Inspired by Hurricane Ian: Counting My Blessings and Keeping Faith Through Hard Times

This is the kind of place where your glass will never be anything other than half full because we choose to focus on the positive side of life.

Now, this doesn't mean that we shy away from the real talk.

No, not a chance.

Matter of fact, we explore all aspects of life.

From the good, the bad, and the ugly.

But all of that is done with one purpose.

unknown: One purpose.

SPEAKER_00: To inspire you to never give up on life, even when it may seem like life has given up on you.

Now I get it, life is hard.

But starting today, you've got grit, grace, and inspiration.

What's going on and welcome to episode 126 here on Grit, Grace, and Inspiration.

Today is a solo edition here on the podcast.

And well, today I was planning on talking about one subject, but then life got in the way.

Well, you could say that the weather got in the way because I had all planned out this one topic that I was going to dive into today when then last week happened.

Now, if you're listening to this at the time of its release, you may understand what I'm talking about when I mentioned the name Hurricane Ian.

Hurricane Ian made its impact felt on the state of Florida last week.

And well, I should know all too well about it because I am a Florida resident myself.

And so when I wanted to record today's podcast, I just had the hurricane weighing heavy on my mind because, well, I'm seeing all the destruction like everybody else, watching the news, watching all the people's lives who have just been completely turned upside down.

And I couldn't help but think to myself, you know what?

I need to talk about the way that I'm feeling right now, watching all of this and being somebody who, you know, is an outsider to it in a sense, but really I was there too, in the hurricane myself.

Just my perspective is a bit different than unfortunately so many people's.

So to catch some of you up to speed who maybe aren't familiar with what just happened with Hurricane Ian last week, is that we had Hurricane Ian coming up.

We knew it was going to enter somewhere along the west coast of Florida.

We didn't know exactly where.

And of course, you know, those hurricane tracking maps, they had us thinking it was going to go one place when it had other plans to go another.

And so we knew, though, that it was going to hit, and it was predicted to enter the state of Florida, not nearly as big of a hurricane as it ended up becoming.

And let me just say this: when this thing hit the state of Florida, it was almost as strong of a hurricane as you can get.

It was literally a couple of miles an hour away from being categorized as a Cat 5, which is the biggest and baddest hurricane there is on the scale.

So here on the east coast of Central Florida, we knew that the West Coast was going to get it bad.

It was going to be devastating for them.

But we knew that by the time the hurricane comes onto the state, it's going to lose a lot of its momentum.

It's going to lose a lot of its strength.

And therefore, you know, our impact, you know, won't be that much.

That's been our experience in the past.

And so, you know, we kind of went with it.

Well, the impact of Hurricane Ian has been absolutely devastating to Florida.

And now it's even gone back out into the Atlantic Ocean and is aiming its sights on the Carolinas.

And so the time you're listening to this podcast, I don't even know what it's done in the Carolinas because that's still to come.

Right now, it's just literally exited the state of Florida.

It's in the Atlantic.

And I'm sitting down to record this podcast for you today.

Now, what was crazy about this hurricane is that a lot of times what we focus on is the winds.

We're all focused on the wind speed.

And because we know the higher the wind speeds, the more damage that is going to be done.

And I can tell you that living where I do, when the hurricane came through, the wind was whipping.

Luckily, it was nothing strong enough to do any damage besides for, well, grabbing a wooden fence or two in the back of my house and throwing it down, along with some big oak trees in the neighborhood and just kind of scattering debris all over the place.

But for the most part, by the time it reached us over on the East Coast, the winds had died down enough that that wasn't such a big deal.

What the big deal about this hurricane, though, was the flooding that it brought.

The amount of flooding was something that I have never seen in my lifetime living here in Florida from a hurricane.

It's been absolutely devastating.

And today I sat watching the news, watching my fellow Floridians across the state where the hurricane entered Florida, and even back here on the East Coast in my very city, watching homes underwater, lives destroyed.

And I just thought, oh my gosh, how absolutely horrible.

And that's really what brings me to the topic that I want to talk about today, is honestly the internal struggle that I have faced while facing this hurricane.

Because as a Florida native, you would think I'd be somebody used to the heat and humidity.

Because, you know, well, that's basically our weather forecast always here in Florida, is it's gonna be hot and humid.

Well, truth be told, I'm a Florida boy who hates the heat and the humidity.

