Trust

Hello All,

Today I want to talk to you about trust.  For some of us, trusting people can be a very hard thing to do.  If we have been hurt by something or someone, trusting becomes that much more difficult.  Today's blog will not be about trusting someone else.  Today I want to write about something that has been very hard for me until just recently.  We all know how hard it is to learn to trust other people but for me it was even harder to trust a very important person - myself.

For many of you this may not be an issue and if you know me, you might be surprised that this was an issue for me but in certain areas of my life.  I had to learn to trust myself.  Have you ever heard the saying, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck?  Well for me, if it walked and quacked like a duck, I still might have thought it was a pelican.  Why?  Good question.  I don't really know the answer.  But I will tell you that not trusting myself was causing me some problems.  See when we don't trust ourselves, we are always unsure of what to do.

Don't get me wrong, even if you totally trust yourself, there will be times when you don't know what to do.  In those cases, the best thing to do is to get quite until you have peace about doing something.  If you are a Christian, peace is one of God's ways of letting you know what he wants you to do.

Now specifically for me, I had to learn to trust my own instincts when it came to dating.  Because I haven't been in the dating world in a long time, I went to some friends of mine and asked their thoughts on dating and how to do it.  I specifically asked about online dating.  A friend, CS, told me that I should try it after I got divorced because he had friends that done it and had success.  I was very skeptical to say the least.  So after talking to another friend of mine about online dating, I set up a week where I was supposed to have several dates with different women during the same week.  After all, that was the way to work this online dating thing.

I was also got some good advice about how to work things if you found someone you liked.  In order to not appear desperate, I was told to wait to contact a person until the next day and always wait a couple of days before you tried to schedule another date.  You really didn't want to appear desperate as that frightened girls away.  So I took all this good advice and was prepared to follow it.  Why?  Because the advice came from people with more experience than me and that made sense.  However, I learned an extremely important lesson during that week.  First of all, I didn't go on all four dates.  I didn't need to.

On the second one, I found someone I really special.  She truly is an amazing woman and I am very blessed to have her in my life.  On our first date, we went to lunch and talked for three hours.  I think we have talked to each other every day since.  Anyway, after lunch as we were walking out to our cars, I had a decision to make.  I could do what I was told or I could trust my instincts.  The advice I was given was good advice but I decided that I just needed to be myself and do my thing my way.  So I asked this person if I could see her on Sunday of that week and she said yes.  It was simple as that.

After that, I cancelled the other two dates because I wanted to get to know this person better.  When I did it, one of my friends made fun of me a little for doing it.  He is a great friend and he had my best interest at heart but I had learned to trust me by that point and knew I did the right thing.  See I realized that I was never going to be the guy who could date multiple women at the same time.  I just don't have the time or the energy to do it.  I also realized that I had found a truly unique person who was definitely worth getting to know more.  To use a football analogy that a friend of mine told me, I had out kicked my coverage.

The interesting thing is that after my friends met this particular woman, I think they are more interested in inviting her to things than they are inviting me!  I could go on for a long time about her and maybe I will in a different blog.

I don't know if any of this would have happened if I hadn't learned to trust my own instincts.  I just did what I had peace to do and the rest took care of itself.

So what am I saying.  Trust yourself.  You will be glad you did.

That's the Opinion of the Minion

Make a Difference

I read somewhere recently that sometime around 40 years old, something happens on the inside of many of men.  They begin to evaluate their life and there is a deep desire to make a difference in the lives of the people around them.  As many of you know, I am 40 years old and I know this is the case in my life.

There comes a time in many lives where we sit back and wonder what mark we have made on earth.  For some that might mean being the best mom they could.  For others it might mean being the best friend they could.  For me?  Well, I don't know the complete answer yet.  Part of what that means to me is being the best dad I can.  As many of you know I have three really great children and they are certainly a blessing.  But yet, I know that with blessing comes responsibility.  It's my responsibility to make sure they have a house to live in, food on the table, and clothes on their back.  It's also my responsibility to make sure they go to school and get a good education.  Now by the grace of God, I have done this so far.  That should make me a good dad and I could sit back and feel like I've made my mark.  But as a dad, I recently got a true revelation of my real responsibility to train them up in the ways of the Lord and to be/do all the intangible things.  Because of that, I have recently read several books on how to be a true Godly man in front of my children.  If I can impart this to them, I will certainly have made a mark on the world because they can carry this forward.

But while being a great dad is very important, it will not be enough to satisfy me.  I want to do something that will say I was here many years after I depart for Heaven.  So what else should I do?  I want to be a great companion.  There is a song by a group called the Crabb Family called Ellsworth.  This particular song is about an elderly woman who has started to mentally slip to the point where she doesn't know a lot about her day to day activities any more.  But if you bring up her husband, she clearly remembers how much she loved him and how much he loved her.  It's similar to a movie called "The Notebook."  Yes, I've seen the movie.  I want to make that type of mark on a woman's life.  I want to be so good to her that 50 years from now, if I'm gone before her she still remembers how much I loved her.  I want to make a difference in her life.  I think I may be at the beginning of that opportunity now and I am really enjoying it.  There is something very special about a good woman.  Did you know Solomon said he looked through 1000 people and found a real man but he had never found a real woman.  Well I guess I am more blessed than Solomon.

Where else can I make a difference?  I can make a difference in the lives of the people who work for me.  On of the greatest privileges in my life is to have the opportunity to be part of God blessing other people with good jobs.  This is certainly a place where I can make my mark in the world.  I can grow my company to the place where I can continue to put people to work and help them feed their families.  Will this make me a lot of money in the process?  Yes.  Is money my motivation for growing a business?  In part I suppose it is but the though of making a difference in some one's life is a bigger motivation.  I recently added a full time employee to our company and I can tell you it was a good feeling knowing that I gave someone else an opportunity to succeed.

I guess I am certainly pleased with the difference I have made so far in the people around me.  And guess what.  Many of them have made a big difference in my life.  In the last several weeks I have become very content and my heart has filled to overflowing because of one person in particular.

But I still want to be able to touch more people's lives in a positive way.  As I am sure most of you know, that's the reason for this blog.  Thank you for reading them and I hope they do make a positive difference in your lives.  Let me stop for a second and say that setting out to make a difference in other people's lives may seem like a strange thing to do.  After all, aren't we supposed to make sure that we are happy?  Well the answer to that question is partially yes but let me tell you what happens when you set out to make a difference in someone else.  You will get happy in the process.  Giving unselfishly to others will produce more happiness in your life than you could have ever imagined.

So let me challenge you with this.  If you are younger than me or older the time to start making a difference is now.  Start with those closest to you and then expand your horizons.  Before you know it, you might be touching people literally around the world.  You can even do it from a small place like Fort Worth, Texas.

That's another Opinion of the Minion