THIRSTY-DAY --- MARCH 20th, 2014 Mt 5:6 Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. We all have problems, dont we??? Sometimes we think our generation has more problems than ours. Take this in consideration: “America’s elders lived through the great 1929 stock market crash that ruined many of their families; the Depression years; the Bonus March on Washington, when veterans were dispersed by Army troops; the New Deal years; Pearl Harbor; the loss of the Philippines; years of long days and nights in defense plants in the 1940s; fighting in Europe and the Pacific; D-Day; the Battle of the Bulge; V-E Day; the hope-filled beginning of the United Nations in America; the A-bomb; V-J Day; the Marshall Plan in Europe; the Berlin airlift; war in Korea; the U-2 incident; the Bay of Pigs invasion; the Cuban missile crisis; the killings of President Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King; the civil rights struggle; the Vietnam War; Americans on the moon; Watergate and the resignation of a president and vice president; the energy crisis; Three-Mile Island; Iranian hostages; a new president shot in 1981; the bombing of our embassy and hundreds of Marines in Lebanon; becoming a debtor nation, with the highest budget deficit in history. What a lifetime!” Those words were penned in the early 1980s I think... since then we have a younger generation who have experienced two gulf wars and witnessed the degradation of our national values in unprecedented ways... We should remember the words of Paul Harvey who said that in times like these it is always helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. Problems (Conflicts) give meaning to life. A wise philosopher once commented that an eagle’s only obstacle to overcome for flying with greater speed and ease is the air. Yet, if the air were withdrawn, and the proud bird were to fly in a vacuum, it would fall instantly to the ground, unable to fly at all. The very element that offers resistance to flying is at the same time the condition for flight. The main obstacle that a powerboat has to overcome is the water against the propeller, yet, if it were not for this same resistance, the boat would not move at all. The same law, that obstacles are conditions of success, holds true in human life. A life free of all obstacles and difficulties would reduce all possibilities and powers to zero. Eliminate problems and life loses its creative tension. The problem of mass ignorance gives meaning to education. The problem of ill health gives meaning to medicine. The problem of social disorder gives meaning to government. In the South, when cotton was “king,” the boll weevil crossed over from Mexico to the United States and destroyed the cotton plants. Farmers were forced to grow a variety of crops, such as soybeans and peanuts. They learned to use their land to raise cattle, hogs, and chickens. As a result, many more farmers became prosperous than in the days when the only crop grown was cotton. The people of Enterprise, Alabama, were so grateful for what had occurred that in 1910 they erected a monument to the boll weevil. When they turned from the single-crop system to diversified farming, they became wealthier. The inscription on the monument reads: “In profound appreciation of the boll weevil and what it has done to herald prosperity.” We all have a tendency all of our lives to want to get rid of problems and responsibilities. When that temptation arises, remember the youth who was questioning a lonely old man. “What is life’s heaviest burden?” he asked. The old fellow answered sadly, “Having nothing to carry.” Many outstanding people have overcome problems (Conflict) in their lives. Many of the Psalms were born in difficulty. “Most of the Epistles were written in prisons. Most of the greatest thoughts of the greatest thinkers of all time had to pass through the fire. Bunyan wrote Pilgrim’s Progress from jail. Florence Nightingale, too ill to move from her bed, reorganized the hospitals of England. Semi-paralyzed and under constant menace of apoplexy, Pasteur was tireless in his attack on disease. During the greater part of his life, American historian Francis Parkman suffered so acutely that he could not work for more than five minutes at a time. His eyesight was so wretched that he could scrawl only a few gigantic words on a manuscript, but he contrived to write twenty magnificent volumes of history.” Bury a person in the snows of Valley Forge, and you have a George Washington. Raise him in abject poverty, and you have an Abraham Lincoln. Strike him down with infantile paralysis, and he becomes a Franklin D. Roosevelt. Burn him so severely that the doctors say he will never walk again, and you have a Glenn Cunningham, who set the world’s one-mile record in 1934. Have him or her born black in a society filled with racial discrimination, and you have a Booker T. Washington, a Marian Anderson, a George Washington Carver, or a Martin Luther King, Jr. Call him a slow learner and retarded, and write him off as uneducable, and you have an Albert Einstein. Dolly Parton sums it all up with these words, “The way I see it, if you want the rainbow you gotta’ put up with the rain.” There is a world of difference between a person who has a big problem and a person who makes a problem big. Have you ever noticed that many folk are like Charlie Brown in a Christmas special—he just can’t get the Christmas spirit. Linus finally says, “Charlie Brown, you’re the only person I know who can take a wonderful season like Christmas and turn it into a problem.” There are many people like Charlie Brown! Their “problems” are not their real problems. The problem is that they react wrongly to “problems” and therefore make their “problems” real problems. What really counts is not what happens to me but what happens in me. A study of three hundred highly successful people, people like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Helen Keller, Winston Churchill, Albert Schweitzer, Mahatma Gandhi, and Albert Einstein, reveals that one fourth had handicaps, such as blindness, deafness, or crippled limbs. Three fourths had either been born in poverty, came from broken homes, or at least came from exceedingly tense or disturbed situations. A problem is something I can do something about. If I can’t do something about it, it’s not my problem. It’s a fact of life. The Burma Shave advertisements used to say: A peach looks good With lots of fuzz … But man’s no peach … And never was. THE PLAIN FACT OF LIFE IS THIS -- While you and I slept last night, a young couple in Africa prayed for their family, “Father, keep my children safe today”.. .They were not worried that their son or daughter might make a wrong decision about “who their friends might be” or if they would stay out of trouble at school… They were concerned that some militant crowd might come by and kill them or take them hostage or worse. When I consider the “problems” I’ve had to deal with in my life, I am ashamed to even complain. In fact, most of the real problems Ive had were a direct result of the decisions, Ive made. So.. Ive learned to make better decisions...(I hope) Ps 118:24 This is the day which the LORD hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.
Posted on: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 10:29:41 +0000
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