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Count your blessings

  • Published
  • By Lt. Col. Mark Kraby
  • 92nd Operations Support Squadron commander
FAIRCHILD AIR FORCE BASE, Wash. --  Several weeks ago, I attended "Resiliency Training" for the first time and was so impressed. Here at Fairchild AFB, we're fortunate to have cadre of motivated instructors to guide us through this new Air Force requirement. A participation exercise, made a significant impact on me and I've been thinking about it ever since. It was a simple question designed to show us what's truly important in our daily lives and how we can use it to motivate and fortify resiliency.

The question was, "What have you been blessed with over the past three days?" The task was to name three blessings and share with the group. Pretty easy, right? I thought of my family and wrote down several items that I considered simple blessings. Individual time spent with my two daughters over the weekend -- a short trip out for a cup of coffee with my oldest. A few laps at the dog park with my youngest daughter and our dog, Cassie. We had a family meal together -- actually sitting down at the dining room table and some quality time on a date with my wife Stacy.

However, as I kept thinking, it became apparent than as a U.S. Air Force member, the answers or "blessings" were more numerous. In the Air Force, we're truly fortunate and richly blessed, maybe more than we recognize each day. Each one of us has an extended family outside of our immediate family -- our Air Force family, and it sounds overly sweet, but our Air Force family cares.

This really hit home when I visited my immediate family over Thanksgiving and talked with my brothers and parents about their corporate jobs and the corporate cultures they navigate on a daily basis. As we talked, I started to think about and consider how very fortunate and blessed we are to be parts of something bigger than ourselves. We are part of an enterprise that genuinely cares about our well-being of its members and will do just about anything to ensure we've got the tools we need to succeed and accomplish the mission safely. That's not a given and doesn't always happen outside the gate. There's no resiliency training out there or front-line supervisor who is as invested in our well-being as your current Air Force supervisor is or your commander. That's probably not the norm outside the gate.

Think about our Air Force Core Values: Integrity, Service Before Self and Excellence in All We Do. Deployed and in garrison, we're blessed to be able to come to work every day in an environment that reveres so many positive qualities such as honesty, justice, responsibility, self-respect and respect for others, openness, discipline, accountability and community excellence. You just don't find that everywhere. This is what makes our Air Force special and this is what makes us the best in the world. It's about the Airmen getting the mission done every day and the fact that every step of the way, we are committed to our Airmen.

Take some time this busy holiday season to reflect on what your blessings. Although none of us won last week's $580 million Powerball Lottery, we're all probably a lot richer than we may initially think.