In the Palm of Your Hand

“We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.”

Charles R. Swindoll(American Writer and Clergyman, b.1934)

If you only took the time to understand how much you can accomplish with a moment. A single choice, when added to and built upon another choice and another, effects such change in your life that it can only be outmatched by the changes that single choice first started in you, yourself. We are more than what we eat. We are also what we do and think and say and believe.

If your mind is full of walls and barriers and obstacles, your words will tend to highlight the things that make it difficult for you to succeed. Your actions mirror the things that you think and talk about. For all intents and purposes, you ARE the terrible things you think you are and are trapped by walls impossible to climb, break, or otherwise escape… but it doesn’t have to be this way.

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931)

The Underground Railroad, was a network of people who helped many slaves find their way to freedom. It was dangerous, frightening, and also illegal. Sometimes, in order for us to overcome hardship in our lives, there is a certain amount of struggle. The brave individuals which were able to escape and begin new lives believed that it was worth the risk, worth fighting for with their lives.

I have been reading about struggles of women and other vulnerable groups in other countries who have fought for the right to freely and safely walk the streets, speak in public, drive, hold a job, raise their children the way they deem best, and many other things those of us in the West take for granted. These things have been denied to them for a long time. The act of public protest and dissent is often like stepping in front of an oncoming train. There is a lot of suffering and pain, even to the point of death. These courageous individuals also believe that some things are worth a fight.

“I will prepare and some day my chance will come.” Abraham Lincoln (16th US President (1861-65), who brought about the emancipation of the slaves. 1809-1865)

Is there something standing before you like a wall, dark and forbidding, which you think you can never overcome? It may seem impossible, it may seem frightening, it may seem foolish to even hope. However, MUCH has been overcome in the past, MUCH is being overcome in the present, and MUCH will be overcome in the future. Do you realize that there is no difference between those who overcome and those who stay shackled in life (sometimes literally)? The only thing which changes the outcome is choice. You can make a choice. You can make a couple of choices. You can make many, many choices. After you do this, changes begin to happen, in your life and in yourself. You are only a few choices away from a different life if you so desire.

“Life is a gift, and it offers us the privilege, opportunity, and responsibility to give something back by becoming more” Anthony Robbins

You have a gift which you may not realize you have. You have, in the palm of your hand, the gift of free will. This is not the gift of someone else’s free will, but yours. This gift is more precious than most things you can name, and with it is a responsibility to choose what is right. Choosing between right and wrong is elementary, though many seem to choose wrong in spite of this.

The gift of choice also means we must choose what is right for us. If your dream is to do something that your friends and family have never done, something that shows your talents, then it is not only desirable but your responsibility to choose to do the thing which makes you happy. None of us are supposed to live our lives as drudges, stumbling around miserable and inept in someone else’s idea of “the perfect life”. I, for one, am not good at things I don’t enjoy, and even some of the things I DO enjoy are hard work for me. But I press through the difficulties (not always with a good attitude, I’ll admit), because of the glimpses I have seen of what awaits me on the other side.

“I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead.

Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 3 : 10-14