(The Twelve Ways of Christmas, Part 4: The Way of Waiting)
For Scotty Thomas, Christmas was cruel. What other word can you use to describe living in a house where Dad enforced a hard-nosed rule: Christmas presents were for Christmas day?
“But can’t I open just ONE?” Scotty would ask.
“No,” his dad would say, smiling.
“I think I know what this one is,” Scotty would say, shaking a wrapped present under the tree.
“Think all you want,” Dad would reply. “You may be right. You may be wrong.” Inevitably for Scotty, it was a little of both.
Like any good 8-year-old, Scotty also had razor-sharp radar for any kid who seemed to get a better deal. Jeremy Walker got to open the give from his sister a day early. Jeff Dunaway opened family gifts the weekend before Christmas day. But Scotty’s appeals landed on stone.
As Scotty grew older and wiser (age 10 now), he became more sophisticated in his approach. If he couldn’t win by appeal, he would conquer by steal. Scotty set out on a mission to find hidden “treasures.”
Snooping through his dad’s workshop and in the attic, Scotty hit the mother lode a full 10 days before Christmas. A new bicycle, video games, a skateboard, some table games, a basketball, a couple of posters for his room, a wristwatch… this was going to be an amazing Christmas.
It turned into the worst 10 days of Scotty’s young life. [click to continue…]
“So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine, and so much in retrospect, that the amount of each person’s genius is confined to a very few hours.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
Whatever happened to Green Stamps? They’re an indelible memory of my childhood. In case you missed it, the Sperry & Hutchinson Company, began offering stamps to retailers back in 1896. Grocery stores, gas stations and the like bought the stamps from S&H and gave them as bonuses with every purchase, based on the amount you bought. In their heyday, 80 percent of U.S. households collected some kind of stamp.
My sister and I grew up licking green stamps and pasting them in books. When the A&P bag began filling up with completed books, we started getting excited. We’d peer at the two pages of toys in the S&H catalogue, surrounded by page after page of sheets, clocks, toasters, and other boring things. (Truth be told, you could get virtually anything with stamps; a school in Erie, Pennsylvania, exchanged 5.4 million stamps for two gorillas for the local zoo.)
Anyway, when we had collected enough to make the trade, we’d go off to the Redemption Center. Technically, we’d already “bought” the stuff. We were presenting evidence of our purchase (the stamps) in order to redeem – to buy back – our merchandise.
This is not about Green Stamps, but about redeeming. About buying back something that already belongs to you – namely your opportunities and your time. [click to continue…]
It was a typical piece of junk mail – the next great offer, the last of the big bargains, real savings on my long distance, or something like that. Just before it sailed off into File-13 history, something at the bottom of the page caught my eye. It said: “Four things that you can never get back… the spoken word… your past life… wasted time… and neglected opportunity.”
Never has something so close to oblivion been so profound. So much of our lives are like the ebb and flow of the tides. So much comes and goes, only to come back again. But there are those other parts of our lives that are like a shooting star – they don’t come back. Other things may come that look similar, but that’s only a matter of appearance. Fact is, there are four things you can never get back. [click to continue…]
by Andy Wood on October 28, 2008
in Ability, Allocating Your Resources, Consumers, Enlarging Your Capacity, Insight, Life Currency, LV Alter-egos, LV Cycle, Money, Pleasers, Time
Here’s a little exercise we actually take worship service time to practice occasionally. Follow the instructions carefully (yes, I mean I want you to actually do this):
- Take a deep breath
- Let out half of it.
- Hold
- Smile
- Repeat the following out loud, in a calm soothing voice:
“No.”
Repeat this exercise regularly, just for practice, and as needed in live game situations.
Not, “No because…”
Not, “Maybe later…”
Not, “Let me pray about it…”
Certainly not, “See if you can find somebody else, and if you can’t, I’ll see what I can do.”
Learning to graciously, kindly refuse is one of eight steps to building or rebuilding margin in your life. Margin has to do with creating gaps – cushions of time, money, energy, or spiritual strength that act as living shock absorbers for those who have them.
Imagine how it could revolutionize your attitude, relationships, productivity, and health if the next time somebody says, “Got a minute?” you actually do! [click to continue…]
The LifeVesting Cycle
1. Allocate your resources.
2. Explore the possibilities.
3. Follow your passion.
4. Execute your plan.
5. Protect your investment.
6. Enlarge your capacity.
7. Wait
It’s one of my biggest fears.
I’m standing face-to-face with the God of heaven to account for my life.
