You think this is just another day in your life? It’s not just another day. It’s the one day that is given to you today. It’s given to you. It’s a gift. It’s the only gift that you have right now, and the only appropriate response is gratefulness. If you do nothing else but to cultivate that response to the great gift that this unique day is, if you learn to respond as if it were the first day in your life and the very last …
My mum and dad were married in London in 1937, with the threat of war with Germany imminent. By 1941 they had two children, a boy and a girl and my father was working at the local air force base in aircraft maintenance. One day while he was working on an aircraft, a malfunction in one of the engines resulted in him suffering massive head trauma from a moving propeller. His injuries were significant and …
I lost my father to cancer when I was 13 years old. He was a great daddy, and just like every other daddy’s girl I loved him a lot. I didn’t find out that he was sick until a week before he passed away. He hadn’t wanted to worry me or make me sad. That didn’t work out so well. I struggled throughout high school. Being a teenage girl is hard enough but I missed …
I arrived on Australian shores a few weeks after my third birthday, in December 1951. My mother, father and younger brother and I were ‘ten pound poms’. The promise of a new life, employment and sunshine had lured my family, along with hundreds of thousands of others, to leave the challenges of life in post war Britain and embrace a fresh start in Australia. We eventually settled in a suburb of Wollongong, NSW called Dapto. …
Madeline Jessica Ramsey was born on 15 January 1994 at Gosford Hospital, NSW, Australia. When she was seven months old, she was adopted by Michael and Carol Ramsey. Madeline has Down syndrome and lives with her family in Wollongong, NSW, Australia. Here is a letter that she wrote to her birth mother for Mother’s Day. Dear Lynda, I want to tell you about my life. I have two cool brothers Nathaniel and Samuel. I love …
