Living Happily Ever After
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Blog Articles

Make A Difference

Date: November 2, 2012  Author: Andrea Merriman

(This post is excerpted from a speech I gave in Las Vegas, Nevada, October 26, 2012 at the Aria Convention Center at a LifeVantage corporate event.)

There have been, and are, many inspiring people in the world. One person from history who inspires me is Leonardo da Vinci, but not just because of of his art. Yes, he is famous for his art, like “The Mona Lisa,” but he was also a scientist and inventor who envisioned many ideas long before the technology existed to build them: solar power, the calculator, weapons of war, motorized vehicles, parachutes and flying machines. Pretty visionary for a man born in the 1400s!

He dreamed big, left the world a better place and said, “I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough…being willing is not enough, we must do.” That wasn’t just Leonardo da Vinci’s philosophy, however. I’m fortunate to work for a company that also believes in doing, and changing lives, not just through its products and business opportunity but through its charitable efforts as well. Like da Vinci, we feel the “urgency of doing” and we ARE doing!

For example, earlier this year LifeVantage and its distributor generously supported LifeVantage Legacy (the charitable program of the Company) which resulted in a donation of over $53,000 to Deworm the World and contributed to improving the health, education and quality of life for over 3.7 million children in Bihar, India. That is significant!

Nelson Mandela said, “What counts in life is not there mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the lives we lead.”

I recently met a “modern day” man who inspires me. He’s a graduate of Cambridge and Harvard University and a philanthropist—he credits his involvement in philanthropy to being “completely and utterly rubbish” at operating a remote control. One night, while attempting to turn off his television he accidentally turned to a program featuring a 2-year-old girl who suffered burns over 90% of her body in a house fire. (The only part of her not injured was the wet skin under her diaper.) He felt he had to do something to help the little girl.

So he arranged to swim the distance of the English Channel in a swimming pool with two friends, and ended up with 10,000 people in 75 countries swimming for the little girl! Which made him wonder, “What if I got one million people to swim for something global, medical and nonpolitical—like malaria?” And he ended up with 250,000 people, including Michael Phelps, swimming for malaria. The world’s largest swim for the world’s biggest killer of babies and children under five years old. His name is Rob Mather, he founded the Against Malaria Foundation and he is an inspiring example to me of the power of one.

There’s an African proverb that says, “If you think you’re too small to make a difference, you haven’t spent a night with a mosquito!” We’re never too small, or too insignificant, that we can’t make a difference in the life of someone else.

Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For indeed, that’s all who ever have. (Margaret Mead, cultural anthropologist, 1902-1978)

I’m grateful to all those who have made my life, the lives of others and the world better through their small and simple acts as well as their heroic, global endeavors. And may we each strive to be like them in our own way and make a difference in the lives of others.

The Secret—Revised

Date: October 3, 2012  Author: Andrea Merriman

“Sometimes I think my life would make a great TV movie.  It even has the part where they say, ‘Stand by. We are experiencing temporary difficulties.’” (Robert Brault)

Life, especially the unexpected one, has its “difficulties.”

I once thought the secret to life had to be picking yourself up and carrying on despite challenges, making the most of what you’re blessed with (or handed, against your will) and choosing to be happy and to do the right thing despite disappointments.

Well, I’ve tried that. I’ve done that. And while it certainly makes for a happy and fulfilling life—and allows you to rebuild a life just as good or better than the one you lived before, I think, now, that maybe the secret to life is something else: endure to the end.

Because you’ve got to hang in there in the unexpected life while everything comes together. And after it all comes together, you’ve got to hang in there and endure during the new challenges life presents.

“Sure I am of this, that you have only to endure to conquer.” (Winston Churchill)

One Unexpected Adventure…Revealed

Date: November 24, 2011  Author: Andrea Merriman

“When I was a child I had a crush on Abraham Lincoln. Why I would choose to reveal this, I know not.” (Julia Roberts)

Revelation time.

I’ve had a few crushes in my day.

Not only that, I have something in common with Janet Jackson who revealed, “My first crush was Barry Manilow. He performed on TV and I taped it. When no one was around I’d kiss the screen.” Let me clarify: I have the crush part, NOT the kissing the screen part, in common with Janet.

When I was a child I also had a crushes on Mike Smith (a little boy in 1st grade–but the crush soured, sadly, when Mike gave me a heart-shaped box of chocolates for Valentine’s Day that was too big to fit in my desk and my classmates teased me about it!); Tim Horn (a boy in my 2nd grade class); The Lettermen; Shaun Cassidy; Kurt Russell; the buck-toothed boy from Disney’s original “Escape To Witch Mountain;” Stewart Peterson; and Donny Osmond.

I remember several nights as a child, arguing with my cousin, Athena, about our Donny Osmond crushes and who “got him.” Athena never failed to insist, “I get Donny because I’m older than you and closer to his age, you can have Jimmy—because you’re younger.” But I didn’t want Jimmy Osmond, I had a crush on Donny!

