Welcome to my blogger page. My professional profile can be found at DeirdreWRussell.wordpress.com and over at LinkedIn.com.
You can also find me at streamofcontinuousness for the fun stuff and fluff....oh and baby pictures.
This blogger page will mostly be devotionals and meditations on scriptures. I'm not promising to be serious here though. I seriously believe that God is Fun.

Enjoy my pages and I hope you come back to visit often.

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Sunday, February 27, 2011

my new mission

my new mission is simple

smile more.

what? you ask. Well I just had a very humbling experience.

I think of myself as a fairly cheerful person. Fun to be around, etc. And photos of me pretty much bear that out.

See? lots of smiles.

But….that is only what happens when I look at a camera and deliberately smile. Apparently my normal, neutral face doesn’t smile very much at all.

How do I know this?

Well I just got home from a solid hour of video taping. My dear, darling wonderful husband got the joy of hearing, over and over and over again a short (3 minute long) piece that I had written at the request of our pastor regarding my job layoff and some of the things that came out of that.

The piece is full of joy and hope and purpose. Or at least the TEXT is full of joy and hope and purpose. But if you turned off the sound and just watched my face you would think I was announcing the death of thousands or something. Seriously, I looked bleak. And I had THOUGHT my expression was pleasant.

So we did it again. This time I will try to smile, really.

and again.

and again drat it.

I finally got it right after 5 takes.

It gave me a whole new appreciation of just how much attention I need to pay to my physical expression and the impact it can have on my message.

But wait, I’m not a pastor. I’m not a paid speaker. Why do I have to worry about this stuff?

Well the folks at my work and in my family and friends know I am a Christian. They know that I profess to have God in me. So shouldn’t that show? Shouldn’t I look different? If I say I have the Joy of Christ Jesus in me, doesn’t it follow that my face would show it? At the very least it should show when I am actually talking about the joy of Christ.

So that is my new mission – to spread the joy of my Lord by smiling more.


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