden under an avalanche of grief. Mine was.

I have 5 brothers and 5 sisters. That’s 10 lottery tickets! People always ask, where are you in the line up? I’m 5 of 11 – which sounds like the Star Trek character, 7 of 9. Yes, we had our own football, baseball and soccer teams.

My parents did their best, but there was never quite enough Mom to go around. Imagine doing laundry for 13 people every week. Our basement dirty clothes piles looked like the Appalachians of laundry.

My deepest wound was that I never quite felt a mother’s love, never felt that mom/daughter connection. Most of my life I felt hungry for it. Starving.

So when my Mom got Alzheimer’s at the end of her life, I figured that bond was never going to happen. Turns out, it was another sneaky lottery ticket.

She asked me to take her to doctor appointments. We had endless trips to Dairy Queen after each one. In time, I found a memory care unit for her.

While caring for her, I met and came to love the woman I never knew inside the mom who was so busy raising all those kids. I also came to love the girl inside that woman, a girl who had once felt as bruised as I did.

My mom played her final lottery tickets at that nursing home: She crocheted hats for the homeless. Slippers to warm the feet of children she never met. Prayer blankets for chemo patients.

My mom never stopped serving, never stopped scratching off her lottery tickets, never stopped making everyone around her feel like a winner.

So what’s your lottery ticket?

Your lottery ticket could be a difficulty, a diagnosis, a disappointment. It could be a failure, a flaw or a part of your very identity that you struggle to accept.

You know what it is. 

It’s up to you to decide that your darkest secret or greatest challenge or deepest wound is no longer going to be your liability. It is your lottery ticket.

Your lottery ticket might be Parkinson’s or your mom’s Alzheimer’s or your son’s autism. Your lottery ticket might be bi-polar disorder or depression or alcoholism.

The truth is most real lottery tickets are losers. You scratch them off, feel unlucky and toss them out. But with a life lottery ticket, when you use it for others, no one loses.

Whatever you have been handed in life or will be handed in life, there will always be something you don’t want. Something you wouldn’t choose. Something the Universe needs you to share so you can be of service and heal some corner of the world.

My friends in recovery taught me this beautiful promise that turns their sordid past into someone else’s sacred gift: “We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.”

We’re all sitting on a life lottery ticket. You can choose to make it the greatest gift that you give the world.

How?

Name it. Identify it. Deep down inside, you know what it is.

Claim it.  Accept it. Befriend it. Embrace it.

Play it. Share it. Blog about it. Write about it. Create art around it. Volunteer around it. Let it inform and inspire your work.

Because you didn’t come to planet earth to make A difference.

You came here to make your difference.

Life handed you a lottery ticket. Play it and you make you – and everyone around you -- a winner.

You can pre-order Little Detours and Spiritual Adventures now!

You can also watch the TEDx presentation that inspired this chapter.