And so I'm somebody who I survive off of some air conditioning.

Well, the bad thing about hurricanes is that it's pretty much a fact, it's gonna steal your power.

It's gonna take the electricity, which in turn means it's taking your air conditioner.

So here I am in the midst of this hurricane, and the power is off, the house is hot, it's ridiculously humid.

And all I can find myself doing is praying, like, oh God, please just let the let the power come back on.

Or even leading up to it, praying, God, please keep us safe.

Please don't let our power turn off.

Please keep the power on.

All the while, though, then starting to realize the damage that this hurricane was making.

And so I started to realize when I was praying that I kept having a struggle because I kept wanting to ask God for my heart's desire, for things that were affecting me.

But at the same point, thinking to myself, Kevin, how can you ask for that when you see what's going on, what these other people are going through?

And that's really what has prompted today's topic.

Today's subject matter is the struggle of following our own heart's desire, asking God for things that we want, for wanting, for needing, yet at the same point struggling because we understand that in the grand scheme of things, we're so fortunate.

We're so lucky.

Where I am in Florida, where what happened to my house, I am so fortunate because we didn't have damage, we didn't have our home flooded.

Yeah, we lost electricity for what 24 hours, and then it's back on.

In essence, it was really a minor inconvenience.

Meanwhile, other people, my fellow Floridians, their lives have been completely changed forever.

And I couldn't help but think of that.

And I couldn't help but ask God for forgiveness, telling God, God, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry for being so selfish.

I'm sorry that that here I have been so focused on me, so worried about me, that I'm allowing that to overshadow what's happening on the big picture.

And I wonder, have you ever had that in your life?

Ever had a situation where you realize you've been so caught up about you that you kind of forget about everybody else.

That's what pain, that's what hurt does to us, that's what fear and anxiety does to us, is it really does make us blind to the rest of the world.

It has us focusing only on us because we can't dare think about anyone else because we're so caught up thinking about how we feel.

And we just want to get out of that.

And so that's what I was facing until I realized, man, Kevin, you gotta stop this.

You gotta start thinking about other people.

And now here's what's kind of ironic about this whole conversation is the fact that I've been faced with this before, but on the other side.

Because, you know, if you know my story, you know that back in 2003, I became blind following the discovery that I had a brain tumor.

I had that tumor removed and had my life saved, but came out of surgery to be left completely blind.

Well, in the years after becoming blind, I would oftentimes have people ask me, Kevin, does it irritate you?

Does it bother you, upset you when you're around people and they're complaining about what's going on in their own life?

And in the big picture, it pales in comparison to what you've just been through.

And people ask this, you know, very serious.

And I've always answered the same way.

No, of course not.

Because everybody's problem is big to them.

And that's what matters, is their problem.

I don't want them to dare think that they can't feel sad or disappointed about this because of what happened to me.

Because we're all living our own life.

We're all experiencing life on our own terms, and we're gonna have the good days and the bad.

So it honestly, it's not fair to make this comparison game about who deserves to pray to God today more than somebody else.

We all get to pray.

We all get to focus on our own problems.

And when I think about it, I kind of realize that I've always kind of had this mindset about me of not wanting others' people's feelings and stuff to be put ahead of my own.

And thinking about it, I really think back to after I went blind.

And in thinking about it, I think back to that same brain surgery that I talked about, the same tumor that was removed, the same surgery that then had me awake to be left completely blind.

Well, that same surgery also really embarked me on a new journey in life of medications.

Because the type of tumor that I had, it had completely killed off my pituitary gland.

Now, if you know anything about the pituitary gland, you know that it controls all of your body's hormones.

Well, now here I am with a list of medications, shots and pills, and creams and lotions and all this different stuff to now try to replace what my body is supposed to produce naturally.

Now, one of those medications was something that most people are familiar with, and that is HGH or human growth hormone.

No, we're not talking about uh performance-enhancing drugs at the Olympics to make you swim faster.

No, we're actually talking about people like me who actually truly need human growth hormone.

Because here I was 17 years old, but I was only five foot three because I had never really started growing.

And so I start on human growth hormone and I start growing and growing fast.

I think I was up to growing a quarter inch a month, all the way to the height I am today, which is just over five feet 11 inches.

So I went from a kid who was five foot three to five foot eleven in a pretty short amount of time.

