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Daily Encouragement for Better Living

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MARCH, 2009

A Sunday school teacher was recently doing a lesson on Jesus healing the blind and the lame, when she stopped and asked: "Do you even know what 'lame' means?" One kid said, "Sure. 'Uncool'." Hmm. Language is a slippery thing. It's important to remember that what you intend to say isn't always what's heard and vice versa. Ask questions to be sure you've been understood and that you understand. Assuming mutual understanding can lead to miscommunication and unpleasant consequences. And, besides, it's lame.
Most mistakes aren’t fatal. Don’t let fear of making a mistake immobilize you. Take action. If it turns out to be a mistake, you can almost always correct it. Michael Jordan missed about half his shots and he was the greatest player in the NBA. You just have to keep moving and take the next shot.
It's a beautiful sunny and relatively warm day. When March rolls around, and there is a warm day, it's a sign that winter is doomed. While you might still get some frigid temperatures or a blizzard, you know that it can't last. Spring is pushing it off the stage. More daylight hours enocourages optimism. Problems are less imposing in the light. As the season starts to turn, use it as a catalyst for optimism. See yourself entering a season of new light and energy. A time when you will set and reach new goals. See the obstacles to your success as doomed like winter's icy grip.
Drudgery is not a virtue. If you think "adventure" and "irresponsible" are synonyms, it's time to rethink. Risk-taking often is the responsible thing to do. "Boring" and "safe" are not synonyms either. Boredom is actually very dangerous. It makes you incapable of taking action when you need to. Get out of your rut and find a little adventure.
Michaelangelo Buonarroti's birthday today. He could bang on a big rock and turn it into an extraordinarly beautiful creation. It is amazing to me that he could look at a hunk of marble, see a statue inside it, and then chisel away everything that wasn't the statue. His creative vision coupled with the manual skill to make the vision a reality has blessed us with some of the greatest works ever made. While we might not be able to match Michaelangelo with a hammer and chisel, we can transform ourselves into a great work. Start by thinking about what you want your life to look like. What is the beautiful creation hidden inside you. Don't get stuck on the rock, what you think you are right now, imagine what you want to be. Then, you don't need to know every hammer stroke in advance, just decide what the first stroke is going to be to move toward the vision and take a swing. Maybe the rock will chip off the way you planned maybe it'll chip a little bit different. After the first stroke, you'll be able to decide how to make the next one. Just keep going one stroke at a time. Before long, the you you're looking for will start to take shape.
"He thinks he's God's gift to women!" This is not a compliment. But, we actually can and should be gifts to others. We can offer them encouragement, support, a laugh. Who thinks you're a gift to them? Who's a gift to you? Make a point of telling people how they are a gift to you.
"Do you know if I can get over when the light changes?" This is what the woman in the SUV next to me at the trafiic light asked me. My first thought was "I don't know. It looks like it would be tough." It took me some time to figure out that she was actually asking me if I would wait so she could pull in front of me and turn at the intersection. Once I figured this out I said "Sure." I'm glad I figured out what she meant. I'm not sure why she didn't just ask "May I please cut in front of you when the light changes so I can turn?" She would have gotten a quicker answer. Direct requests are easier to grant.
As I was about to pull out onto the street, a car drove by with it's back end badly caved in. I pulled out behind the car and was thinking "I wonder how that happened?" when I had to stop suddenly. The car had stopped at a green light. "Well, that answers that question," I laughed. Of course, his stopping at this green light was no evidence at all that he'd ever done it before or that it was the cause of the dent in his trunk. I simply jumped to a conclusion based on a very limited sampling of the guy's driving. Before you draw any conclusions about someone, make sure you've spent enough time with them to get a full picture.
What do I stink at? Let me count the ways? Do you find yourself thinking like this? We seem to have been trained to look at our shortcomings and to try to fix them. " Hey! If I just work hard enough and long enough at this, maybe I can be mediocre!!" What's the point. What we should be doing is working on the things we 're really good at. Getting even better. Excelling. We'll be happier and the world will be better off when we take our strengths to their fullest potential and don't waste our time trying to achieve mediocrity in our weak areas.
Who is wielding the brush that's painting the portrait of your life? Is it you? Or is it the dead hand of somebody in your past (or present for that matter) slopping paint on the canvas in a way that doesn't do you justice? Don't relinquish the brush. Take it back if you have to. You're responsible for the way the picture turns out. Don't let somebody else make a mess of it.
Do you take yourself seriously? Does it matter to you what other people think of you? Are you troubled by the idea that someone else might not respect you? If you answered "yes" to these questions, chances are other people think you're a jerk. Generally, the more you want to get other people living in a way that satisfies your ego, the less they are going to want to do anything for you. You might get some phony signs of respect thrown your way but the genuine thing is not likely to be there. We can't make other people respect us. All we can do is try to be worthy of respect and let the chips fall where they may. If you're obsessed with being respected, it's unlikely you'll act in a way that makes you respectable. Having and showing genuine respect for others is a good place to start being respectable.
