God's Coffee

 

A group of alumni, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university professor. Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life.

Offering his guests coffee, the professor went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups - porcelain, plastic, glass, crystal, some plain looking, some expensive, some exquisite - telling them to help themselves to the coffee.

When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the professor said: "If you noticed, all the nice looking expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress.

Be assured that the cup itself adds no quality to the coffee. In most cases it is just more expensive and in some cases even hides what we drink.

What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the best cups... And then you began eyeing each other's cups.

Now consider this: Life is the coffee; the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain Life, and the type of cup we have does not define, nor change the quality of Life we live.

Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee God has provided us.

God brews the coffee, not the cups.......... Enjoy your coffee!

"The happiest people don't have the best of everything. They just make the best of everything." 

Live simply. Love generously. Care deeply. Speak kindly. Leave the rest to God.

Author Unknown

Now there is great gain in godliness with contentment, for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world. But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content.      

1 Timothy 6:6-8      ESV    

In Your Careers You Will Meet Many People, All Are Significant

During my second month of college, our professor gave us a pop quiz. I was a conscientious student and had breezed through the questions until I read the last one:  "What is the first name of the woman who cleans the school?"

Surely this was some kind of joke. I had seen the cleaning woman several times. She was tall, dark-haired and in her 50's, but how would I know her name?

I handed in my paper, leaving the last question blank. Just before class ended, one student asked if the last question would count toward our quiz grade.

"Absolutely," said the professor.. "In your careers, you will meet many people. All are significant.. They deserve your attention and care, even if all you do is smile and say "hello.."

I've never forgotten that lesson... I also learned her name was Dorothy.

The Old Dented Bucket

My aunt forwarded this email to me the other day.  There is a wonderful lesson to be learned from this story, and how true it is..  

THE OLD DENTED BUCKET

   Our house was directly across the street from the clinic entrance of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore .  We lived downstairs and rented the upstairs rooms to out-patients at the clinic.
    One summer evening as I was fixing supper, there was a knock at the door.
I opened it to see a truly awful looking man.  "Why, he's hardly taller than my 8-year-old," I thought as I stared at the stooped, shriveled body.
But the appalling thing was his face, lopsided from swelling, red and raw.
    Yet his voice was pleasant as he said, "Good evening.  I've come to see if you've a room for just one night.  I came for a treatment this morning from the eastern shore, and there's no bus 'til morning."
    He told me he'd been hunting for a room since noon but with no success, no one seemed to have a room.  "I guess it's my face .... I know it looks terrible, but my doctor says with a few more treatments .."
    For a moment I hesitated, but his next words convinced me: "I could sleep in this rocking chair on the porch.  My bus leaves early in the morning."
    I told him we would find him a bed, but to rest on the porch..  I went inside and finished getting supper.  When we were ready, I asked the old  man if he would join us.  "No, thank you.  I have plenty."  And he held up a brown paper bag.
    When I had finished the dishes, I went out on the porch to talk with  him a few minutes.  It didn't take a long time to see that this old man had an oversized heart crowded into that tiny body.  He told me he fished for a living to support his daughter, her 5 children, and her husband, who was hopelessly crippled from a back injury.
    He didn't tell it by way of complaint; in fact, every other sentence was preface with a thanks to God for a blessing.  He was grateful that no pain accompanied his disease, which was apparently a form of skin cancer.  He thanked God for giving him the strength to keep going...
    At bedtime, we put a camp cot in the children's room for him.  When I got up in the morning, the bed linens were neatly folded and the little man was out on the porch.
    He refused breakfast, but just before he left for his bus, haltingly, as if asking a great favor, he said, "Could  I please come back and stay the next time I have a treatment?  I won't put you out a bit.  I can sleep fine in a chair."  He paused a moment and then added, "Your children made me feel at home.  Grownups are bothered by my face, but children don't seem to mind."
I told him he was welcome to come again.
And, on his next trip, he arrived a little after 7 in the morning.  As a gift, he brought a big fish and a quart of the largest oysters I had ever seen!  He said he had shucked them that morning before he left so that they'd be nice and fresh.  I knew his bus left at 4:00 a.m. And I wondered what time he had to get up in order to do this for us.
    In the years he came to stay overnight with us, there was never a time that he did not bring us fish or oysters or vegetables from his garden.
    Other times we received packages in the mail, always by special delivery; fish and oysters packed in a box of fresh young spinach or kale, every leaf carefully washed.  Knowing that he must walk 3 miles to mail these, and knowing how little money he had made the gifts doubly precious.
    When I received these little remembrances, I often thought of a  comment our next-door neighbor made after he left that first morning.
    "Did you keep that awful looking man last night?  I turned him away!
  You can lose roomers by putting up such people!"
    Maybe we did lose roomers once or twice.  But, oh!, if only they could have known him, perhaps their illnesses would have been easier to bear.
    I know our family always will be grateful to have known him; from him we learned what it was to accept the bad without complaint and the good with gratitude to God.
    Recently I was visiting a friend, who has a greenhouse, as she showed me her flowers, we came to the most beautiful one of all, a golden chrysanthemum, bursting with blooms.  But to my great surprise, it was growing in an old dented, rusty bucket.  I thought to myself, "If this were my plant, I'd put it in the loveliest container I had!"
    My friend changed my mind.  "I ran short of pots," she explained, "and knowing how beautiful this one would be, I thought it wouldn't mind starting out in this old pail.  It's just for a little while, till I can put it out in the garden."
    She must have wondered why I laughed so delightedly, but I was  imagining just such a scene in heaven.
    "Here's an especially beautiful one," God might have said when he came to the soul of the sweet old fisherman.  "He won't mind starting in this small body."
    All this happened long ago - and now, in God's garden, how tall this lovely soul must stand.
    The LORD does not look at the things man looks at.  Man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart." (1 Samuel 16:7b)
    Friends are very special.  They make you smile and encourage you to succeed.  They lend an ear and they share a word of praise.  Show your friends how much you care.  Pass this on, and brighten someone's day.
    Nothing will happen if you do not decide to pass it along.  The only thing that will happen if you DO pass it on is that someone might smile  (because of you).

