Wise Men Still Follow Signs.

Wise Men still follow signs.

In the time before the birth of Christ, Magi from afar, saw the signs in the skies and followed a start. These Magi were men whose job it was to be learned men, men of wisdom knowledge; wise men to advise kings and leaders. These men were the Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Warren Buffet’s of their time. They were very smart fellows.

My father had been an educator for most of my life. First as a teacher, then as an administrator and Superintendent of schools. When he retired from the school business, he entered the ministry. As a local minister, he’s part of a group of them who meet regularly to share and support one another.

He tells the story of one of his colleagues, that was getting a tank of gas at the local station. One of those stations that you have to swipe your credit card. If you don’t have a credit card, you have to go in and pre-pay with cash. The man looked across the pumps while he was waiting on his tank to fill and there he saw a mini-van. You know, that soccer-mom type of mini-van. Inside, he could see that there were four kids. All stair stepped in ages, probably from a young teen down to one just getting into school.

He watched as a woman came out from the station and started to pump gasoline. But, it wasn’t long before the pump clicked off, as she’d reached the end of the cash she’d taken inside. Slowly, the woman started to sink down against the pole next to the pump until she was squatted down on the ground, one hand on her head, the other clenched, a look of anguish on her brow.

Crossing between the pumps, the man approached the woman and knelt down, “Is there something wrong?” he asked her. The woman told him that her husband wasn’t in the picture anymore, she didn’t know where he was. She had lost her job when the economy had gone bad and she hadn’t been able to get another one to support her children. She was on her way to Wichita, Kansas, where her parents were. There, at least her children would have a warm place to sleep, food to eat, and there would be love to surround them with.

She had put her last five dollars in the tank, and all she had left was a few coins in her hand. If you know anything about the map, five dollars worth of gas won’t get you from Kansas City, Missouri to Wichita, Kansas.

Without hesitation, the man reached over and swiped his credit card and filled her gas tank with gasoline. He reached into his pocket and took a twenty dollar bill from his money clip and pushed it into her hand with the coins. “Take your children down to the McDonalds and make sure they get some food,” he told her as he smiled.

Looking up at him, she asked, “Did God send you?”

For those who aren’t followers of Christ, the moral to the story is: When you’re in the Right Place, at the Right Time, do the Right Thing.

For those who do follow Christ, the thing to remember is that Wise Men still follow signs. Sometimes, those signs are as everyday, as normal as our gas gauge dipping down towards Empty.

Heroes..

A recent podcast I frequently listen to, EscapePod, had an interesting story that spoke to racism and bigotry.  While the story was set with science fiction in a future earth, and used cloning as the source of the bigotry, what was much more interesting were some of the comments the narrator made afterwards.  Something he pointed out in his pleasantly British accent, was that we are all Heroes of our own story.

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I had to take pause and think about that for a long moment as I was listening.  The example that he cited, was a mystery novel, where the detective worked so hard through three-quarters of the book before he started to get traction and home in on the suspect.  Where, in the last five pages, a police officer pulls the suspect over for a broken tail light and captures him in a page and a half.  In that page and a half, the police officer, a regular patrolman, was the hero of his own story because he caught the bad-guy!

In that light, we each, are the Hero of our Own Story, our own lives.  Each day we can choose to do great things, or live hum-drum, dreary existance.  But, either way, we are the ones who have the opportunity to craft our own novel, write our own story.  But, as we write our own stories, the stories of our lives each day, we have to focus on doing what would take us along the High Road.  For as we look back along the road we travel, the story we have written, we will find much more joy when we have something that makes us smile, and not feel shameful.

Abraham Joshua Heschel once said, "Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason."  Let us strive to avoid this sort of maximizing and minimizing in our lives, for there are so many more things we can put our focus and energy on.  This would not be the sort of story we'd want to see other read about ourselves.

Setting goals, and reaching them.

I've recently gone through Zig Ziglar's, How to Get What You Want.  Zig of course speaks to one of the primary keys to reaching your goals is to first to set your goals.  If you have no destination to journey towards, you'll arrive nowhere very quickly.

Once you have a goal, you focus on it and set measurements.  Make them goals you can reach and work a plan to get there, one step at a time.  You have to avoid putting it off.  Procrastination will take you places you don't want to go every time you engage in it.  It will give you results you do not want, every time you procrastinate.

Inside your goals, create smaller, measurable segments that you can use to see that you're making positive progress on your overall goal.  With this you can use that to fuel your drive to get further towards reaching your goal because there is progress.  Without the ability to see that you're getting traction, it's easy to get lost in emotions that won't help you reach your goals.

Striving towards your goal is a conscious process, something you must engage in every single day.  Even if today you say that it isn't your day to work on that goal.  Every day you must put a conscious effort towards that goal.  This keeps the goal in the forethought of your mind, so it's never lost, but is ever present, until you reach it and set your next goal.

The more times you set a goal before you and then reach it, the more often you will find that setting and achieving the next goal is easier than you thought it would be.

QBQ - Being Personally Accountable Again.

Very recently I listen to QBQ: The Question Behind the Question and found that it was a very appropriate follow up to the last book, Who Moved My Cheese? The two seemed to compliment one another very well.

QBQ is focused on getting us to change our way of thinking in primarily the work environment. Of course it's something we should probably use in many other parts of our lives. It draws us away from negative thinking, moves us from asking questions that lead to the Blame Game, and puts our focus back on how to correct the problem.

We tend to ask Inappropriate Questions in our job, the root of which is to push blame from ourselves onto another source. What we should be doing is asking questions like, 'How can I change this?' Or 'What can I do to achieve this goal?'

It is when we stop putting our energy on things like blame, and turn our energies towards moving forward, pressing on, and getting past the negative things that bog us down, that we'll free our personal resources from those debts to build other resource-wealth. If my time and emotions are tied up in being unhappy because the company won't train me, or my manager won't give me the tools I need, or what-not.. then those parts of my personal resources are indebted to those pursuits. If I get out of that I can start moving forward and using the tools I have to get things done, or putting together my own sort of plan for training. When we do these things, often we will find that more tools will come our way, that training will begin to materialize.

It's not easy being personally accountable. It takes practice and repetition. The concept is even a little old-school. But with time, it can become part of who we are. If you knock over a glass of milk at the dinner table, you don't just cry over it, do you? You may want to, but as adults we sometimes just hang our head a little and go get a towel and wipe it up. It's our mess, we made it, we should clean it up. And when our children do it, we dash into action, trying to keep it from spreading far and wide, leaking over the edge of the table. And while there we are, holding back the flow of errant milk, we say, 'Go get a towel!' Thus we show by our action, while helping them, that they too need to be personally accountable to clean up their own mess.

This isn't a new idea. We all ran for a towel when we were younger, didn't we? We just have to move that old habit back to a more prominent place in our way of thinking and our way of life.