Gene's Blog

Preparing for Tomorrow

This from Steve is a piece I can identify with and can endorse wholeheartedly. What else is tomorrow for?

GETTING READY FOR TOMORROW

You heard about the sign posted on a rancher’s fence? On the other side of the fence resides the biggest, meanest looking bull you can imagine. The sign is intended to strike fear into the hearts of
would-be trespassers. It reads: “Don’t attempt to cross this field unless you can do it in 9.9 seconds. The bull can do it in 10 flat!”

Don’t try to cross that field unless you are prepared! And isn’t that the way it is in life? We have to be ready when the opportunity arises or else we will have little chance of success.

Sixth-grade schoolteacher Ms. Shelton believed in readiness. Students remember how she walked in on the first day of class and began writing words of an eighth-grade caliber on the chalkboard. They quickly
protested that the words were not on their level and they couldn’t learn them.

Their teacher insisted that the students could and would learn these words. She said that she would never teach down to them. Ms. Shelton ended by saying that one of the students in that classroom could go on to greatness, maybe even be president some day, and she wanted to prepare them for that day.

Ms. Shelton spoke those words many years ago. Little did she know that someday one of her students – Jesse Jackson – would take them seriously (“Leadership, ” Summer 1992). She believed that if they were
well prepared, they could achieve high goals.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “People only see what they are prepared to see.” If that’s true, then it is also true that they only become what they are prepared to become. And a lot of life is just about
getting ready.

“I want to be doing something more significant with my life than what I am doing now,” a young man once said to me. He felt like what he was doing was just not that important. Other people have said things to me such as, “I only wish I had a meaningful relationship. ” And, “I’d really like to get a better job, but I just don’t see how.”

You fill in the blanks. What is it you would like to happen that isn’t happening? Perhaps the answer is that you are not yet ready. Maybe you need more time to prepare before you are truly ready for that which you desire.

Think of today as another chance to prepare yourself for that exciting future you are looking for. Today is not wasted. If you desire more from life, then you can use today as training. For you will experience only what you are prepared to experience. Something wonderful can happen. And you can use today to get ready for tomorrow.

— Steve Goodier

Today is a day that will never come again. If time is on a line, each second is a dot on that line, each one unique, each one precious and each one here for that moment and that moment alone, never to be seen again. When you think of your time and your preparation and your life, if you think of it in those terms, you will often find yourselves wondering if what you are doing in any given moment is what you really want to be doing. Need to be doing? No such thing. Want to be doing is the ONLY reason for doing anything. Do you want to? :^) gene

If today brings even one choice your way
choose to be a bringer of the light :^) gene