Family Life and Friendship Network

I recently attended a fireside with Richard and Linda Eyre, who have co-authored several popular books, including "Teaching Your Children Values", "Teaching Your Children Responsibility", "Teaching Your Children Joy", and "Three Steps to a Strong Family". He talked about Serendipity and started out with some commonly understood definitions of the word. One definition people commonly use is "dumb luck" or encountering random fortunate events. Later in the fireside, Richard gave a better definition. I'll also give it later as well.

Richard gave a couple examples of serendipity in his own life. When he was 28, he was going to run for congress. He would have been the republican candidate against a democratic incumbent. Shortly before he would have been placed as the official candidate, he was called to be a mission president in England. The republican candidate that ran in his place ended up winning the election. At the end of his mission presidency, he was privileged to see an eight hour pre-screening of "Jesus of Nazareth", and was chosen to be in charge of marketing the film world wide. Brother Eyre gave this as an example of serendipity. He had planned to run for congress, and would have even been the winning candidate, but instead he got something better that he could not have planned on - to serve as a mission president and then because of that, get the opportunity to see the full 8 hours of "Jesus of Nazareth" and be put in charge of marketing the movie after he completed his mission.

After sharing that serendipity with us, Richard gave a couple more examples from his life and then gave us a better definition from the person who originally coined the word: "Serendipity is a state of mind whereby a person through sensitivity and awareness frequently finds something better than what he was looking for." Brother Eyre added "and faith" so the definition says "through sensitivity, awareness, and faith". Thus, serendipity is not "dumb luck", but something that happens frequently to those who develop the correct state of mind, achieved through sensitivity, awareness, and faith. We are a checklist-driven people. We make checklists for everything. We even write something on the checklist we just did sometimes so that we can immediately cross it off. Serendipity suggests that these checklists are not always so important. Sometimes, if we listen to the spirit, we will realize something better than anything we planned on. Don't develop a "can do" attitude. Instead, develop a "can't do" attitude: "I can't do that, but I can with God's help". You'll find that you frequently find something better than what you were originally planning on.