The shepherd who didn’t go to the Manger

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Imagine that one of the shepherds telling the story about angels appearing to him in the fields, telling him about the Christ child—but not going to the stable to see the child (Luke 2). 

“Grandpa! Tell us the story of the angels again.”

“Well, there I was out in the field … angels appeared.”

“And what was the baby like?”

“Oh, I never went to see the child.”

Hard to imagine, right? The angels’ appearance was just the beginning. How could the shepherd not have gone into the more? How could he have been satisfied with just that first exhilarating experience? He shouldn’t have been. And neither should we.

Stephen Goforth

Rewrite your brain

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Many people believe that their intellectual ability is hardwired from birth, and that failure to meet a learning challenge is an indictment of their native ability. But every time you learn something new, you change the brain-the residue of your experiences is stored. It's true that we start life with the gift of our genes, but it's also true that we become capable through the learning and development of mental models that enable us to reason, solve, and create.

Peter C. Brown and Henry L. Roediger III, Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning

Seeing Potential

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A New York businessman dropped a dollar into the cup of a man selling pencils and hurriedly stepped aboard the subway train. On second thought, he stepped back off the train, walked over the beggar and took several pencils from the cup. Apologetically, he explained that in his haste he had neglected to pick up his pencils and hoped the man wouldn’t be upset with him. “After all,” he said, “you are a businessman just like myself. You have merchandise to sell and it’s fairly priced.” Then he caught the next train.

At a social function a few months later, a neatly-dressed salesman stepped up to the businessman and introduced himself. “You probably don’t remember me and I don’t know your name, but I will never forget you. You are the man who game me back my self-respect. I was a “beggar” selling pencils until you came along and told me I was a businessman.”

The greatest good we can do for anyone is not to share our wealth with them, but rather to reveal their own wealth to them.

Zig Ziglar, See You at the Top

Varieties of Bitterness

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Why do we accept bitter feelings? Why do we nourish acidic emotions and slowly allow them to eat away our attitudes, motives, and even our spirits? The bitters come in so many varieties.

There’s the I’ve-been-used-and-abused brand of bitterness that lets us stew in our own anger juices. It grows when we have no opportunity to vent these hostilities against the person who has hurt us. As a substitute, we take it out on ourselves.

There’s the everyone’s-against-me-nobody-cares kind of bitterness that grow into a full-blown martyr complex. Complete with self-pity and all the extras.

Bitterness can form from a sense of I’ve-been-neglected-forgotten-and-overlooked-a routine especially real when someone feels trapped in the house all day long with whining toddlers, endless chores, and a spouse who is out all day what appears to be an endless fascinating world.

Or it may be the blind, curse-it-all-I’d-rather-be-dead bitterness that follows tragedy, grief, or failure. We withdraw into ourselves in despair.

Our world is infested these bitters and unless we build a support system externally and internally we may find them all too often corrupting our palates so the whole of life tastes bitter. 

Based on a passage from Gene Van Note’s Building Self-Esteem

Bless you Prison

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It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.

That is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me: ‘Bless you, prison!’ I…have served enough time there. I nourished my soul there, and I say without hesitation: ‘Bless you, prison, for having been in my life!’”

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (Born Dec. 11, 1918), The Gulag Archipelago

Embracing Hard Work

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Think about how a typical English class works: You read a “great work” by a famous author, discussing what the messages are, and how the author uses language, structure, and imagery to convey them. You memorize particularly pithy quotes to be regurgitated on the exam, and perhaps later on second dates. Students are rarely encouraged to peek at early drafts of those works. All they see is the final product, lovingly polished by both writer and editor to a very high shine. When the teacher asks “What is the author saying here?” no one ever suggests that the answer might be “He didn’t quite know” or “That sentence was part of a key scene in an earlier draft, and he forgot to take it out in revision.”

Or consider a science survey class. It consists almost entirely of the theories that turned out to be right—not the folks who believed in the mythical “N-rays,” declared that human beings had forty-eight chromosomes, or saw imaginary canals on Mars. When we do read about falsified scientific theories of the past—Lamarckian evolution, phrenology, reproduction by “spontaneous generation”—the people who believed in them frequently come across as ludicrous yokels, even though many of them were distinguished scientists who made real contributions to their fields.

No wonder students get the idea that being a good writer is defined by not writing bad stuff.

Megan Mcardle writing in the Atlantic