An excerpt from my book, “One Arm One Leg 100 Words, Overcoming Unbelievable Hardships”
“Do not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time you will reap a harvest if you do not give up.” (Gal. 6:9).
It has been said that genius is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent perspiration. Humans were made to be goal oriented. “Without vision, the people perish.” (Prov. 29:18). Boredom will usually creep in if we are not striving towards a goal. Balance, however, is the necessary ingredient in any genius, otherwise the line that separates genius and insanity gets blurry. We get into trouble whenever we get out of balance. Too much work, too much play, too much anything makes us unbalanced.
Get into the habit of turning our lemons into lemonade, which reminds me of the story of the optimistic boy who always had a very positive attitude about life. He was told to go shovel out the horse manure from the barn. Well, he tore into that manure with a shovel like a mad man. When asked why he was shoveling so enthusiastically, he replied, “With all of this horse manure in here, there just has to be a pony under all of this somewhere.”
Now that’s a positive attitude.
I learned lessons from the movie Finding Nemo. Dora and Marlin were trapped in the whale, and they were hanging onto the tongue of the whale for their lives. Then Dora heard a voice that said, “Just let go and everything will be fine.” Well, the situation was hopeless, and they had nothing to lose, so they both reluctantly let go, wondering if they were falling to their death. Instead, they fell into a pool of water, and were then blown out of the whale via the blow hole.
The moral of this story is to always have hope, never give up, and to listen to the still small voice in our heads. I know… not very scientific… but it worked for them, and it always seems to work for us.
There is always a way out of your impossible predicament. The Bible says, “All things are possible to those that believe.” (Mark 9:2). So many people quit too early, not realizing they were so close to their breakthrough.
A true survival story I’ve been told states that a man was rappelling a mountain and lost his footing, falling several hundred feet, but a tree caught his body, and broke his fall. He was left hanging on a branch by his rope. There was a very dense fog, and he couldn’t see how far the ground was below him.
That night the temperatures were below freezing, and when they found him the next morning, he had frozen to death… hanging just five feet off the ground that he could not see because of the fog. He was also just a quarter mile from a campsite. He must have given up all hope, instead of taking a risk, and simply cutting his rope to fall the five feet to his survival.
He had absolutely nothing to lose, and only his life to gain if he had just realized that he was going to freeze to death if he did nothing. He at least would have had a 50/50 chance of surviving the fall, and finding shelter for the night. Instead he chose to just do nothing and give up.
When I would visit Mexican orphanages, I noticed another way of examining the impact of a positive attitude is by observing how poor countries, such as Mexico, never throw anything away. They are so poor, they recycle everything. Bedsprings for fences, tires for retaining walls, old barrels for water containers, cardboard and Styrofoam for walls and roofs for their makeshift houses, etc. You name it, they recycle it. That is their way of creatively using what is available to them, instead of going without.
Despite this poverty, their poor children are very happy. They just don’t realize how miserable their circumstances are because they are too busy making toys out of things that they find at the garbage dump where they live. They simply don’t realize what they are missing, because they never have known prosperity or a better life. We are so spoiled in this prosperous nation of ours. It would do us all some good to visit a Mexican neighborhood in a garbage dump to be reminded of what the rest of the world really lives like.
This is just a another chapter of my book “One Arm One Leg 100 Words, Overcoming Unbelievable Hardships”. You can buy the book by clicking this link. And surely, you will not stop reading it from the beginning till the end of this book.