“Live one day at a time,” Charles W. Shedd recommends. “You can plan for tomorrow and hope for the future, but don’t live in it. Live this day well and tomorrow’s strength will come tomorrow.”
So, today, try to do the following:
Handle the hardest job. Easy ones are pleasures. Do not be afraid of criticism. Be glad and rejoice in the other fellow’s success. Be enthusiastic – it is contagious. Be fair and do no at least one decent act.
Have confidence in yourself; believe you can do it. Harmonize your work. Let sunshine radiate and penetrate your relationships.
Mend a quarrel. Search out a forgotten friend. Dismiss suspicion and replace it with trust. Write a love letter. Share some treasure. Give a soft answer. Encourage youth. Manifest your loyalty in a word or deed.
Keep a promise. Find the time. Forego a grudge. Forgive an enemy. Listen. Apologize if you were wrong. Try to understand. Flout envy. Examine your demands on others. Speak love.
Think first of someone else. Appreciate, be kind, and be gentle. Laugh a little more. Take up arms against malice. Decry complacency. Gladden the heart of a child. Take pleasure in the beauty and wonder of the earth.
Welcome change as a friend; try to visualize new possibilities and the blessings it is bound to bring you. Never stop learning and never stop growing. Cheer someone.
Fight temptation. Pray for yourself and for someone. Go to church. Plant a tree. Don’t ride, walk. Run for your own sake. Jog to shed extra weight. Sing to your heart’s content.
Clean your drawer or table. Quit smoking. Wear a new shoes or shirt. Have fun. Compliment your teacher or professor. Listen.
Phillips Brooks wrote: “You who are letting miserable misunderstandings run on from year to year, meaning to clear them up someday; you who are keeping wretched quarrels alive because you cannot quite make up your mind that now is the day to sacrifice your pride and kill them;
“You who are passing men sullenly upon the street, not speaking to them out of some silly spite, and yet knowing that it would fill you with shame and remorse if you heard that one of those men were dead tomorrow morning; you who are letting your neighbor starve, till you hear that he is dying of starvation; or letting your friend’s heart ache for a word of appreciation or sympathy, which you mean to give him someday;
“If you could only know and see and feel, all of a sudden, that ‘the time is short,’ how it would break the spell. How you would go instantly and do the thing which you might never have another chance to do!”
Allow me to share the story related by Leslie D. Weatherhead: During the First World War, a soldier in the trenches saw his friend out in no-man’s land – the ground between our trenches and those of the enemy – stumble and fall in a hail of bullets.
He said to his officer, “May I go, sir, and bring him in?”
But the officer refused. “No one can live out there,” he said. “I should only lose you as well.”
Disobeying the order, the man went to try and save his friend, for they had been like Biblical characters — David and Jonathan – throughout the whole war. Somehow he got his friend on his shoulder and staggered back to the trenches, but he himself laid mortally wounded and his friend dead.
The officer was angry. “I told you not to go,” he said. “Now I have lost both of you. It was not worth it.”
With his dying breath the man said, “But it was worth it, sir.”
“Worth it!” said the officer. “How could it be? Your friend is dead and you are mortally wounded.”
The man shrank from the reproach, but looking up into his officer’s face he said, “It was worth it, sir, because when I got to him he said, ‘Jim, I knew you’d come.’”
Charles Spurgeon declared: “Friendship is one of the sweetest joys of life. Many might have failed beneath the bitterness of their trial had they not found a friend.”
Today, be a friend!
For comments and feedback, write me at henrytacio@gmail.com
So, today, try to do the following:
Handle the hardest job. Easy ones are pleasures. Do not be afraid of criticism. Be glad and rejoice in the other fellow’s success. Be enthusiastic – it is contagious. Be fair and do no at least one decent act.
Have confidence in yourself; believe you can do it. Harmonize your work. Let sunshine radiate and penetrate your relationships.
Mend a quarrel. Search out a forgotten friend. Dismiss suspicion and replace it with trust. Write a love letter. Share some treasure. Give a soft answer. Encourage youth. Manifest your loyalty in a word or deed.
Keep a promise. Find the time. Forego a grudge. Forgive an enemy. Listen. Apologize if you were wrong. Try to understand. Flout envy. Examine your demands on others. Speak love.
Think first of someone else. Appreciate, be kind, and be gentle. Laugh a little more. Take up arms against malice. Decry complacency. Gladden the heart of a child. Take pleasure in the beauty and wonder of the earth.
Welcome change as a friend; try to visualize new possibilities and the blessings it is bound to bring you. Never stop learning and never stop growing. Cheer someone.
Fight temptation. Pray for yourself and for someone. Go to church. Plant a tree. Don’t ride, walk. Run for your own sake. Jog to shed extra weight. Sing to your heart’s content.
Clean your drawer or table. Quit smoking. Wear a new shoes or shirt. Have fun. Compliment your teacher or professor. Listen.
Phillips Brooks wrote: “You who are letting miserable misunderstandings run on from year to year, meaning to clear them up someday; you who are keeping wretched quarrels alive because you cannot quite make up your mind that now is the day to sacrifice your pride and kill them;
“You who are passing men sullenly upon the street, not speaking to them out of some silly spite, and yet knowing that it would fill you with shame and remorse if you heard that one of those men were dead tomorrow morning; you who are letting your neighbor starve, till you hear that he is dying of starvation; or letting your friend’s heart ache for a word of appreciation or sympathy, which you mean to give him someday;
“If you could only know and see and feel, all of a sudden, that ‘the time is short,’ how it would break the spell. How you would go instantly and do the thing which you might never have another chance to do!”
Allow me to share the story related by Leslie D. Weatherhead: During the First World War, a soldier in the trenches saw his friend out in no-man’s land – the ground between our trenches and those of the enemy – stumble and fall in a hail of bullets.
He said to his officer, “May I go, sir, and bring him in?”
But the officer refused. “No one can live out there,” he said. “I should only lose you as well.”
Disobeying the order, the man went to try and save his friend, for they had been like Biblical characters — David and Jonathan – throughout the whole war. Somehow he got his friend on his shoulder and staggered back to the trenches, but he himself laid mortally wounded and his friend dead.
The officer was angry. “I told you not to go,” he said. “Now I have lost both of you. It was not worth it.”
With his dying breath the man said, “But it was worth it, sir.”
“Worth it!” said the officer. “How could it be? Your friend is dead and you are mortally wounded.”
The man shrank from the reproach, but looking up into his officer’s face he said, “It was worth it, sir, because when I got to him he said, ‘Jim, I knew you’d come.’”
Charles Spurgeon declared: “Friendship is one of the sweetest joys of life. Many might have failed beneath the bitterness of their trial had they not found a friend.”
Today, be a friend!
For comments and feedback, write me at henrytacio@gmail.com
