Paid For by a Glass of Milk from my book: An All-consuming Desire To Succeed One day, a poor boy who was selling goods from door to door to pay his way through school found he had only one thin dime left, and he was hungry. He decided he would ask for a meal at the next house. However, he lost his nerve when a lovely young woman opened the door. Instead of a meal, he asked for a drink of water. She thought he looked hungry so she brought him a large glass of milk. He drank it so slowly, and then asked, “How much do I owe you?” “You don’t owe me anything,” she said. “Mother has taught us never to accept pay for a kindness.” He said, “Then I thank you from my heart.” As Howard Kelly left that house, he not only felt stronger physically, but his faith in God and man was strong also. He had been ready to give up and quit. Many years later, that same young woman became critically ill. The local doctors were baffled. They finally sent her to the big city, where they called in specialists to study her rare disease. Dr. Howard Kelly was called in for the consultation. When he heard the name of the town she came from, a strange light filled his eyes. Immediately, he rose and went down the hall of the hospital to her room. Dressed in his doctor’s gown, he went in to see her. He recognized her at once. He went back to the consultation room determined to do his best to save her life. From that day he gave special attention to her case. After a long struggle, the battle was won. Dr. Kelly requested the business office to pass the final bill to him for approval. He looked at it, then wrote something on the edge and the bill was sent to her room. She feared to open it, for she was sure it would take the rest of her life to pay for it all. Finally she looked, and something caught her attention on the side of the bill. She read these words: “Paid in full with one glass of milk. (Signed) Dr. Howard Kelly.” Tears of joy flooded her eyes as she prayed happily, “Thank You, God, that Your love has spread abroad through human hearts and hands.” C-2005 j. carinci : An All-Consuming Desire to Succeed Every so often we get a wake-up call to put our goals and dreams on the front burners and move in the direction that will see the tasks to fruition. I feel that I am in fairly good health, though I have the normal aches and pains of a middle-aged man. But the other night I was given a rude awakening. I was trying to adjust a timer we set up to control our exterior Christmas lights. It was dark, so I went out onto my rear yard deck through my home’s sliding patio door. As I walked onto the deck and closed the patio door behind me, the door suddenly locked me outside. So, after I had adjusted the timer, I proceeded to walk down the wooden patio stairs, and I slipped. My feet went up in the air, and I landed very hard on my back, right on the wooden stairs. Everything hurt but nothing was broken. I learned that the wooden steps had ice on them even though there was no ice elsewhere. Over one week later, everything hurt: my back, my hands that broke some of the fall, and some pulled muscles. But what really hit me hard was this: If I had hit my head really hard, I could have been killed or paralyzed. Life is just that precious. Someone who is in perfect health could have an unfortunate accident that ends his life. Just today I learned that an insurance friend of mine skidded on a patch of black ice and hit a guardrail. His car flipped over and landed on its roof. My friend was smart enough to have worn his seat belt and got away with some minor injuries. Talk about a wake-up call that makes you put everything in perspective. After a sudden wake-up call like that, petty things just don’t bother you anymore, and you look at life with a new set of eyes, thanking God for all the good you still have. Maybe it is my age, but I feel like I hear more hard-luck stories of late. It is important to put these sometimes-sad stories into perspective. I try not to dwell on sad stories for too long. But I also believe that there is a fine line between not dwelling on sadness, and ignoring it completely. I feel we must extract a lesson from each story. We must learn from another’s sadness and then store the sadness away in a file deep within the recesses of our minds, retrieved later only to remind us of the lesson the story carries within itself. Once again—put it all in perspective. A Little Encouragement Goes a Long Way Sometimes a small word of encouragement can go a great distance in motivating one onward to new and lofty goals. Today an old acquaintance called me from far away. We hadn’t seen each other in almost twenty-five years. He called me to tell me that he was reading one of the books I had written. Since he had never read one of my books before, I was interested in his assessment. When he told me that he had been reading my book until four o’clock in the morning and he couldn’t put it down, it made me feel great—not because I wanted to hear someone else tell me that my writing was riveting, but because I wanted to hear that someone whose opinion I respected a great deal was actually enjoying one of my books. I thought about the impact that a well-placed kind word has on a person. As a writer, where it takes anywhere from three to five years to completely write a new book, it is very encouraging to receive positive feedback. In fact, just one honest and very positive statement from another can actually motivate me to complete a new project. In my case, the positive feedback helps push me to drive forward with my next book. And when a book can take up to five years to complete, with many hurdles along the way, it is those well-placed comments that I remember so well. I draw on the positives from my past writing successes to help with whatever current writing difficulties I am facing. So the next time you think a positive thought about someone, don’t hesitate to let him or her know it. Maybe that comment will stay with them for many months to come. We Are Each Born into This World Destined for Greatness! John Paul Carinci amazon/All-Consuming-Desire-Succeed-John-Carinci/dp/160037994X/ref=la_B004ZAAJUM_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1382452132&sr=1-2
Posted on: Tue, 22 Oct 2013 14:29:17 +0000
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