Now, the bad thing about medications is they're never as good as what our body can do naturally.

And so by growing so rapidly, so quickly, it also caused some other side effects.

And one of those was that my left leg below the knee, the shin bone, had started bowing outwards.

And so here I am now growing.

I'm up to basically the height I am today, but now I'm having all this major leg pain.

And so that prompted a new set of doctors' visits.

And long story short, has me checked in as a patient up at a hospital in North Carolina.

The surgery went well, but there was another just boatload of complications that came along with it, and me and my medical issues.

Something that I've come to realize is just kind of a signature uh thing with Kevin Lowe, is um nothing ever quite goes as planned.

So, what that meant is that the surgery that was supposed to have us up there for maybe a week instead has a has us up there for I think about a month in total.

Now, this was leading up to Christmas, and here I am in a children's hospital.

And it was towards the end of my stay.

It was, I think, if my memory serves me, coming up on Christmas Day.

And one of the nurses had come into my room and had told me and my parents that they had an entire room filled with every toy you could imagine.

They had been collecting these toys.

They had been donated for the kids of this hospital.

And so the nurse came in to ask me if I would like to go pick out whatever toy I wanted.

Well, I responded politely with a no thank you because I knew that I was getting ready to get to go home soon.

And I also knew that there was a whole lot of other kids in this hospital who weren't gonna get to go home.

They weren't going to get to be home on Christmas Day.

And I also knew that there was a whole lot of kids in this hospital that had it worse than me.

And so I didn't want to take a toy that maybe one of them would like to have.

And so I declined that opportunity.

And that is something that I feel is so vital for us to remember is that no matter what we're talking about in life, there's always somebody who has it worse.

Yeah, I know.

Sometimes that can seem hard to imagine, but I found it to be the truth.

There's always somebody who has it worse than you.

And one of the best ways to overcome what we're going through, I have found, is to focus on thinking about the person who has it worse than you.

What can you do today to help them?

That's what got me involved in different support groups through Facebook for people who are blind or for people who have other health issues like me with no pituitary clan.

And is ultimately what has led me to become a coach, all starting with this mindset that there's always somebody who's got it worse than us.

And so, although it's important to recognize our own feelings, and it's important for us to have our own desires and to never hesitate to ask for what we want, to make it known what is hurting us, whether that is to our friends, our family, or it's prayers.

We need to make it known.

But at the same point, I do believe that it is healthy.

It is good for us to also think about other people, to think about the people who do have it worse than us.

And, you know, not only can that lead to us thinking about ways to help them, but it can also really just be a benefit to you by helping you have kind of a big picture reality check on life of, hey, you know what?

Maybe this isn't so bad after all.

And that is where I wrap up today's episode with the final thought.

Whether it's a hurricane affecting an entire state's population or a medical issue affecting just you.

There's always somebody who has it worse.

So think about them while at the same time remembering that it's okay to care about yourself.

We need to care about ourselves.

What do they teach us in scuba diving?

You gotta take the breath first, then pass the regulator to the other diver.

Yeah, we gotta help ourselves to then be able to help other people.

So that's my kind of crazy solo episode here for the podcast, still kind of in a fog from the past couple of days.

And I don't know.

I've made it through it.

I've gotten you today's episode that hopefully can give you a little bit of insight into life and always with the hope to make today a little bit better than yesterday.

Hey, real quick before you go, I have one last thought to leave you with.

I of course hope that you've enjoyed today's episode, but more importantly, I want to remind you that I never want you to listen to an episode of this podcast to hear something that I have to say or that my guest has to share and think, wow, I wish I could be like them.

I wish I could overcome my own challenges and do the great things that they are doing, but I just can't.

Well, friend, that's where you're wrong.

unknown: You're wrong.

SPEAKER_00: You are capable, you are able, and you darn sure are deserving of having all that you can imagine in this life.

There's nothing special about me or any guests I have on this podcast.

We are all just normal people trying to make it in this life.

And so I encourage you to take a look at yourself in the mirror and remind yourself that you know what?

I can do it too.

Now, of course, if you would like help along that way, reach out to me.

Whether that's as a listener of this podcast, a friend, or if you'd like to work with me as a coach.

My contact information is inside of every episode's show notes, just like this one.

So go down, check out my contact information, and reach out to me today.

With that said, I encourage you to take on the day every day with grit, grace, and inspiration.