I even watched “The Donny & Marie Show” each week and I knew every song on their “Deep Purple” album by heart! And then Donny filmed “Goin’ Coconuts,” he married, and I grew up—and experienced many other crushes, but those are another blog post. (It did strike me as ironic, and funny, however, that as I drove off “just married” in 1989—my first marriage—Donny Osmond’s “Soldier of Love” was playing on the radio! A fitting conclusion to my childhood.)

I was married for 20 years, and happily so. I was a mother of four children, absolutely fulfilled in devoting my life and my efforts to my husband, children, home and church and community service. And then, in one moment, on one day, it all ended. Oh, the bleak and black absolute despair I felt! Indescribable. Within a few months I found myself divorced, single, working full-time and living in Utah attempting to create a new life for myself and my children as I raised my four kids alone. I carried on, but a big part of my shattered heart was sure I’d had my turn. That every good thing that was ever going to come to me was in the past.

And then, unexpectedly, I fell in love and got married again. Now I have a crush on my husband.

Even more unexpected: the day I found myself driving through the roads of Utah County in my trusty Subaru Outback station wagon to have lunch with…Donny Osmond!

All I can say is that if anyone had told me when my life fell apart in 2009 that lunch with Donny Osmond was in my future as part of my unexpected life, I’d NEVER have believed it! But it’s true.

“Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what’s for lunch.” (Orson Welles)

A News Story

Date: June 15, 2011  Author: Andrea Merriman

It’s official.

Another opportunity for me and my children to share some of what we have experienced and learned in our unexpected life.

Jennifer Stagg, a news personality on NBC affiliate Channel 5, in Salt Lake City, Utah, did a story on our family which aired last week.

Here is the link to see the news story, if you’re interested:  http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=15904053

What I noticed most about this opportunity was the continued healing that has taken place in myself and my children, especially my middle son. He was just 9 years old when his world shattered; too young to understand a lot of what was taking place and to understand why it was happening. However, last week’s interview reminded me that a lot of growing up takes place from 9 years old to 11 years old!

Although this particular child didn’t want to participate in the interview, he agreed to stay in the yard and play while it was taking place. And then, unexpectedly, before the filming wrapped, he came in the house and hung around the film crew. I asked, “Is there something you want to say?”  He replied, “Yes.”

So Jennifer sat down and asked him some questions, including things about his old life, things about his new life, what he had learned and how he felt about it all.

As for what he missed about his old life? The fields behind our Colorado home that he played and rode his dirt bike in–and his friends. “If you have friends and family, that’s all you really need to be happy though,” he explained. “And I’m happy in my new life. My new life is just as good.”

“Really? What do you like about your new life?” asked Jenn.

“That I have a stepdad who is really nice, nice to me, who really likes me and who I really like.” (Too bad #5 was out of town on a business trip and didn’t get to hear that, huh? I shared it with him when he got home!)

He concluded by offering his wisdom: hard things happen, you just have to carry on.

Count his emotional well-being and healthy outlook and happiness in life as yet another miracle we’ve been blessed with, thanks to the triumph of living…the unexpected life.

“We are all broken and wounded in this world. Some choose to grow strong at the broken places.” (Harold J. Duarte-Bernhardt)

He sure has.

If The Phone Doesn’t Ring

Date: January 18, 2011  Author: Andrea Merriman

“If The Phone Doesn’t Ring, It’s Me.” (song title by Jimmy Buffet)

Telephones.

Let’s just say I’m not addicted to them. Never have been. Probably never will be. But last night I realized what an impact the phone has had on the love lives of the women in my family, so I have to share.

The Henrie-Jorgensen-Christensen women have a history with…the phone.

My Nana, Vonda Henrie, (born in 1903) worked as a telephone operator when she was a teenager. She was the old-fashioned kind of telephone operator, the kind featured in black and white movies or tv shows, the woman wearing a headset that you called and asked to be connected to a certain phone number—and she’d connect your line to another one by hand.

One important rule for operators was the one about never listening in on the conversations of other people. I think my Nana was obedient to that rule, too, until the night a boy she had been dating called during her shift and asked to be connected to another girl!

Can anyone blame her for breaking the rule that night? Of course she listened in! And even at age 90, as she recalled it, she shook her head in disgust at the “lovey-dovey” things she overheard her boyfriend say to the other girl.  I asked, “Oh, Nana! What did you do?” She gave me a satisfied smirk, a wink, and a smile as she said, “Oh, nothing much…except disconnected them when I’d had enough of his nonsense!”

“There is something about saying ‘Ok’ and hanging up the receiver with a bang that kids a man into feeling that he has just pulled off a big deal, even if he has only called the telephone company to find out the correct time.” (Robert Benchley)

And then Nana had a son.

My dad.

“No, sir. The Americans have need of the telephone — but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys.” (England’s chief engineer of the post office, when asked whether the new ‘Yankee invention,’ the telephone, would be of any practical value)