YOU CAN DO SOMETHING

"Only by giving are you able to receive more than you already have." - Jim Rohn

YCDS

The process of 'giving' - whether in cash or in kind - will only serve to open your world in ways you could not even begin to imagine, and you will feel a lot better than before you actually offered that help in the first place. Do you know that, nothing exalts the soul or gives it a sheer sense of buoyancy, and victory so much as being used to change the lives of other people?

An elderly widow, restricted in her activities, was eager to serve Christ. After praying about this, she realized that she could bring blessing to others by playing the piano. The next day she placed this small ad in the Oakland Tribune: "Pianist will play hymns by phone daily for those who are sick and despondent--the service is free." The notice included the number to dial. When people called, she would ask, "What hymn would you like to hear?" Within a few months her playing had brought cheer to several hundred

Things We Talk About When We Talk About Refinement

Wisdom Nugget: I have refined you, but not as silver is refined.Rather, I have refined you in the furnace of suffering.

It is a matter of great interest to visit plate-glass works, and inspect the casting-tables on which the heavy plate-glass used in the large store-windows is cast. Each table is about twenty feet long, fifteen feet wide, and from seven to eight inches thick. The rough plate is commonly nine-sixteenths of an inch thick, but after polishing it is reduced to six or seven sixteenths. All casting tables are mounted on wheels, which run on a track made to reach every furnace and strengthening-oven in the factory. The table having been delivered as near as possible to the melting furnace, a pot of molten glass is lifted by means of a crane, and its contents poured quickly out on the table. A heavy iron roller then passes from end to end, spreading the glass to  a uniform thickness. This rolling operation has to be done by expert hands quickly, as the boiling glass, when it comes in contact with the cold metal of the table, cools very rapidly. The glass is then passed into the oven. When it is ready to be taken out of the oven, its surface is very rough. In this condition it is used for skylights and other purposes where strength is desired rather than transparency. But when intended for windows it has to go through an experience of grinding, after which it is smoothed and polished. Transparent souls are made in much the same fashion. Men must be melted down in the heat of the furnace of trial; must have many a heavy roller run over them, leveling their pride and ambition; must be strengthened in the oven of patient submission.

We call it pain or problems but it is refinement. However, we aren't refined like silver in one day, instead, we are refined through many years of life, in the fiery furnace of affliction.

As Jim Rohn said "We must all suffer one of two things: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret or disappointment". Anthony Robbins concludes "The secret of success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you're in control of your life. If you don't, life controls you."