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“Choose you this day whom you will serve. As for me and my family, we will serve the
Lord.” Joshua 24:14
“Do you
know what excellence demands? It demands
that you be better than yourself.” (Ted Engstrom ***) It isn’t required that you be 100 % better in
one thing. It simply means that you
strive to be 1 percent better in more than one thing. (rewrite of quote from
Jan Carlzon ****) If you forget
everything I write, remember this, “Those who settle for mediocrity are always
at their best.” Let me say that again,
‘Those who settle for mediocrity are always at their best.” (Anonymous)
Do you have a jar of
Smuckers jam in your refrigerator? Did
you know that if you weighed it, it would weigh more than the label says it
does? You see, Smuckers doesn’t care
whether their customers weigh it or even that some heavenly set of scales might
one day weigh it, all they care about is doing their best and then a little
more…no matter who knows it.
Get this kind of attitude and your life
will smell of roses rather than stink with rot.
There is a word, responsibility, that is normally thought of as one word. Try thinking of it as two; response and
ability. In short, how you have trained
your abilities to respond to life is essentially who you really are. When
things go wrong some people just respond by doing nothing and being
nothing. Others take the initiative and
try to solve whatever the problem is.
And then there are others...
During
World War II, a Spitfire pilot awoke one morning deciding he didn’t want to
fight anymore. He knew that many of his
comrades also weren’t terribly enthused about rushing up into the wild blue
yonder to be shot down and killed, but they
kept on doing it anyway. He decided he
didn’t want to keep on doing it. He just
wanted to stay alive and he didn’t care how he did it. So he devised a clever plot of
self-preservation that would also get him declared a hero in the process.
He
was a good pilot and so he was reasonably sure
he could ditch his plane and survive. Therefore, during the next dogfight he
simply put his plane in a dive, flattened out just before hitting the water and
was soon safely floating in his life raft while death raged in the clouds
above. Men were dying, but he was safe. It had worked out exactly as he had planned
it. Picked up by the French Resistance,
for two days he was treated as a courageous hero. On the third day, he shot
himself. He had been given the gift of
Time but he could not accept the responsibilities that went with it. He had survived, but mere survival can be a
curse rather than a blessing. It happens
all the time.
In Bridgeport , Connecticut
. Her birth certificate
officially listed her as Fanny Crosby.
And though you may not recognize the name, most of you have spent your
life singing many of her hymns.. She wrote over 9,000 of them; Blessed Assurance; All the Way My Savior
Leads Me; Jesus Keep Me Near The Cross; Rescue The Perishing; Tell me the Story
of Jesus; Praise Him, Praise Him. .The list goes on and on as did her
faith, her dedication and the use of her abilities to the maximum.
When she penned “Praise Him, Praise Him,” she wrote it from a life
that had started out behind the eight ball, and never could see around (it)
that eight ball, because at the age of six weeks she went blind. Like all of us, she was given the gift of
Time. Like all of us, she had abilities
and choices to make. Her choice was to
make the best of the worst.
Her hymns were set to music by every popular American melody maker
of the nineteenth century. She was the
guest of six Presidents and a personal friend to Grover Cleveland.
And because she must have firmly believed “I am but one, but I am
one, I cannot do everything, but I can do something; Therefore, what I can do,
by the grace of God, I will do.” (author
unknown) she went out and did it.
Sightless but filled with heavenly insight she supped at the table of
the Lord and rose back up filled with spiritual energy beyond compare.
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