Hope Focuses On Possibilities

Daily headlines can be so devastating. They can plunge our spirits into the vast, all encompassing darkness of the deepest reaches of a coal mine. The light of hope seems elusive with so few good or uplifting events headlining the news. Yet one tiny flicker of light is all that is necessary to focus our thoughts on the vast array of possibilities in any endeavor on which we yearn to embark. That flicker of light is called hope.

What does hope mean to you when you hear the word? What images does it conjure up in your mind? Is it the encouragement of doctors when you are given a difficult prognosis? Is it seeing a stranger lifting up a bombing victim and carrying her to medical help? Is it a child running with joy to a cat in an animal shelter as he spots his new best furry friend?

 Hope focuses on the future. Hope urges our souls to look at potential, even if we are unaware of that simple childlike focus within us. Hope fueled the efforts of the engineers designing the first rocket for the first manned space launch way before it became a possibility, much less a reality. Hope is as simple as enduring winter in anticipation of  the first buds on an apple tree linked with the anticipation of biting into the first apple. Hope is as exciting as watching your grandchild build a sandcastle on a beach while watching the incoming tide and hoping it will not reach his masterpiece.

Think of all of the instances we risk negatives while keeping focused on the possibilities.

What story can you tell a discouraged person about a risk you took while intently eyeing the possibilities? Is it a focus that inspired hope and moved you forward rather than keeping you in the bondage of never having attempted to succeed?

How might you inspire a person to focus on their situation’s potential? The situation does not have to be monumental. It could be as simple as encouraging an elderly person to watch birds flitting to and fro or encouraging a post surgical patient to attempt a few steps to look at life beyond their four walls.  It could be eliciting a child’s courage to rebuild his tower of blocks that dashed his joy as the tumbled down around him.

Today and every day offer someone, as well as yourself, the hope of possibility. The flame of possibilities burns in our souls, but sometimes it is close to being extinguished. Fan the flame of potential in your life and the lives of others today. Possibilities pursued in the past have yielded realities that have changed our world for the better.

 How will your possibility change your world or the world around you? Begin today!

 

 

 

A Day In The Life: First Person Overload

A Day In The Life: First Person Overload
how dio I subscribe to this regularly

Our Arms Are The Ones God Holds His Children With

For me, there was nothing better in the world (well, maybe with the exception of chocolate!) than being held in my Daddy's big strong arms when I was a little child. He was my hero...so tall and handsome...always more than willing for my twin and me to tumble all over him when he came home after a week on a business trip. He would lie on the floor and become the jungle gym as we laughed at his tickling us and basked in the joy of being in his presence. Daddy was home! All was well with our world.

In today's world many children do not know what it is like to be hugged by a Daddy on a regular basis. With the divorce rate  high, as well as the deaths or absence of our military overseas, there are children who go to bed night after night without a time of play or a good night hug from their dad. 

Those children need loving arms wrapped around them and it is our arms that are the only ones God can utilize to hug His children. That is a very powerful thought. There are so many people who need a father's hug...or a mother's hug for that matter.

  

We have a loving heavenly Father who loved us so much He sent His Son to die on a cross for us, but are there times when you yearn for His physical presence and a hug?

There is a remedy. We need to grasp the concept that we can be the loving arms of God. We, as His creation, are the only beings He has endowed with the capability to give a hug to His children , as well as to our pets… those precious creations He placed on earth to demonstrate the power of selfless, devoted love.

The next time you see someone who looks like they have lost their best friend, you might ask them, “Could you use a God hug?” Tell them God loves them and cares about them and you realize our human arms are the only way God can hug us.

Always ask. Never assume. Perhaps what will mean the most to someone is not the hug, but that you noticed them or cared to reach out.

If given, your hug may be the only hug a person has for a day or a week or a month and by hugging them you will allow their soul to feel the hug of a Heavenly Father who cares enough about us individually to know the number of hairs on our heads.

