Guidelines For Living Devotional

Reincarnation has been defined as "the transmigration of the soul," and, according to the teaching of some eastern religions, you may have had a previous existence in a lower form of life, and as the result of your personal goodness, you move up the ladder in each successive rebirth towards heaven.

It's an old story but it still proves a point.  A pastor midway through his sermon asked the question on a warm Sunday morning, "How many of you want to go to heaven when you die?"  Everyone raised his hand except one man, obviously asleep.  Focusing on the sleeping man, the pastor loudly asked, "How many of you want to go to hell when you die?"

Thomas Edison, the inventor of the incandescent globe, or the "light bulb" as we call it today, was never one to waste words.  Hard of hearing, he avoided a lot of social conversation; but when he said something, people listened.  That was especially true of the night Edison lay dying.  Struggling to say something, his wife and doctor leaned down to catch his dying words.  With a smile he clearly and distinctly said, "It is very beautiful over there!"

Whenever I travel overseas and I have not been to a particular place before, I always am curious about what to expect when I get there.  I want to know about the weather, the geography, the people, and my wardrobe--what kind of clothes I should bring, which is usually determined by what I'm going to be doing when I get there.

One of the greatest tragedies in life is to get very close to reaching your goal, arriving at your full potential, accomplishing what you set out to do, only to fall short of what you wanted to do.  It's always sad to have to quit a few hundred meters short of the top, or to get so very close to winning, only to have victory snatched from your grasp.

William Borden was born to a wealthy family, but when he was challenged by a friend at Princeton University, he gave away his millions.  Years later he wouldn't even allow himself the luxury of a car, when he rode through the teaming streets of Cairo, Egypt on a bicycle.  His desire was to reach people at their level, and he did just that.  His motto:  No reluctance, no regrets, no retreat.

Everyone admired his vast library.  He had nearly 10,000 volumes.  The man lived on a tiny pension.  Then an enterprising librarian tried to trace down a book that had not been returned.  In the house there were "books everywhere," she said.  She found the missing library book and also found an unbelievable number of other books which had been borrowed without permission from various public and private libraries and book stores.  The librarian got her book all right, and five trucks and three police vans carted the rest away to return to their rightful owners.  That is what you could call a rather extreme case of borrowing.  But borrowing has become a real problem the world over.

Whoever said that life is fair?  Certainly not God.  Airplanes crash and burn just as do marriages and future hopes and dreams.  Innocent children in Africa die from HIV as well as the doctor who has spent her life striving to save the lives of her patients.  Never, under any stretch of the imagination, would a sane person ask God for difficulty, for trials, for illness that he or she might learn the lessons of grace and patience which come from facing difficulty and winning the battle.

Victor Borge, the renowned pianist, once told a friend that he could tell time by his piano.  The friend wasn't convinced so Borge proceeded to prove his point.  He immediately began playing a resounding march.  In only moments there was a noisy banging on the wall and a voice on the other side screamed, "Stop that noise!  Don't you know it's 1:30 in the morning?"

"Happiness is a state of mind" believed Beatrice Eckelberry, who learned first-hand what sorrow and loss are all about.  The following is the advice she gave to a friend following the death of her four-year-old, written many years ago in the year 1933:

"Tonight is the anniversary of the birth of my first-born.  I've been lonely for a few days and thinking a great deal.  Memory takes me back to January, 1928, before the beginning of this world-wide thing called Depression.