Wednesday 2 April 2014

AUTHOR OF THE MONTH! Morag Wade Mackay with FACES & FOOTSTEPS


You are what you think you are……

Think more of yourself and there is MORE!

As a teenager I was quiet and really quite shy.  Deciding what I was going to wear and which pop star should go up on my wall was the scope of life’s choices but even at that stage I wanted MORE out of life. So I asked for MORE, not realising how much I would get. I got a life filled with challenges and many highs and lows but I also got an understanding that any adversity came to make me MORE.

Faces and Footsteps – A Simple Celebration of Life is a story of personal triumph; it is a story of overcoming utmost distress of an overwhelming nature; it is a story about being on a mission to succeed so strong that every stumbling block became a stepping stone to ultimate success.

I was born in Paisley, Scotland and came to South Africa as a toddler. Being brought up by parents who believed that children should be seen and not heard my life was uneventful. Until the early hours of June the 7th 1980.

On the way home after celebrating my 17th birthday the motorbike that I was riding pillion on was involved in a collision. My injuries were severe, amongst which I broke my neck and subsequently lost my right arm.   While I was hospitalised for 9 months I began my journey of self-discovery and my new lease on life.  During this time, I became inspired by overcoming the many obstacles that were presented to me, in turn loving life as I have come to know it.  I underwent numerous operations to get me safely on the right path to make my life an adventure of success.  Literal baby-steps were the order of the day, as I rediscovered how to walk, talk and breathe again.  I was able to move beyond the “if” word and experienced enormous benefit from my new limitations.

Among the mayhem, I completed my matriculation and was introduced to the open market as a working class girl with a difference. One hopes that a single life lesson is enough, but through the years I was to find out that opportunities would be lost should I choose to live in the past and that tests of compromise and adversity would be my destiny.

I progressed from strength to strength and felt rewarded and fulfilled when I got married.  I was able to put negativity aside and met each assault stronger than before.  The challenges I faced and overcame allowed me to unearth the ‘Morag’ from where my name is derived – the great one!

Many doctors, nurses, paramedics and physiotherapists invested much valuable time and knowledge to get me to the place that many spinal cord patients only dream of, - to walk out of hospital.

Completing a task on my own that I would normally have done with two hands does take me a while longer, but the satisfaction of being able to do it by myself gives me a renewed sense of purpose and is rewarding enough to justify my efforts.

Accomplishment is the building block to having a good opinion of yourself and for some reason I found myself giving thanks for all the little mundane things occurring around me that I had previously taken for granted. I found that living in this positive realm of thankfulness attracted all that was good.  Life was unfolding for me.

For whatever the reason, I was to be given a second chance and at the age of 17, the test of compromise and courage began. Had God appeared in my life? I did not ask Him to be there. Was this by divine intervention or had I innocently invited him? For whatever reason, He was there to carry me on my path to success.

Undoubtedly, I was to learn and grow from substantial adversity and through God’s grace I was to be guided and protected along the way.

This book is my story but it is my wish that it will make you look into the losses and challenges of your own lives, to enable you to find the Hero within yourselves.

Faces and Footsteps reaches out to the awesome people that I met on my journey and the ‘footsteps’ are also those of the faces that journeyed with me and how they too came to rise above adversity, how they also learnt how to celebrate life and learnt to grow victory beneath their feet.

I want this book to act as a mirror, to show the reader how to look deep within and to start a process of self-discovery that turns so called “misfortune” into hope and renewed opportunity.

 

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