My sin is covered, but God is looking at what I did with the life He gave me. And he holds up a thumb and index finger, one inch apart.
“Andy,” He says, “you were this close, to seeing it happen, and you quit. The blessing you were looking for was just around the corner.” No wonder he’ll wipe away every tear from our eyes.
Many a wonderful idea started well, but never came to fruition because somebody pulled the plug too soon, and refused to wait.
Just for the record and the sake of full disclosure, I hate waiting. I hate being told that waiting is the solution to any problem or situation I’m facing. I believe traffic lights will be in hell, and I hate waiting at them – particularly when nobody’s coming from the direction of the green light. I hate waiting in line and loathe waiting on hold while listening to a computer on the telephone (which will also be in hell).
That said, and my flesh notwithstanding, there is no substitute for time. And the larger the investment, the longer the wait. It takes 40 days to make a squash, and 40 years to make an oak tree. How long do you suppose it takes to make a man or woman of God? I heard of a recent controversial study that suggests it takes 26.5 years to make an adult in the U.S. Makes sense to me. Jewish tradition held that it took 30 years to make a rabbi. (Yes, that’s why Jesus waited.) [click to continue…]
Hoarding’s back.
I’m sure it never went away, but it’s been back in the news over the last month. Banks are hoarding money. People worldwide are hoarding rice. Myanmar officials and residents are warned about hoarding aid.
People are scared, and when they’re scared, they hoard. OR, somebody else hoards and looks to make a killing off the really scared people.
In a previous post, I mentioned that there are four alter-egos to LifeVestors – consumers, hoarders, gamblers, and codependents. Hoarders are the most unique of these. While consumers live as if there is no tomorrow, hoarders live as if there is a tomorrow, and wherever/whatever it is, it’s gonna be ticked off. Hard. Terrible. And we have to plan for it today.
It’s one thing for literally starving people to make sure they have something to eat for the next few days. It’s another to live with a spirit of fear, even while you’re being wonderfully blessed.
It’s one thing to save and invest for retirement or a rainy day. It’s another thing to create an ongoing bunker mentality based on fear of the future.
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“I can shoot straight, if I don’t have to shoot too far.”
“I can’t think about that right now. If I do, I’ll go crazy. I’ll think about that tomorrow.”
-Scarlett O’Hara, “Gone With the Wind”
Everybody is fascinated with Scarlett. But nobody wants to admit how much like her we can be.
One way to understand LifeVesting is to define it in terms of what it isn’t. LifeVestors have four alter-egos: consumers, hoarders, gamblers, and codependents. Today I’d like to introduce you to the first.
While in the purest economic sense everyone is a spender, the Consumers I’m talking about are takers. They spend their money, their time, their relationships on today’s wants and needs. Their primary focus is on themselves – though not always in an intentionally selfish way. They come to church for what they can get out of it. They spend their time and money in ways that, when spent, are gone forever. For them, there is no other moment but now. Tomorrow will take care of itself.
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There are four things – and only four things – you can spend your money on. Like me, you may keep up with your finances with computer program that has a vast array of categories. You may be a day planner diva, able instantly to analyze what occupies your time. But it still comes down to just four things.
Are you a leader, or a leader wannabe? There are four – and only four – directions of leadership.
There are four – and only four – foundations of wisdom.
Same goes for other LifeVesting Currencies – esteem, love, words, and abilities. There are four sources or directions for each:
[click to continue…]
Recession. It’s the word on everybody’s mind these days. Congress, in an election year, is scrambling to give people some of their money back in order to avoid it (which begs the obvious question…). All the media, the experts, and the average Joes are all talking about some aspect of it. Somebody did a poll a couple of days ago, and it seems the average American believes if we’d just get out of Iraq, the recession would get better. Uh, OK, I guess.
What most of us are interested in is, can I keep what’s happening in a national and global economy from happening to me? Yes! But first it’s important to understand that economists are measuring only one thing.
What to recession-proof your life? Get a bigger definition of the word, “economy.” Try this one as I first heard it from Jack Taylor: Economy is the exchange of all the commodities of life.
If you’re finding yourself a bit short on cash, or if you’re worried about it, why not try a different kind of currency? Here are seven ways you can be wealthy, with or without money:
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Take a look in the mirror. There you’ll see somebody you hope comes across as decent, caring, and human at least. Godly at best. Imagine, however, that you could look through the veil at the thoughts of people around you. Chances are, sometime over the last several weeks, you walked right past them. Absorbed in your own world, you dissed ‘em. And though you were clueless, they caught it.
You jerk. [click to continue…]