Finish What You Start

OK, today I want to talk to you about something I don't see a lot.  Let's talk about finishing what you start. This may not be a real popular blog but I think many times God gives us great ideas and we start on a project.  Then something happens and we can't find the time, energy, etc. to finish the project.  I would love to point a finger at someone else and say that everyone but me is guilty of this but unfortunately if you point one finger at someone there are usually three pointed back at you.

So let's start with a couple of things that I can think of from my own life.

1.  When I was in college at TCU, I was in ROTC.  I thought it was cool to hang out with all these great guys and gals who were in excellent shape and play with guns.  It was like being a kid all over again.  The problem was I couldn't control my weight.  If I had finished the program correctly, I would have been a second lieutenant in the US Army when I graduated.  Pretty cool stuff right.  I think so.  Many of my friends from ROTC did just that and many are still in the Army doing very well.  Who knows what I could have been.  Maybe I could have been the next General Patton.  OK, for all my ROTC buddies, we all know that was probably not going to happen but it could have.  I basically quit the Army ROTC program because I could not control my weight.  Now we will never know what I could have been in the Army because I didn't finish what I started.

2.  I cannot tell you how many times I started to lose weight only to gain it all back plus some within a short time after I started.  Why?  Because I didn't finish changing the way I ate and I went back to where I was or worse.  I could have been much happier but I didn't finish what I started.

3.  I can't tell you how many books I didn't finish reading.  A couple of times I quit reading them because I didn't like the book but many times I simply quit reading them.  I would definitely have been smarter if I had and I need all the smarts I can get.

4.  How many of us have made New Year's resolutions with the best intention of changing something about the way we live only to let things go right back to "normal" within a very short time.  I know I am guilty of this more than once.

5.  Now let me give you a situation that I face right now.  I believe the Lord instructed me to write a book about how He helped me to lose a lot of weight.  This happened several years ago and I did nothing with it for a long time.  Finally in September of last year I started writing the book.  I have a rough draft of the book that I think I finished around November 15th.  Today I e-mailed it to a very special person for her to read.  That was when I noticed the date of the last time I worked on it.  I have let that book lay around for almost two months without ever working on getting an editor, a publisher or anything else.  If I don't do something about this, the book could lay there for ever without me doing anything with it.  That wouldn't be a very good thing.  Why?  Well let me say, I am not sure the book is any good because I wrote it a lot like I write this blog.  But I will tell you this.  The Lord gave me an assignment to write the book and if He gave it to me, He has a reason for it.  What if there is someone who will actually read my book and God uses it to deliver that person from their weight issue?  Let me ask the question a different way.  What if I never do finish the book and someone who God wanted to read it never gets a chance.  What if that person dies because of their weight issue and I could have made a difference in their life?  Let's take it one step farther.  What if that person was not a Christian when they died?  Am I being a little over dramatic?  Maybe but we will never know.  The point is that God gave me an assignment to write a book.  He didn't give me an assignment to start a book.  See God always sees the end of a thing from the beginning.  He is always figuring out how to finish what he starts.  If it's good enough for Him it's more that good enough for me.

Let me begin to wrap this up by telling you about something I used to do at my church.  We used to have a Christian business man's meeting in our church on a regular basis.  Now this organization, the Provision Network, is much more than that but for simplicity sake I will stop there.  At these meetings, I would have any number of people come up to me with great ideas.  They would tell me the Lord told them to do this or that and the vast majority of the ideas sounded like good ones maybe even God ones.  However, these same people would come up to me the next meeting with a completely different idea.  I always wondered why God changed His mind about the first one.  Just so you know, God never changes His mind.  If He told you to do something, He means for you to do it.

I think what happened to them and certainly what happened to me in the examples I gave above is that I came up against a very dirty four letter word - Work.  Remember, the only place that success comes before work is in the dictionary.  I know I should have done a better of job of finishing what I started all those many times and I did not.  I will definitely get back to work on that book.

Let me leave you with this.  Even if you are someone who has never finished anything you thought you should do, one of the coolest things about God is he always has a plan for your life.  So even if you fail at something, don't worry about it, he has another plan.  But in order for us to be successful, we have to actually complete the plan He gives us and it will probably require work but the reward will be well worth it.

That's the Opinion of the Minion

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