My word: You are a promise, you are a possibility

When American cartoonist Charles Schulz said, “There is no greater burden than an unfulfilled potential,” he probably didn’t have anything like a global pandemic on his list of obstacles. 

Schulz was famous for the cartoon strip 'Peanuts'. In a career spanning 50 years, he drew 17,897 Peanuts comic strips, which were published in 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries and in 21 languages. Yet Schulz discovered his love for drawing as a shy and timid child who loved to draw the family dog. Who would have thought? Talk about potential. 

When I think about missed potential, I think of a large stainless steel pot that was meant to cook hundreds of family meals over decades but which was placed on a high shelf to gather dust. Unless someone takes it down from that high shelf and washes it with hot water and lots of soap, no one will know how shiny it once was. 

And still, it won’t matter how shiny or how heavy or how durable the pot is...if no one cooks in the pot, it will just be a shiny piece of metal that is shaped into a container. 

How many ideas, how many talents, how many dreams are you sitting on that are yet to see the light of day? Is there something you love doing, something you are really good at that you have pushed aside because you are too busy trying to survive? 

Or perhaps you’ve set aside a brilliant idea “for emergency use” -- you’ve told yourself you’ll only bring it to life when all else fails and you have only one matchstick left. 

Don’t wait until you have only one matchstick left. If you wait too long, the matchbox might get wet.