Who can you offer a God hug to today?  Perhaps it will be the only touch they will  experience today or even this week or month. And you most likely will receive a hug in return!!! A bonus for the receiver as well as the giver.

Heavenly Undertaking from the heart of God!

Those Who Beef Too Much Land In The Stew

Would you prefer filet mignon steak or beef stew?

For most folks there is no comparison. Filet mignon wins hands down, especially if someone else is buying!

There are as many grades of beef as there are human attitudes. Now I am not saying all life experiences should be prime ones. Ground beef, ground chuck, pot roast and beef stew are viable alternatives. A diet of all candy or a diet of all prime beef is not as good for you as a diet of various cuts of beef as well as chicken, seafood or even occasionally a vegetarian meal for us meat lovers.

Attitudes also have various grades just like beef at the butcher shop. A perennially “do gooder” is questionable company as is a chronic complainer. Both are seldom listened to for more than a few minutes. Do you really want to spend your valuable time with someone who cannot find even the tiniest bit of good in anything? Perhaps a Pollyanna is worse yet! Both can do a mighty fine job of getting your dander up.

It is wise therefore, for us to each take an inventory of our verbalized attitudes. Solitary grumpiness is our choice to make, but we need to button our lips in public for the well being of others.  Although valid feedback can lead to prosperity of businesses and even in folks’ lives, incessant negativity is as deadly, and unwanted, as a viper bite.

Beginning tonight, and every night to come, take a truthful inventory of your lip service during the day. Was there an appropriate balance of negatives and positives being “fed” into your surroundings?  Did your cohorts benefit from your care-filled lip service today?

Neither all sweetness and light nor all negativity is appropriate, but hopefully there was far less gristle-y beef in the stew of your surroundings. The news headlines have more than enough gristle for all of us, so consider adding some sweetness to your day tomorrow. Perhaps not full strength sugar, but rather some lighter, low calorie sweetener to evoke a smile and gratitude for your presence rather than making stomachs turn at your approach.

Were you a sugar cube or were you stew today? You may not know the answer, but I bet your colleagues do!!

When You Lose, Don’t Lose The Lesson

It is a fact of physics that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.  Sir Isaac Newton was addressing the laws of physics, but his theory can also be applied to life experiences.  There are wins in life, but also losses.

It is easy to be a winner.  We watch the Olympics and applaud the winners of the gold, the silver and the bronze medals as THE athletes in a particular sport, but not winners are not on the top of the awards podium. The opponents of the winners can be winners as well if they do not lose the lessons learned from the winners of their event. In the case of the Olympics, perhaps the lesson is devoting additional hours to future training or replacing a coach or moving to another city where the world’s most renowned coach trains a particular sport.

We win by learning lessons just as a toddler learns how to get peas in his mouth after numerous failures exercising not only his patience but his mother’s picking up the flying peas from her kitchen floor.

The toddler must learn the lesson of getting food to his mouth in an orderly manner. The athlete must learn additional lessons from his or her coach and devote the necessary hours of training to reach the gold medal platform. In both instances, loss is the greatest motivator.

The greatest positive, although it might not seem to be so at the time, is failure, IF the failure results in renewed efforts to succeed based on the lesson learned by failing.

No great inventor succeeded the first time. Thomas Edison said, “I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.”  

Helen Keller, deaf, mute and blind from birth said, “Do not think of today's failures, but of the success that may come tomorrow. You set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere and you will find joy in overcoming obstacles.”

Winners win because at some point in their life they experienced loss and were motivated by it.

You can sit and suck your thumb and hold a pity party or you can focus on the gold medal awaiting you atop the victor’s stand of life. Which will it be?

Everyone Wants a Harvest, But Few Want To Plow (#3)

I love the flowers of summer. My patio is filled with assorted pots…about 40 of them in a very tiny space. And there is every color of flower that God created in those pots. They are profuse with blooms and I sit and soak in all the intricate tiny details of each blossom and thank God for His extraordinary creative Hand.