The bookstore has a huge selection of self-help books. Diet books. Exercise books. Relationship books. How to get rich books. If you really want to act to improve your life, you can probably find a book or two in a half hour that will give you a plan to follow that will work for you. You can be a rich, thin, muscular, happily married individual relatively quickly if you follow the plan. That's the hard part. Following the plan. It requires actually wanting to change and being willing to actually do something different. For a lot of people, buying another book is just an excuse not to act. They tell themselves the next book may have the answer. It probably does. Just like the last book did. The answer is get off your butt and do something. Some plans may work better than other plans. You can refine your plan as you see what works best for you. But all plans work just the same if you don't follow them. Not at all.
Years ago my wife and I were walking near a pond. Suddenly, she started laughing. There was a sign in Spanish next to the pond. She translated the sign for me. "It says: 'No Weighing.'" Instead of using the Spanish word for "fishing" the signmaker had used the apparently similar word for "weighing". Can't you just picture the guy sitting by the sign with a big stringer of fish telling the cop "Yes, I caught all these fish but I didn't weigh a single one of them!" Just because you know what you meant doesn't mean anybody else does. Make sure your message has been received and understood.
My daughter feeds the cats. Cats are optimists. They sit outside her bedroom door whether it's feeding time or not. If she walks to the basement (where they get fed) they run down with her, even if she's just going to do the laundry. They attend her every move because she might, just might, be about to feed them. They are always ready. Humans are not like cats. We are not always ready. We lose heart when success doesn't arrive immediately. We doubt it will come so we quit being attentive to the things that will bring it about. A cat would not make this mistake.
Roberto Clemente was my favorite baseball player. He was one of the greatest of all time. He wore #21. This is not about him. My son, Tom, just finished his high school basketball career. He also wore #21. What impresses me most about Tom as a basketball player isn't the over 1,000 points he scored in three seasons, or the hundreds of rebounds he pulled down, it's the passion and hard work he brought to playing the game. If I could make a highlight film of his high school career, it wouldn't show his long 3-pointers, or his smooth drives to the basket. No, it would show him diving on the floor to grab the ball, and defending much bigger guys so effectively that they couldn't score, and (my favorite), getting fouled by those guys because they're so frustrated by the fact he's keeping them from scoring that they shove him away. They say the measure of a person's character is what they do when no one is watching. The basketball equivalent is playing defense. Tom worked hard to learn how to play great defense and he applied what he learned with tremendous passion. People in the stands may or may not have noticed, but a bunch of guys in different colored jerseys did. Thanks Tom! You taught me a lot through the way you play the game.
My mom had a sign in her kitchen that said "A perfect wife does not expect her husband to be perfect." My wife, very,very early in our marriage, commented on the sign to my mother saying that I was perfect. She has continued to believe this every day of our marriage. [Are you finished laughing yet?] No, sadly, she learned the truth pretty quickly. I think we all have reconciled with the fact that other people are not perfect. We have more trouble dealing with our own lack of perfection. We don't like our mistakes or flaws so we beat ourselves up over them. We need a new sign. How about "A perfect life has many imperfections"?
Life is a bottle of fine wine and your problems are the cork. A good corkscrew removes the cork. Griping and frustration do not. Don’t get mad and smash the bottle. Find the right tool. What's the best action to take to uncork your bottle? The other important thing to remember is that your life is not the cork. Our problems can seem so overwhelmeing that we forget refreshment awaits on the other side of them. You've got to believe there's something valuable on the other side of the cork in order to muster the energy to go looking for the corkscrew.
Who are the three most loving people you know? [You can have more than three if you want.] What about them makes you think they are the most loving? Can you imitate them?
"He's the funniest guy over 60 I've ever met." "Actually, he's 42." "Oh." Thus, an attempted compliment was rendered something less. Of course, those of us who heard it and knew the intended compliment recipient thought it was hilarious. If the speaker's intention was to make us laugh, he succeeded. But I don't think that's what he was after. Be careful you've got the facts right before you start flapping your jaw unless you enjoy unintended consequences.
Sitting in a coffee shop overhearing a 50ish guy complain to a woman about bad dates he's had recently. If she's his date tonight, I can see what his problem is. He can't find a woman who wants to listen to him complain about other women. It's like going to buy something and telling the sales person that you've sued the last 4 people you bought this item from for selling you a bad one. Chance are they aren't going to risk being #5. If you're looking for a relationship, don't start out by demonstrating how difficult a person you are to relate to.