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 (pp. 181-182). Center Street. Kindle Edition . But that is the way we have always done it.   And those words will defeat progress in any person’s world.   This world is not the same, it is constantly changing.   And we need to be flexible and changing with it in order to survive. Most of the time we are afraid of change and that fear keeps us from stepping out.   I like how Malcolm Gladwell in his book called, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants puts it.   He says that, “Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.” Life is tough. The truth is life has a way of bringing us into our future and we find that the way we have

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