But that array of blooms comes with a price. The price is dirt under my finger nails and broken fingernails! It is breaking up clots of dirt and allowing no clay in the soil. It must be a rich nourishing soil that takes a lot of preparation to bring forth the harvest. And the harvest does not come instantly. It takes time which means watering and the precise amount of fertilizer when it appears that there will be no desired results. It takes time to search out the plants I want and analyze which combinations will be most beautiful in the planter. Furthermore, some thrive in the sun while others die with too much sun, so it takes careful planning and tender care of the plants for them to flourish.

If I step on a tender plant without being careful not to step around it, it will die. Too much water and too much fertilizer will kill it. All care must be in moderation.  It takes effort. It also takes a desire to want those flowers. It took a lot of people willing to give of time and effort in the greenhouses to bring seeds to the point of the seedlings that I could then bring to the point of mature growth.

Look beyond the labor necessary to plow the soil. I can go and buy a bouquet at a flower stall at the local market and enjoy it, but there is a far greater sense of satisfaction and fulfillment when I have given my time and effort to co-create with God a harvest of beauty.

It takes time and effort and lessons to paint a picture or write a book or create a garden, but the time invested in the knowledge reaps rewards for the pocketbook, possibly, but far greater  rewards of personal accomplishment for the creator.

Be The Change You Wish to See in the World-Ghandi.

If only people did not get so impatient on the road and try to pass in a no passing lane or get on the bumper of the car in front of them If only people loved each other and were less critical, there might be no war. If only people did not pick the wild flowers so everyone could enjoy them. If only…..

Life is full of if onlys. And each of us seems to have an if only list, as if we were never the one at fault. It is so easy to judge others and not look at ourselves and our behaviors.

We need to stop our other- focused commentary, look at our own  actions, and let the change that we wish to see in others begin with each of us.

Transformation is not easy. It is a slow, sometimes ugly, process. A few steps forward and often times many steps back.

Our transformation into less critical human beings reminds me of  the goldfinch at my  early spring feeder. What a pitiful looking sight.  Late winter or early spring, when thoughts in the bird world turn to love and nesting. So, of course, Mother Nature adorns her creatures in their Spring finery. How else to attract a mate? But the change in feather finery is not an overnight process. In the middle of early spring molt, the goldfinch is starting to become  a radiant yellow, but still has remnants of the dusty brown of “off season”. Hardly the  bright lemon yellow beauty ready to go a courting. But wait! A day will come in the near future when the goldfinch with be as bright yellow as the sun. But after replacing one feather at a time. It is a process to get to radiant beauty.

One day we are brown and then we become splotchy…even perhaps not as charming as we were during the days of our less than best behavior. But the people in your world will be amazed the day when the transformation is complete and one less-than-best attitude or behavior is a thing of the past.

On to the next transformation. Just as with the goldfinch who must,  once again  molt and change for the winter and then again the next  spring and season in and out, change is a continuous lifelong process.

 We are a work in process. Birds change feathers and we change attitudes and behaviors. The transformation starts with letting go of just one feather…one bad attitude. The world is beautiful with grayish goldfinches in winter and splotchy ones in early spring…but oh! It is just breathtaking when the transformation is complete and they brighten their world with their completed transformation. The gold finch world takes on new excitement once the new outfit is complete. Love is in the air!

 Let the transformation of our souls/attitudes begin. The path to change in our behaviors is a slow step by step process.  Like the goldfinch’s experience, it might not be a pretty process. We might lose our tempers or lose sight of the process for a time. But the effort is worth the process. How bright our little corner of the world can be if we exchange even one behavior at a time. Our world will take on new excitement. Love will be in the air as we become the change we wish to see in the people around us. We can become the role model. They might even consider the molting process for themselves when they see how radiant we become in our new soul outfits!