The Seven Powers for Self Control

 

Lesson 5:  The Power of Love

See the best in each other.

The Beatles sang "All You Need is Love."  Thomas Carlyle said, “A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.”  Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, “All men, even the most surly are influenced by affection.”

When you Google quotations about love you get 173,000,000 hits.  It seems that everyone has something to say about love.  The kind of love we’re talking about here is the kind of love you have for yourself, first, and then the love you have for those around you.  It may be your spouse, it may be your children, maybe it’s your co-workers or your teammates.  All of these people require you to love yourself, so that you can love them. 

Why would it be necessary to love yourself before you can love anybody else?  Well, it’s really simple.  If you can’t love yourself, care about yourself, how can you know how to love and care for anyone else?  It’s impossible.  Love comes from within you.  It is a respect you have for yourself, because you know that you are valuable and worthy of it.  If you don’t have this knowledge, then you can attempt to love others, but it will be a selfish kind of love, more about you than it is about them.  You will fail in loving others when you have no internal foundation upon which to build their love.

We have to find a way to see the best in ourselves.  This means, as in Lesson 4, that we have to take a look at ourselves and determine what there is to love.  We all have good things and bad things about us.  There will be those things that you are really proud of.  You ‘love’ those things about yourself.  Make a list and post it somewhere.  The truth is we all spend more time dwelling on those things we don’t like, than the ones we do.  Certainly, we need to address those negative things and work to make them things that are now positive, but there are those things, even if it’s a very short list, that we at least ‘like’ about ourselves a little bit.  Remember, what you focus on you get more of (Lesson3) so focus on the good stuff and you’ll get more. 

Faith makes all things possible.  Love makes them easy.  No one knows who said this but it is true.  When you love yourself, it becomes a simple task to love those around you and when you love those around you, you are able to see the best in each other.  This isn’t something that just happens, however.  It is a commitment to look for the good.  As we’ve talked about in the other four lessons, it is always easy to focus on the bad things, especially in others.  It is easy to decide that they are the ones who need to change.  Finding others’ faults is relatively simple.  Finding the best in each other could take some practice.

I had a student in public school, fourth grade, who was a perfectionist.  If he didn’t get one-hundred percent on his papers he was determined that he had failed.  It was a problem we worked on for quite a while before he had a total melt-down one day over a math paper.  It was the first homework assignment on long division and he had missed just one.  Because he had done so well, I wrote a great big GOOD at the top of his paper with my signature smiley face embedded in it.  As I handed out the papers the next day, he brought his paper to me with tears in his eyes to ask me why I would put this mark on his paper when it, obviously, was not ‘good.’  I tried in every way I knew how to help him see that missing one problem, on something so new to him, to all of them, was a very good thing, but he absolutely refused to see it.  He had missed one, therefore it was bad.

