"Do you take a break from doing good?"

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 A group of high school students was doing construction projects and sharing God’s love with inner-city kids. They had worked long hours for several days and needed a break. The hotel where they stayed had a swimming pool so they decided to take a break from “doing good” for a little while and swim.

Well, they were having so much fun in the pool that other folks began coming down, many bringing their kids with them. So instead of taking a break, the teenagers found themselves hoisting kids up on their shoulders and playing with them in the pool.

Soon it was time for the students to get out of the pool. Their break was over. As one young man hopped out of the pool, the mother of the little girl he’d carried on his shoulders came over to him and said, “Thank you for playing with my daughter. She’s an only child, and doesn’t have a daddy or many friends and she’s never had anybody to play with like that.”

You know, even when you think you’re taking a break from doing good, you can still share God’s love.

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"Is there really enough to go around?"

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 We love feeding hummingbirds at our farm. There are so many now that drink from our feeders and the many flowers we grow.

I love watching the hummingbirds as they buzz and hover, bombard and harass each other around the feeders; each one jockeying for the best position on the feeder. But recently, there was one male who was determined to be the only bird to drink from the feeder.

As other little birds buzzed up, he squawked and flew straight at them, chasing them away. And as he chased one, another bird came up from a different direction. And as he chased the second one off, a third one hovered nearby, until he was trying to chase away about a dozen different hummingbirds.  

Of course, he couldn’t. Try as he did, there was always some bird drinking on his feeder, doing what he didn’t get to do because he was too busy fighting the others off.

Are you too busy fighting others to enjoy life? God gives us all enough to go around. So relax, and make a life, not just a living today.

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"Do you laugh much?"

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 Recently I shared with a group about listening to life. Now I speak to a lot of groups and sometimes I do PowerPoint presentations from my laptop using a video projector. And that’s what I was doing this time.
 Now if you use a computer much, you know that sometimes stuff happens that you just didn’t plan for. It just happens. And it did to me.

For some unknown reason, my computer starts acting up, making me start and restart the program, even accusing me of that dreaded “illegal operation” that Windows throws at you. So here I am, in front of a large group of folks, being accused of an “illegal operation.”

Now there was a time in my life when I would have gotten really upset about all of this. Instead, I just tried to joke my way through it, assuring the group that while I had committed a few immoral operations, none of them were illegal as far as I knew, and so on until eventually, for whatever reason, the thing cleared up. I went on with the presentation and everything went quite well.

Today, when something like this happens to you, don’t get upset. Just laugh your way through it as God coaches you to make a life, not just a living.

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"Do you ever overreact?"

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A medical student was doing a rotation in toxicology at the poison control center. A mother called in very upset because she caught her little daughter eating ants. The med student quickly reassured her that the ants weren’t harmful and there would be no need to bring her daughter to the hospital.

The mother calmed down and at the end of the conversation happened to casually mention that she gave her daughter some ant poison to eat in order to kill the ants. The med student told her that she better bring her daughter into the emergency room right away.

Sometimes we overreact to life situations, don’t we? A problem seems worse than it is and we think it requires a bigger than is necessary solution. It’s easy to lose our heads at such times.

Today, something is bound to happen that seems like a huge problem. Just stop and ask yourself, “Is it really all that bad?” Chances are its not and you can avoid poisoning the situation and instead let God get involved. Stay calm as you listen to life and make a life, not just a living.

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"Where are your challenges?"

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 Now I know their families lived there before we moved in. I am fully aware that they have as much right to live there now as I do. And I respect others’ rights as fully as I do my own, but somehow I think they should respect mine, too.

What am I talking about? I’m talking about the whitetail deer who were eating my blueberries at 6:30 a.m. recently. Four of them, to be exact.

Now I haven’t seen them for weeks and weeks, except in the woods or grazing in a distant pasture. You know, in places where they belong; at least, in my opinion. So when I checked the blueberry bushes the day before and discovered a few ripened, I thought to myself, “I’ll get out here and pick some soon. I haven’t seen the does in a while so no worries there.”

Boy, was I wrong! They had their heads fully up in the bushes, eating my carefully tended and grown blueberries with joy and delight.

As you listen to life and make a life, just because one of your challenges hasn’t been around lately, doesn’t mean it’s not present. So ask God for help, even when you think you’ve got life growing on your own.

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