Tuesday, January 17, 2012

A Golden Opportunity

Today I want to talk to you about Golden Opportnities.  They are not necessarily opportunities to get gold but they could be.  Do you realize how many opportunities you have in front of you everyday?  Many of them probably go unnoticed.  See, sometimes we aren't really looking for the opportunities that God puts in our lives and we miss them.  Many times those opportunites involve doing something for someone else.  But understand this, if God put them in your life He will bless you even though you gave to someone else.  I am sure that I have missed more than I ever want to know about.

Well over the last few days, I realized that I had an opportunity that I took advantage of.  I didn't even know that the opportunity was one until later.  Fortunately, I was able to act on this one.  Now I don't think it was a real big deal to the people involved but most of life isn't about the big deals.  Whether or not you are successful in life is more often than not about how you handle the small deals.  Well on this particular occasion, I got to teach a few people how to fish.

OK, Uncle W, Uncle J, Dad, and everyone else who knows me, you can go ahead and laugh at me now because we all know that I am not a great fisherman.  To be honest, fishing even bores me most of the time.  See I like catching fish, I just don't really like waiting for them to bite.  Now fortunately for me, fishing is in my blood in both my mom's and my dad's family.  I am not very good but I can bait a hook, get the line out in the water and take a fish off of the line when someone catches one.  However, I really don't know much about it other than that.  I don't even know what we caught the other day.  It could have been small mouth bass but I don't have a clue.  The good news is that it bent the poles and everyone had a good time.

So why is this an opportunity from God you ask?  Well, because these three people are very important to me.  I got to impart something good into their lives and I think they really enjoyed it.  Sometimes life can be like a bank, especially with kids.  We have to make withdrawls from the account of their lives in the form of correction when they don't do their homework or when they need to clean their rooms, etc.  These types of withdraws are very important and they certainly are part of helping a child grow into a mature, productive, socially responsible adult.  I am all for them.  But if you don't make deposits into their lives in the form of love, teaching them fun things, spending time with them and just being part of their world, then you will end up overdrawn at the bank.  This is a very bad place to be.  Fortunately for me, I don't have to make any withdrawls from the people I taught to fish but this concept is still very important.  I did get to deposit a fun experience in their lives and I got to learn a little more about each of them in the process.  Here is something else that amazed me.

I had a lot of fun teaching them the very minimal amount that I know about fishing.  It might have been more fun for me than for them.  I did get to teach them about looking behind you before you cast.  It cut's down on the number of times you put a treble hook in your brother's head.  No, I didn't put one in my brother's.  He put one in mine.  But that's a different story.  See when we seize God given opportunities even though they look like giving to someone else God will bless you richly in the process.

Now here is another take away lesson.  I didn't know this was an opportunity at the time.  I was just having a good time hanging out with other people.  Thank you again K for all your hospitality this weekend.  What I did wasn't even anything I thought about.  I was just enjoying myself.  Many times life is like this.  God is putting opportunites into our lives and we don't even realize that these little gifts from Him are there.

God has a million ways to bless you and he sits around everyday thinking up new ones.  If you will look for the opportunities he presents to you each day, he can even make taking out the trash an adventure.  The thing is you have to do the little things to get the big reward.  Like I said, what I did wasn't monumental in anyone's life.  So look around and see where God has given you opportunites to make deposits into other's lives.  You will find that God is making deposits in your life when you do.

That's another Opinion of the Minion

No comments:

Post a Comment