We are pleased to announce a new coffee partnership with Java Jolt, located at the corner of Butler and Holland in Mauldin. Owners Randy and John are so much fun and want to make your coffee experience the best in the Upstate. They serve homemade, delicious breakfast items too! Drop in sometime or visit their drive-through window. They also cater, call 281-3889.

Our first Java Jolt run was at Synnex in Greenville…from left, meet Melanie, Randy w/Java Jolt, James, Chris, Lance and Krish.  Be sure and enter your office on the Magic Home Page. Good Luck!

Meet one of our interns, Blake…in the middle. On Fridays, he joins Chris and me in studio for the Pick Your Idiot Game as our beloved time-keeper!  Isn’t he adorable?  But I’m old enough to be his Mama!

Happy Valentine’s Day to you!! The following article is by John Boakye, The Mirror [e-mail: jydboakye@yahoo.com]
The versions of the origin of valentine include birds and festivals but the most widely accepted version is about a catholic priest who lived in the third century and was killed for his exemplary acts of love. We therefore celebrate Valentine to understand and emulate the good examples of this priest.

The underlying factor in Valentine is love. The Greek word for love may be translated in many ways: philia or affectionate love, family love, eros or passion love and agape or unconditional love.

Valentine is therefore not only about romantic love. Everyone in relationship or not can therefore personalise valentine and celebrate some aspects of love.

St. Valentine was at peace with himself even when he was in prison. This means you do not have to be rich or be in a relationship to be at peace with yourself. You can’t find peace outside you.

Put yourself first. Love and believe in yourself. If you do not believe in yourself you can’t love others and they cannot love you. See yourself as good because you are wonderfully and fearfully made by your Maker.

Pamper yourself. Do not wait to receive gifts. Instead buy for yourself what you can afford to reflect how special you are and what you love, be they perfumes, books, gadgets or clothing.

Dress good. You may wear red fabrics to signify you are prepared to do all it takes to be what you want to be in life. You may stay at home and do anything that makes you happy. Watch movies, read a book. Play your favourite music, dance and laugh. Laughing is good medicine for the heart.

Valentine reconnected with nature. He had a garden and often took to a walk. Go out and spend time with the natural world. Walk along the beach or green grass. Watch the birds of the air. Quiet time gives relaxation and stress relief.

Be open to meeting new people and share social and religious activities. Who knows you may meet someone who will spend the next valentine with you. If you treat yourself special, you meet someone special.

Show kindness.

Do something special to show others that you care. Show verbal kindness by talking to friends and family members, give gifts you can afford, such as cards, flowers and chocolates.

The value of the gifts do not matter as the goodwill you show. Your act of kindness impacts positively on others and creates good relationships.

Valentine was good even to his enemy. This is a time to forgive yourself for the pain you have caused yourself and others. Be your own friend.

Forgive yourself for what has caused you pain. If someone abused your trust, disappointed you, left you when you needed him most, forgive him and see it as God’s plan to make you stronger and wiser.

Forgiveness is therefore a divine gift you give to yourself. Nobody can heal you but yourself.

Relationship

Uphold the dignity of marriage.

See it as of God and by God. He calls you into it to serve Him by what you do for your partner and humanity. If you are in a relationship resolve to nurture your love. Put focus on yourself and your relationship. As you show greater commitment, honesty, effective communication, forgiving spirit and prayer, you improve yourself and your relationship improves because your partner merely responds to what you do.

If you are single avoid abusing marriage by indecent sexual and promiscuous behaviours because valentine signifies love not lust, greed or selfishness.

This is a good time to propose.

Send a card to do all the talking for you. Simple sentences like “I am thinking of you”, “what do you feel about me”? and “where is our friendship going” may just do the trick for you.

Remember it’s always better to try than to regret losing a potentially loving partner because you refused to act at the right time

Can you be your own Valentine?

Valentine is for everyone because it is a celebration of love: If you are single do not dread valentine because it is a painful reminder that you are alone and have nobody to share your life.

You can always be your own valentine as you do something good for yourself. Get involved in the celebration. Celebrate in your own way. Nobody else can make you happy but you. No one can replace you.

If you are in a relationship enjoy the day. Whatever you do to show love, never forget that the one who deserves it most is you. Show true love with or without a lover.

Good valentine does not come and go. Love yourself and be your own valentine always.

Credit: John Boakye/The Mirror [e-mail:  jydboakye at yahoo.com]

Things do get better with age!!!! Enjoy!!!

A sheet of ice covers my town, and underneath, a dusting of snow is trying to breathe.  My heart, like the beautiful snow, has felt trapped for awhile.  The frozen rain that left me paralyzed at home for 2 days has given me time to unravel the jumbled thoughts bouncing around in my head.  I feel my future is about to change….for the better. As the ice thaws and melts into puddles of dreams …so too has my heart begun to melt and transform. What once felt true, no longer exists.  The realization that I really am the only one in control of my life, with the help of my dear Lord…is liberating! I can follow my heart, and the only approval I need…is mine.  I encourage you all to search your heart and find the peace that is already there. Whatever you think is holding you back in life…does not exist. The ice will eventually melt.

Meet the wonderful ladies in the accounting department of the Greenville Water System..they enjoyed lunch from Honey Baked Ham! Mary Rae, second from left, won the goodies for her co-workers! Thanks girls for listening to Magic!

