Just Continue That Thought...

A thought by John C. Maxwell, (2013-10-08) from his book, Sometimes You Win--Sometimes You Learn:Life's Greatest Lessons Are Gained from Our Losses (p. 180). Center Street. Kindle Edition. Have you ever read the book of Acts in the Bible?   The book starts with Jesus leaving and going to heaven and how troubling it was for His followers but He had done what He was here to do and He had to end His stay so the work of the Holy Spirit could begin.   What would have happened if Jesus said, “I don’t want to leave”?   “I still have work to do.”   Then we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to reap the benefit of His coming.   For His work to continue, He had to leave it to His followers through the Holy Spirit to continue it. I had to leave my position of being a Pastor to begin the privilege of becoming a writer.   Something had to end for something to begin. John shared that “Poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson had an insightful take on this. He asserted, ‘For ever

A thought by John C. Maxwell (2013-10-08) from his book, Sometimes You Win--Sometimes You Learn:Life's Greatest Lessons Are Gained from Our Losses (pp. 170-171). Center Street. Kindle Edition. That is always a good place to start in honestly looking at a bad experience.   You ask the question, “What part did I play in this bad experience?”     It is so easy to make excuses and play the blame game but that doesn’t help in stopping them from recurring again. John says, “Changing those requires not only teachability but also a change in behavior. If you don’t make those changes, the bad experiences will likely keep coming and keep getting worse.”   In other words, don’t waste the bad experience, learn the lesson. Now looking at ourselves is hard for most of us.   We have problems with accepting our doing anything wrong and we then have real problems with stopping problems from recurring.   But somehow we need to humble themselves and accept that we make mistakes so w

A thought by John C. Maxwell (2013-10-08) from his book, Sometimes You Win--Sometimes You Learn:Life's Greatest Lessons Are Gained from Our Losses (p. 168). Center Street. Kindle Edition. Excuses, excuses.   What excuse have you used this week not to do something that really you were too lazy or afraid to do? Just be honest. I have used the phrase over and over that an excuse is a skin of a reason stuffed with a lie.   Just be honest.   I can’t is an excuse, I don’t want to is the truth.   Just be honest.   But also understand that you will miss out on so many things that God has out there for you to experience.   You and I were built to live my faith but there is always some risk and some effort attached to it.   Now something else about failure is that the most successful people fail the most because they try the most so that means they are not failures they just fail a lot.   John also says, “There are two kinds of people in regards to setbacks: splatters,