Someone wrote the other day about my Words for the Day entry where I recounted how getting old had me stiffly hobbling around with various and sundry aches and pains on a rainy day.
His poignant response to me: “Growing old is not for sissies”.
Every year at this time I’m all over goal setting for the upcoming year. Actually I start in October and don’t finish working on them until January 15th, at which time they will be reduced to writing and I will begin making them become reality.
The other day a mix-up on our schedule at Honey Lake caused a ruckus with a customer. According to the schedule, no events were planned for that venue for at least a couple of weeks, so our maintenance superintendent scheduled a major renovation to the Lakeside Pavilion. We are glassing it in so it can be heated and cooled and thus be used year around and not just when the weather is nice. When it’s finished, in addition to wedding receptions, spiritual and corporate retreats, family reunions and the like, we intend to use it for our Gospel Brunch, our “Honey Bunny child care nursery”, and the contemporary service for our new church.
We began work and right when the pavilion had all of the screened enclosure removed and looked like a tornado had struck, disaster did strike! We discovered that the gal in charge of the schedule had accidentally failed to post a dinner event to it, and when that customer found out her venue was being completely remodeled and looked like it had been hit with a cruise missile, she went ballistic herself.
Yikes, she and her husband lit me up like a Roman candle and turned me every which way but loose as they raked me over the coals for being so incompetent. I apologized and pledged to do my best and promised I would try my utmost to get it presentable in time for her dinner party, but admittedly it looked bleak with much to be done, and with the Christmas holiday break, few to do the work.
I am basically a positive optimistic person and believe that difficult situations are not so much problems as they are opportunities to prove to the negative that the positive rules! So after I licked my wounds for a few minutes and conducted a little pity party for myself I decided to give it a shot.
I went to my construction superintendent who was less than enthused and did not share my optimism to the point of his being negative. In fairness he has been overwhelmed with similar situations for the past three years of crafting construction miracle after miracle and hitting unachievable deadline after deadline at Honey Lake and was experiencing a good dose of well-deserved burnout. It was a large project and he didn’t have the foggiest idea of how he could round up enough skilled workers to achieve our goal. It was too much work and too little time, and hey, did he mention it was Christmas.
I told him that while it was true that we might not achieve our goal, I wanted to give it our best shot. I copied him and his assistant on the not so nice correspondence that I had with the customer and lo and behold the serious nature of it inspired his assistant to come in and work on Christmas Eve, (against my advice). He also rounded up several workers to come in yesterday, and that inspired the superintendent to perk up and by the time they left yesterday it now looks as though we will have it in good shape by the time of our valued customer’s event this weekend.
The positive rules!
Achieving goals is like growing old to me. It isn’t for sissies. I’ve founded 11 companies and virtually every single one of them was met with negative “can’t do” advice from well-meaning friends. Had I listened to it, I wouldn’t have achieved much of anything in life. Additionally none of them were easy to get going and they were beset with problems most every day, but we kept a positive attitude and fought through them all of the way to the winner’s circle.
The great Apostle Paul said that we should run a race as though we are to win it. If you have some daunting goals ahead of you, envision yourself achieving them, on time, with a huge smile on your face, and then get busy! Most people can do just about anything that they make up their minds to do.
And if you get overwhelmed and/or discouraged and don’t believe, re-read Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me”.
Last year I set a new Words for the Day subscription goal for 2012. I was getting really close to achieving it, and then several people unsubscribed when I talked about giving money to the ministry yesterday, and now I’m 8 people short of achieving my goal for the year. If you know anyone that would benefit from subscribing please encourage them to do so today at www.Wordsfortheday.org
I try to hit ALL of my goals ‘cause I ain’t no sissy!
1 Cor. 9:24
Don’t you realize that in a race everyone runs, but only one person gets the prize? So run to win!