Vice President’s Letter (11/1/25)
November 2025
Let me share the three steps that show how feeling gratitude can transform your life.
She was so young, just beginning her teen years when she ran away. I was out of my mind with grief. I posted pictures of her asking if anyone had seen her. The waiting and not knowing was killing me.
Finally, she called and then came back, but not alone. She had found a man 10 years older who was a gangster. I knew he was trouble but I tried to be-friend him. I hated him from the start and I knew he was abusive.
The first part of gratitude
is not knowing you need to be grateful at all.
The circumstances seem so awful,
so unfair, that you can’t imagine being thankful for any of it.
She then told me I should be grateful to him because she was about to be trafficked to Mexico. He saved her.
The second part of gratitude
appears in the pain and anguish
a small flicker,
a fragile light
born in the middle of what hurts most.
How can a person be grateful and filled with hate for someone at the same time?
I could not be grateful to a man who was abusing my daughter, yet did he save her from a worse fate or was the circumstance she found herself in now, worse?
I was grateful that she was here, though I did not know where she was. I knew she was somewhere close by.
The third part of gratitude
comes when you learn to find it
in the smallest places,
even in the darkest times.
You begin to understand – often after failure or loss –
that the way through it
is to find gratitude.
When you find the power of feeling grateful in your life, you can affect others with the simple question. “ What happened today that you can be grateful for?
It was time, time helped me see that yes you can be both grateful and still be weary and not trust others.
The greatest gift that I was given was to claw my way into being grateful for all I have experienced good and bad and that all of it, all of life’s experiences can shine the lights of gratitude in us.
My daughter bore a child who is now a grown man from these challenging times, who’s doing amazing things with his life, and I am grateful.
In Gratitude,
Teri
Teri Ismail
Vice-President
Sepulveda UU Society
818-724-4260
For more information and access to other events, sign our Guestbook!