When I talked with his parents about my concerns over his perfectionism, they shared their concerns as well, but as we talked it became apparent that his father also shared this perfectionistic tendency.  In fact, his first question to the boy was why he had missed that one and gotten all the others correct.  It was not a question intended to teach.  It was a question intended to belittle; “If you could get all the others right, why not this one?”  I learned very quickly that there were lessons here for the father as well as the son, and if I couldn’t help the father, I probably wouldn’t be able to help the boy either.  I have no doubt that the father never came right out and told the boy that his work must be perfect, but he said it in so many other ways  that the boy had very clearly heard and taken to heart. 

As with most of my students, I don’t know what happened with this one.  I hope that there was some easing of his burden after he left my room for the next grade.  I’m certain that he was very successful in whatever field he chose.  I hope that it was his choice, whatever it was, and I hope that he is happy with the work that he does.  As for the father, I doubt that I made much difference in his thinking.  He may have been a little less quick to voice his ‘concerns’ at least in front of me, but I am certain that he still holds the highest expectations for himself and his children. 

Expectations are not a bad thing.   In fact, I have been quoted as saying,  “Children will live up or down to our expectations.”  If we set them too high, then they become unattainable as with this young man and his father; no one is perfect.  If we set them too low, then we tell them that we don’t believe they are capable of anything too difficult and they learn to not even try.  It is a fine line that we walk in setting our expectations reasonably, knowing the abilities of our children, or our spouse, or our co-workers, and then expecting that they will live up to what we believe them to be capable. 

I have also had parents who were so afraid of letting their children fail that they ‘helped’ them with each and every assignment.  You know their work when it comes in, obviously not that of a ten year old, alone.  My son always complained at the Pinewood Derby  in Cub Scouts because we helped him with his car when it came to using the power tools but the rest of the work was all his.  Inevitably, on race day, a lot of the other boys would come with their cars that had obviously had a lot more ‘help’ than our son’s.  It was always a great day, when his car defeated some of those other cars.  We had told him that we believed him to be capable and he was.  We expected to see the best in him, and we did.

It comes down, as always, to choices.  We will see what we choose to see.  We will find what we choose to find.  Choose to see the best in each other, but choose to see the best in yourself first!

Shoot for the Moon!

Why is it that so many of us are afraid to reach beyond our normal range?  We settle into our lives, get comfortable with the way things are, and just maintain it.  Then we reach the ripe old age of 40 or 45 or even 50 and we begin to evaluate EVERYTHING.  And it doesn't feel like it's enough or something is just not quite right.  We can't really put our finger on it.  There's a longing for --- something.  But what?  I've heard it explained as, "I was just skimming along the surface of my life.  Now I want to dive deep, deeper than I've every dived before."  Another friend said, "I've raised my kids, I've done my job, now I want to raise me.  For the first time since I was eighteen years old, I want to re-evaluate what I really want."


The reality is, those of us who are "middle-aged" are facing the second half of our lives.  For some this will be a long time.  For others, the time will be shorter.  None of us know exactly where we'll fall between those marks, but the reality of our life span is smacking us in the face and we want to be certain that however long the remaining time may be, it is not wasted. 


For some, it means leaving the confines of the business world, slowing down and enjoying life.  For others, as with another friend, we look for deeper meaning and start a new career in the service of others.  For me, the last few years have been an opportunity to sit back and listen to the inner callings of my heart.  What is it that I feel, that I know, in my soul I'm here to do? 


It's an interesting time in our household.  My son will be nineteen years old in a couple of weeks.  He has chosen not to attend college at this time and to create a technology business with some friends.  This has been a dream of his for several years and we both agreed that this was his moment in time to give it a try.  College is always available should this opportunity not pan out.  He is young with very few responsibilities.  Now is the time!


I watch him in his youth, lashing about, attempting to control things, to make things work his way and I remember myself at the same age doing some of the same things (we didn't have computers and cell phones but the ideas were the same--we were in control, we could make things happen). 


At fifty three years old, I've learned that we really do control our destiny.  What we think becomes our lives.  I've also learned that it's much easier to allow the things I want in my life to happen rather than to try to force the things I want.  Both ways may work, but allowing is so much simpler for everyone involved.  It's a much more peaceful existence, and I'm all about peace at this point in my life. 


Why is it that when we're young we believe that things must happen by force?  When is it that we learn that force may not be the easiest way to accomplish things?  I don't remember when that shift happened for me.  I just know that it did, and I'm grateful!  I've come to a point in my life where I don't want to, or have the energy to, force things anymore.  I'm relieved to sit back and watch as the world unfolds, just the way it is supposed to, and usually to my benefit. 


A good friend gave me a poster many years ago that I have kept on my desk, "Shoot for the moon.  Even if you miss it, you will land among the stars!" (Les Brown).  My son is shooting for the moon.  God bless him!  I, also, am shooting for the moon, a little more quietly, but never the less reaching for the same goal.