WHAT YOU SEE

"It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui." - Helen Keller

"No arms, no limbs, no worries", that's Nic Vujicic's slogan. He's motivational speaker with no arms, and no limbs. I heard him say sometime ago (paraphrased), that "the words we speak sometimes are either going to pull someone off the edge of the cliff of rejection or plunge them down, headlong."

In a certain city there lived a very cantankerous, and troublesome old man. He was difficult to please and never saw anything good in not even the most comely of people in the community. He was always in the habit of fighting with his fellow villagers. He would analyze the fault in the king's every decision. He knew everyone's problem and everyone's flaw. He was never wrong. It is said that, his wife left him after about 2months into their marriage. He frustrated her. She once confided in a friend how that, her husband always found fault in everything she did. He was either complaining about how disrespectful the tone of her voice was, or how embarrassing her silence is. She couldn't do anything right; so she left.

In the same town, there lived a young man, Marvin was his name. Marvin, could see brightness even in the darkest of situations, he always had something good to say about every situation. If things were always going wrong, there was always a good lesson to learn from it. He was the exact opposite of Paloma, the old man. One morning, people woke up to the sound of cries from Paloma's compound. He'd passed on. His burial was arranged and it just before he would be laid to the ground, the king requested that everyone make a comment about him. Everyone stood in the queue and said their mind. You can guess that no one had anything good to say about Paloma. After a long while, it was Marvin's turn, and you could hear whispers and muffled voices, everyone wondering what good he would find to say about Paloma. Walking up to Paloma's corpse Marvin looked intently at it for a moment, lift up his head, smiled and said, "even in death, his teeth are so white".

Paloma and Marvin are two types of people in the world today. Some hardly can find anything good in people. They have a problem with their sight. To them the glass is always half empty. The other group are like Marvin, there's always some good in every bad. They rather see the glass half full.

Everyone of us in life has a weakness, flaw or soft spot. We all have areas where we're not very proud of. We should chose to without words make people feel better than we met them; rather than leaving them a million times worse than we met them. Arnold Schwarzenegger, we're told was paid 15million dollars, and he only spoke a total of 700 words in the entire movie. Every word we speak should be priceless and precious. Use them judiciously.