Why Just Polish Stones When You Could Create Jewels
A man walked up to three laborers digging in the ground. As he approached the first man, he asked inquisitively what he was doing, the man looked back with a “you-should-know-this-yourself” attitude and said, “Digging a ditch.”
He walked up to second man and asked the same question. The answer was only slightly better: “I’m earning a living. Just making a living. You know, I’ve got to feed my wife and kids.”
When he asked the third man what he was doing, the man answered with a very positive attitude and with great pride, “Sir, I’m building part of a great irrigation system that will transform this old barren valley into a fertile garden that will produce food for a hungry world!”
We should all be approaching our endeavors with the same attitude as that last man, looking beyond what may seem like meaningless tasks and minor failures today, and see the bigger picture — the ultimate vision — the image of serving others.
You’ll find greater satisfaction in your daily work when you see yourself creating jewels for the crown of God, not just polishing stones, setting long-term goals to keep yourself from becoming frustrated by short-term failures.
Habakkuk 2:3
For the vision is yet for an appointed time ... though it delays, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not delay.
27 Contacts
The British journal of medicine reported in July of 2018 that a woman in England had 27 contacts removed from her eye. She would put them in but wasn't always able to find them, so she just assumed they had fallen out.
Actually, the lenses were slipping to the back of her eye and getting stuck. She just kept adding new ones in, and they piled up. But despite having 27 lenses in her eye, her vision was not 27 times stronger.
We can add more and more theological information to our minds, but if our hearts aren't transformed, it won't give us a clearer vision of God . Information without the Holy Spirit can't bring about the life that God desires.
"They cannot comprehend or understand, for He has shut their eyes so they cannot see, and closed their minds so they cannot understand" (Isaiah 44:18).
Who Needs An Electrical Toy?
Neatorama writes:
In 1876, Western Union had a monopoly on the telegraph, the world's most advanced communications technology. This made it one of America's richest and most powerful companies, with $41 million in capital and the pocketbooks of the financial world behind it. So when Gardiner Greene Hubbard, a wealthy Bostonian, approached [William] Orton with an offer to sell the patent for a new invention Hubbard had helped to fund, Orton treated it as a joke. Hubbard was asking for $100,000!
Orton bypassed Hubbard and drafted a response directly to the inventor. "Mr. Bell," he wrote, "after careful consideration of your invention, while it is a very interesting novelty, we have come to the conclusion that it has no commercial possibilities... What use could this company make of an electrical toy?"
The invention, the telephone, would have been perfect for Western Union. The company had a nationwide network of telegraph wires in place, and the inventor, 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell, had shown that his telephone worked quite well on telegraph lines. All the company had to do was hook telephones up to its existing lines and it would have had the world's first nationwide telephone network in a matter of months.
Instead, Bell kept the patent and in a few decades his telephone company, renamed American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), had become the largest corporation in America ... The Bell patent - offered to Orton for a measly $100,000 - became the single most valuable patent in history. Ironically, less than two years of turning Bell down, Orton realized the magnitude of his mistake and spent millions of dollars challenging Bell's patents while attempting to build his own telephone network (which he was ultimately forced to hand over to Bell.)
Instead of going down in history as one of the architects of the telephone age, he is instead remembered for having made one of the worst decisions in American business history.
It's hard to imagine a more obvious business opportunity than the one turned down by Western Union's William Orton. Mr. Orton couldn't see the "electrical toy" for what it could become. He was too blinded by his present success to appreciate the profound implications this opportunity held for the future.
This is exactly the situation many place themselves in as they scoff at the opportunity offered to them in the Gospel. Do they continue on as they are, content with their current success, or do they embrace this divine opportunity to have their lives count, not just for now, but for eternity?
Don't end up scrambling like William Orton, after it's already too late, to make up for the lost opportunity of a lifetime.
"For God says, "At just the right time, I heard you. On the day of salvation, I helped you." Indeed, the "right time" is now. Today is the day of salvation" (2 Corinthians 6:2, NLT).
"Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall" (Proverbs 16:18).