Words to Live By

I have been going through boxes of material I had gathered over the years - intending some day to file it away appropriately. As I have sorted through the notes & quotes I was reminded of how I got such a collection. They were things my Dad had shared with me. Some of them were poems, some of them were short little quotes, others were just personal notes of encouragement.

Now that my Dad is gone those words, notes, & quotes are all the more special to me.

As I journeyed down memory lane the thought occurred to me. . . I need to share this with my children. So I decided to start a personal project. I would gather up those notes & quotes and put them into a book form that I could pass on to my 2 children. I am calling it: "Words to Live By".

Here is a sample entry. Hope this encourages you:

"Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as ever . . .
. . . you can!"
- John Wesley

I thought about this quote on Sunday night as my wife & I watched Oprah's new show, "The Big Give" (ABC). If you have not heard about it, here is a little description: "Oprah's Big Give" the exciting and much-anticipated new primetime series that defies television convention with the bold idea of people competing to give rather than get. In eight one-hour episodes, a diverse, determined and competitive group of ten people are given the challenge of a lifetime — to change the lives of complete strangers in the most creative and dramatic ways. In this intense competition, the contestants criss-cross the country, scrambling to find ways to impact the fates and fortunes of unsuspecting people who are in for the surprise of their lives. Lives will be changed in the blink of an eye as contestants race against time to create once-in-a-lifetime experiences and also give away hundreds of thousands of dollars."

At first, I thought . . . COOL! Rather than selfish people competing to get something, people are actually starting to be selfless and start to give something.

But as I have thought about it over the last 2 days, my mind keeps coming to this question. . . do we really need a reality TV show to do that? What would happen if the Church got serious and stopped trying to compete with the culture & started to actually change people's lives by being the Big Give?

There could be less homeless on the streets, there could be less starvation in our world, families who have lost their jobs could be cared for instead of being referred to the government, the AIDS epidemic could be appropriately addressed. What could happen if the church invested itself into people's lives rather than tried to re-invent itself?

I love what my favorite author, Charles Swindoll, says; "You can change the world. But you change it one person at a time."