Dear Sweet Ones,
I started writing love notes to my Beachy Beach Office officially in 2010 when I opened. I actually started this practice as an employee working outside sales at a lighting company. I had this loving energy in me and I wanted to get it out. This is when I started using the motto, “The only people we have to get even with are those that have helped us.” I would bake homemade chocolate cookies and put them in a brown paper bag. On one side of the bag I wrote the motto, and on the other side I wrote, “Have a sweet day!!” Get it? Cookies—have a sweet day.
By the way, my husband thought it was brilliant and adorable!!!
Okay, I think I was rather hokey, but hokey or not, those contractors on the job sites remembered this little short stack girl trudging through the job site dodging nails and such to garner their business. At that same time I felt this overwhelming desire to write a sweet love note to the people that I worked with. Mostly a happy note filled with lots of love and grace and all the stuff that filled my heart and had to pour out.
Thankfully it was well received, and when I went back to Real Estate full time and later had my own business that was built after the great recession of 2008, I continued to write a monthly love note.
Let’s pause a minute to mention why I was not full time in Real Estate at that time even though I had my license since 2003. The bottom had fallen out, and Hugh and I went several years without a paycheck. Yes, as in NOTHING!!! So I ended up taking a job at Lighting Etc. at the time and sold lighting like my life depended on it. The Real Estate sales were ZERO!!!
Hugh and I had weathered the storm for over 2 years, but our savings and our hope ran out, and he went and got a job at Rosemary, and I originally did lighting, then back to education. All the while I continued to read and study and attempt Real Estate. I eventually got back full throttle, as is evidenced by this precious company, Beachy Beach Real Estate.
Back to the love note portion of this story!! It was truly a love note. It was a pouring out of me. Feelings that had no avenue but escape. Something would hit me during the week and I felt it was a message that helped me, touched me, or taught me something. I just had to share it.
Sometimes I wrestled with the sharing. The writing was always easy; the sharing was not. The sharing is still not easy, and I am often embarrassed, but I do it anyway. I would sometimes feel exposed; sometimes they felt silly and nonsensical, but I wrote them anyway.
These love notes are a great lesson for a people pleaser—to write and not worry about the outcome. I would just follow my heart’s leaning and pray that someone is touched like I have been touched by the writings of other brave people.
I know this love note saga is all over the place, but hopefully I can bring it full circle.
For 17 years I have written these notes, and in that time I have missed 2 notes—one when my husband died and one when my daughter-in-law, Rachel, died. And one time we chose for Scott to write one for the fun of it while I was away.
Many years ago a few people in my office said you should compile these in a book, especially Lindy Bryan. I thought about it, and I even started putting them together. I started editing, and I even got a team together to go over them and pick the best ones and help me with editing. I was so excited. I remember that day at my kitchen table over 8 years ago at least. I felt so energized and so proud of myself that perhaps I could do it. Perhaps I would do it.
So why do you not have that book in your hands? The one I was so pumped about, and so many told me that there were messages that might bless others. I know that many of them have blessed me. Why is that book not out there?
One person—just one person—told me that it was not a good idea. It did not make any sense. So that compilation of love notes is still in book binders gathering dust in my corner of my closet. One person!! Seriously.
I am almost embarrassed to write this. This note may make it to all of you, or the few of you that would read it, and it may not. It may stay sadly and quietly in my docs.
This week, I held in my hands my first published book, and it is out there, warts and all. It is out there after all the second guessing and the fretting over the fact that I am less than clueless about all the business decisions and formatting decisions and lots of words that, when told to me, my eyes cross and I am a little deflated. There is so much that I don’t understand.
What I do understand is that in the writing and the publishing of the first book, after much fear and wavering, this one is finally in the works as well. I wish I could get rid of all the scared feelings and the embarrassment I feel when I do this. But if I cannot do that, I will keep on trusting that God has put something in me that is only in me, and if I don’t release it, then it does not get released.
I am so thankful that other authors before me have been brave enough to put their work out there. Maybe one day someone will look at me as the brave one that paved the way for them. I pray that you NEVER ever stop something that is born in you and must come forth. I pray that you always listen to the spirit of God and the spirit of you that is placed in you.
So take this as my promise to you that I am braver now in the doing of the one thing, and my goal is to finish this 365-day devotional book based on all of my love notes and then some. My goal date is the beginning of October, and perhaps in the telling of it, hope will sprout wings. And when people tell me I can’t, I will remember that I already have wings like that butterfly that is my new symbol, and I will remember that I can and I will.
Thanks for loving me through all these years!!!
Karen Key Smith
ps. It feels really weird and unmerited to call myself an author but I will work on getting accustomed to it.
