The Heart of "Celebrate Confidently"
Listen to Episode 01 of Celebrate Confidently the Podcast or read the script below.
Let’s just get right to it. Why Celebrate Confidently? For me, celebrating is about more than just party planning.
Parties are great. But celebrating is about acknowledging someone or something in someone's life and saying “I see you. You're not alone in this.” Whether that's something exciting or whether that's something that's hard. By celebrating all seasons of life -- the good, the bad, the big, the hard, the small, and the silly. We say “You're not alone. I see you, I'm coming alongside you, and you won't ever do this by yourself.”
That's my heart behind celebrating. Whether it's sending someone a Starbucks gift card via text on their first day of a new job or just sending a quick message to remember someone’s anniversary or sending a card to someone... MAN! We cannot underestimate old-fashioned snail mail. Or throwing a party and going above and beyond because we are communicating to our people: “It's not just a party that I'm throwing. I see you in the details and I want you to feel loved by my efforts.”
Celebrating can be the kind of gift that you give, the way you wrap the gift and present it. The way that you sit and listen well in a conversation, the way we don't back away from asking hard questions or having hard conversations. Because we're celebrating our friendship, we're celebrating our relationships, we’re celebrating and respecting who that other person is and we're willing to go into the hard things. It's also celebrating who they are and how God made them: their personality, their strengths, their weaknesses, their challenges. The things that they're good at and we need to call them up to.
Celebrating is so much more than just being able to have good etiquette and having a pretty party. It's more than spending money on details. Truly, the best celebrations can be done for not that much money, but it does take some thoughtfulness and some forward planning. And that's my hope -- that I can share with you things that I've learned along the way as I have done it not so well and as I have been able to learn how to do it well, so that I'm not overwhelmed, overworked, or overspent from my budget, but that I'm also acknowledging and celebrating my people and myself well in these seasons of life. Confidence comes not from our ability to celebrate others “perfectly” -- because hi, that’s not really a thing -- but with a pure heart and an unfrazzled mind. Having a plan can also help. I’d love to encourage you in the first part and equip you with the second.
So, are you in? Would you join me? I hope that you will because there is so much good in the world and there's also a lot of hard right now. What better time to really zero in and focus on acknowledging the good stuff? Because it's there and we need to celebrate it. Let's go.