"Have you been reset?"

My wife and I were at a concert and as she clapped her hands, a ring on her right hand struck her engagement ring on the left and the band snapped. You can imagine how bad I felt. The engagement ring I gave her broke, and after only twenty-three years of her wearing it!

Well, I decided that getting the ring repaired would make a perfect upcoming anniversary gift. So I took it to a jeweler and the lady started showing me how thin the shoulders were on the ring, how the prongs were broken, and I smelled a sales pitch for a new ring coming on. Instead, she showed me a ring almost identical to my wife’s twenty-three years ago in which the diamond could be reset. I bought it and gave it to my wife on our anniversary at about the same time we arrived at our honeymoon spot all those years ago.

When our daughters saw the ring, they thought I’d given their mother a new ring. Amazing, isn’t it, how something old and worn, when reset, looks new? The same is true of you—give God your spirit, old and worn, and get it reset. You’ll feel and look new as you listen to life and make a life.

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"Do you live as if there’s enough or as if there’s not enough?"

A friend of mine, John, had a yellow Labrador retriever named Abbie that he loved dearly. Abbie got sick and died and John was heartbroken.
His wife went shopping with some friends at an antique mall shortly thereafter. As she was browsing through the mall, she saw a dealer who had a couple of dogs there with him. She started talking with him and found a pillow with a yellow Lab on it that looked exactly like Abbie. She wanted to buy the pillow to give to John in memory of Abbie, but the dealer only takes cash and she just had credit cards. When she told the dealer why she wanted to buy the pillow, he told her to take the pillow and send the money later.
Can you believe the dealer’s generosity? Most of us act like there aren’t enough pillows in the world; there’s a scarcity of pillows. But this man understood that there are more than enough pillows to go around; an abundance of pillows. How do you live—as if there’s enough or not enough? Live abundantly as you listen to life and make a life.

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"Are you open?"

I travel out-of-town to speak to companies, associations, and other groups which means I fly some. And, of course, whether I like it or not, I have to check bags occasionally. Not that I like checking my bags because I’m afraid something is going to be lost one day, but sometimes I have no choice.

I stood in the baggage claim area of an airport one day, waiting for my bag to appear on the carousel. I noticed what I thought was my bag coming down the chute and making the turn toward me. I grabbed it up when it came by and went on my way.

As I carried the bag, it seemed heavier than I remembered it. At first, I just thought I was tired from the flight. But it really seemed way too heavy. I stopped and looked for my tag. There was no tag. So I opened the bag…and didn’t recognize a thing in it. It looked like my bag on the outside, but on the inside it was completely different.

We’re like that, too. We can look the same on the outside, but you don’t really know us until you get to know us on the inside. Open up, as you listen to life today and make a life, not just a living.

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"Where's your TV?"

You know, just when you think you’ve heard it all, there’s something so fresh, so alive, so real that it fully captures your attention.

A young woman in her mid-twenties recently married. She emailed me through our website at www.listentolife.org to say, “Married life is wonderful. We recently got rid of cable in order to dedicate more time to our marriage. With both of us having stressful work situations, we would come home and want alone time. We talked about it and realized that it wasn’t a good way to start things out so we decided to yank the cable. No more TV. It’s really been the best thing for us. We now have time to spend together and focus more on our relationship and our relationship with God.”

See what I mean? Now if that’s too extreme for you—no more TV—I understand, but what if, to improve your marriage relationship and your relationship with God, you took the TV out of your bedroom, creating a quiet space. Try it, and then email me at DrJoey@listentolife.org as you listen to life!

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"Who decides how fast you go?"

I was recently standing around talking with a group of people. One of them talked about driving during a recent trip. His speedometer stopped working while he drove down an interstate so he had no idea of how fast or slow he was going.

“What did you do?” someone asked.

“I just kept driving,” he said.

And another person said, “How did you know how fast you were going?”

“Well,” he said, “the truth is that I didn’t. What I did was to just go with the flow of the traffic. However fast they went, that’s how fast I went.”

I stood there thinking to myself, “You let other people decide how fast you’d go.”

And you know, that’s what a lot of us do with life. You may let other people—at work or home or the Jones family next door—set your pace, determine your actions, choose your sense of right and wrong. Try letting God set your pace as you listen to life and make a life, not just a living.

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