Can you imagine living under a plastic sheet on a road outside where your house once stood…with no water, food or medical care….can you imagine the suffering of everyone around you after a devastating earthquake killed 200,000 of your fellow country men?  500,000 people are stranded with nothing…and many of them will die without immediate assistance. Relief efforts are underway in Haiti, but it’s slow-going, given the infrastructure has completely vanished. As we pray and send money, here’s a picture of an American Red Cross volunteer mothering who is for certain an orphan now. My God…I can’t not fathom the sadness. How this woman can hold this precious child as if nothing is wrong, in order to comfort the poor thing. It is remarkable the strength people have…thank you God for the American Red Cross, and the countless other relief workers and the global military… and for people like Winnie who are literally holding these people together.

Winnie has been volunteering for the American Red Cross since 1995 and has responded to hundreds of local, national and international disasters. Her first experience with the Red Cross was in 1990, when the Mexican Red Cross saved her life. She became ill in Mexico and didn’t have enough money to pay for a doctor. The Mexican Red Cross gave her medicines and fluid resuscitation anyway and when she was well enough to walk, the Red Cross nurse sent her home saying, “Don’t worry, I’m sure you’ll pay us back someday.” Winnie is fluent is Spanish and lives in Upstate New York.

How cute are they??  Meet Bart, the credit card guy, Michelle, Cindy and Tabitha who work around the clock at Foothills Bariatric Center. I popped in this week with fresh, hot doughnuts from Krispy Kreme and Liquid Highway java.  It was a comedy of errors as Ispilled most of the coffee on the way to visit them! But they were very gracious and very thankful. We appreciate them for listening to Magic 98.9!!!

I found this piece of writing beautiful. One thing I learned from this…how impatience can lead us astray. Patience is a virtue after all.

The Sacrament Of Waiting

Fr. James Donelan, S.J.

The English poet John Milton wrote that those who serve only also stand and wait. I think I would go further and say that those who wait render the highest form of service. Waiting requires more discipline, more self-control and emotional maturity, more unshakable faith in our cause, more unwavering hope in the future, more sustaining love in our hearts that all the greatest deeds of deering-do go by the name of action.

Waiting is a mystery – a natural sacrament of life – there is a meaning hidden in all the times we have to wait. It must be an important mystery because there is so much waiting in our lives.

Everyday is filled with those little moments of waiting (testing our patience and our nerves, schooling us in self-control.) We wait for meals to be served, for a letter to arrive, for a friend to call or show up for a date. We wait in line at cinemas and theaters, concerts and circuses. Our airline terminals, railway stations and bus depots are great temples of waiting filled with men and women who wait in joy for the arrival of a loved one – or wait in sadness to say goodbye and give the last wave of hand. We wait for springs to come – or autumn – for the rains to begin and stop.

And we wait for ourselves to grow from childhood to maturity. We wait for those inner voices that tell us when we are ready for the next stop. We wait for graduation, for our first job, our first promotion.

We wait for success and recognition. We wait to grow up – to reach the stage where we make our own decisions. We cannot remove this waiting from our lives. It is a part of the tapestry of living – the fabric in which the threads are woven to tell the story of our lives.

Yet current philosophies would have us forget the need to wait “grab all the gusto you can get.” So reads one of America’s greatest beer ads ­ get it now! Instant pleasure, instant transcendence. Do not wait for anything. Life is short – eat, drink and be merry because tomorrow you will die. And so they rationalize us into accepting unlicensed and irresponsible freedom- pre-marital sex and extra marital affairs – they warn against attachments and commitments – against expecting anything of anybody, or allowing them to expect anything of us – against dropping any anchors in the currents of our life that will cause us to hold and wait.

This may be the correct prescription for pleasure – but even that is fleeting and doubtful – what was it Shakespeare said about the mad pursuit of pleasure – “Past reason hunted, and once had, past reason hated.” Not if we wish to be real human beings, spirit as well as flesh, soul as well as heart, we have to learn to wait. For if we never learn to wait, we will never learn to love someone other than ourselves.

For most of all waiting means waiting for someone else. It is a mystery, brushing by our face everyday like a stray wind of leaf falling from a tree. Anyone who has loved knows how much waiting goes into it – how muchwaiting is important for love to grow, to flourish through a lifetime.

Why is this? Why can we not have it right now what we so desperately want and need? Why must we wait – two years, three years – and seemingly waste so much time? You might as well ask why a tree should take so long to bear fruit – the seed to flower – carbon to change to diamond.

There is no simple answer – no more than there is to life’s other demands -having to say goodbye to someone you love because either you or they have made other commitments; or because they have to grow and find the meaning of their own lives – having yourself to leave home and loved ones to find your own path – good-byes, like waiting, are also sacraments of our lives.

All we know is that growth – the budding, the flowering of love needs patient waiting. We have to give each other a time to grow. There is no way we can make someone else truly love us or we them, except through time. So we give each other that mysterious gift of waiting – of being present without asking demands and rewards. There is nothing harder to do than this. It truly tests the depth and sincerity of our love. But there is life in the gift we give.

So lovers wait for each other – until they can see things the same way ­ or let each other freely see things in quite different ways.

There are times when lovers hurt each other and cannot regain the balance of intimacy of the way they were. They have to wait – in silence ­ but still present to each other – until the pain subsides to an ache and then only a memory and the threads of the tapestry can be woven together again in a single love story.

What do we lose when we refuse to wait; when we try to find shortcuts through life – when we try to incubate love and rush blindly and foolishly into a commitment we are neither mature nor responsible enough to assume? We lose the hope of truly loving or of being loved. Think of all the great love stories of history and literature – isn’t it of their very essence that they are filled with this strange but common mystery – that waiting is part of the substance – the basic fabric against which the story of that true love is written.

How can we ever find either life or true love if we are too impatient to wait for it?