Editor: Richard (Dick) Innes
Published by: ACTS International
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Vol. 18 - No. 4816 November 26, 2016
Thought
for the week: "It's in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped." – Anthony Robbins
Weddings can be adventures. I will never forget one several years ago that
went just beautifully until the very end of the ceremony. In that tender
moment when bride and groom kissed, the bride's five-year-old brother, the
ring bearer, let out with a "YUK!" The congregation was on the floor
laughing. As people left that afternoon, the place glowed with everyone's
grins. And in years to come, when people think of that wedding, the one
thing they will remember is YUK!
- Dr. David E. Leininger, "This Jesus is Something!"
"The only big ideas I've ever had came from daydreaming, but modern life keeps people from daydreaming. Every moment of the day your mind is being occupied, controlled by someone else—at school, at work, watching television. Getting away from all that is really important. You need to just kick back in a chair and let your mind daydream."
I recall, as a boy, a man who lived on one of the most thickly settled streets on the East side of New York City. We children coming and going from school would often times see him. He was a little old man with a gray, straggly beard, who dealt in coal and ice. He had his place of business in a dark basement underneath a huge tenement. In winter he sold coal and in the summer he sold ice. He would sell coal by the bucket load and would carry these buckets up three and four flights of stairs. In the summer he would buy large cakes of ice, cut them into smaller cakes, and carry them up five, six flights of stairs to his customers. He was always bent under a load. We called him "Humpback," though he was really not humpbacked. This little man with the gray, straggly beard, "Jacob the Humpback," died quietly like all humble folks, as he had lived.
A few years ago I learned that one of his sons, because of the labors of "Jacob the Humpback," had become a professor of mathematics in a large university, and another had become a surgeon. I suddenly asked myself, "Little man, how big were you?"
Abba Hillel Silver in James W. Cox, The Minister's Manual 1994, San Francisco: Harper, 1993, p. 46.
Vince Lombardi believed that mental attitude accounted for 75 percent of the ingredients of winning. Everyone wants to win, but most people don't believe they can, and therefore give up before they have tried. The more you believe you can win, the harder you will work. The harder you work, the more you will believe you can win, and the longer you will persist until you succeed.
– Ari Kiev, A Strategy for Success (New York: MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1977), p. 39.
No one wants pain, troubles or hardship, but it's absolutely inevitable that we all will have plenty of each. And they won't come at times of our choosing or in doses we think are manageable. Adversity is never welcome, but it's not necessarily our enemy.
As the blade is sharpened by friction with a harder stone, our character and the quality of our lives can be shaped and strengthened through struggle and striving. Shakespeare said, "Sweet are the uses of adversity / Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, / Wears yet a precious jewel in his head." Adversity's precious jewel is cut by the chisels of confidence and competence, forged in a process of confronting and overcoming difficulties. As Nietzsche said, "What does not destroy me makes me stronger."
This poem by an unknown author reminds us that what we need is not always what we want:
I asked for Strength
And God gave me Difficulties to make me strong.
I asked for Wisdom
And God gave me Problems to solve.
I asked for Prosperity
And God gave me Brain and Brawn to work.
I asked for Courage
And God gave me Danger to overcome.
I asked for Love
And God gave me Troubled People to help.
I asked for Favor
And God gave me Opportunities.
I got nothing I wanted.
But I received everything I needed.
The road to achievement and fulfillment is dotted with hazards and tragedies that can wound us, frighten us and slow us down. But afflictions and misfortunes can stop us only if we surrender. If we exercise courage, patience and perseverance, we can overcome any adversity, bearing pains we cannot relieve and solving problems we cannot avoid.
This is Michael Josephson reminding you that character counts.
"Then he [Jesus] said to them, 'Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.'"1
We recently had a speaker at our church who conducted a class for parents to help protect them from becoming infected with "affluenza." The idea being that we and our kids can get so caught up in the world of materialistic affluence that we miss the real meaning of life.
I believe that one of the main reasons we are so materialistic here in the West is because we are so emotionally repressed. Emotions are God-given. They add beauty and interest to life. When they are repressed and denied, life can be deadly dull and empty.
Furthermore, when we bury emotions, we tend to settle for counterfeit experiences and the feelings they produce. For instance, when the emotion of love is repressed, there is a tendency to substitute lust which can look like love and feel like love—but it isn't love and a very poor substitute at that—and leaves one more empty, lonely, and unsatisfied.
Also, consider the emotion of wonder—the emotion that puts sparkle into life and moves us deeply when a baby wraps its tiny hand around just one of our fingers and in so doing touches our very heart. When wonder is repressed, we become "characteristically bored with life," and tend to turn to materialism in a vain attempt to fill the empty void in our heart. And instead of loving people and using things, we end up unhappily loving things and using people.
So if we want to avoid the problem of "affluenza" and the blight of empty materialism and learn to fully live and fully love, it is essential that we get in touch with—and connected to—all of our God-given emotions.
Suggested prayer: "Dear God, please deliver me from the blight of materialism which can easily become the driving force in my life. Help me to get in touch with all of my God-given emotions and use them in the manner and ways you designed them to be used so that I will learn to fully live and fully love. Thank you for hearing and answering my prayer. Gratefully, in Jesus' name, amen."
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