Lou Holtz - Trust • Commitment • Love<-click
Wow! Lou just made me cry, laugh, cry, and laugh some more.
This isn't all there is to life and success, but boy howdy! it's a good start!
I look at the blessings in my life, and my childhood seems so foreign, yet so familiar. I hope my kids didn't miss something in life because God made me more financially capable.
My story:
Born in a small, Indiana town to a family that did not know God. That changed before I was a year old. The earliest memories of my dad are of him not having a job, and not having luck finding another one. I remember him working in a fruit stand, selling local produce for someone we knew. The only time I have ever ridden on a tractor was when he was helping that same man in the fields. I rode on his lap.
Eventually my Pawpaw found Daddy a job in Alabama, and we loaded up our belongings and headed south. No home, just relatives to depend on. I remember arriving in Tuscumbia at Pawpaw's house, where we lived for a while.
Over the years we lived in houses with no toilet or tub, used an outhouse, bathed in the yard in a steel tub, stood in line for cheese and peanut butter, used food stamps, spent weeks without electricity because we couldn't pay the bill, carried drinking water in old milk jugs from Mawmaw's house or running off a bluff, wore secondhand clothes, wore whatever shoes the Dollar Store sold, often relied on charity for food, spent weeks eating potatoes and bread, learned to play for hours with sticks and anything else I could find, often found our best Christmas gifts waiting on the porch after a trip to the grocery store on a Saturday evening, watching and later helping my dad keep old rust buckets running so we had transportation, and the list could go on.
But I also soared to the moon in a spaceship made from an old shopping cart. My brother and I traveled the United States in our RV/bed with the aid of an old Rand McNally atlas. I broke world motocross records on my flea market bicycle. I climbed mountains, fought ninjas, explored the darkest jungles, fought wild animals, carried out secret missions, and always got the girl, though she probably didn't know it. :)
Then I went home to a filling meal, a warm bed, and parents who loved me, and prayed for me.
Yes Lou, I, too, was born with a silver spoon in my mouth.
