You Decide
This morning I received a forwarded email with the following anecdote:
A 92-year-old, petite, well-poised and proud man, who is fully dressed each morning by eight o’clock, with his hair fashionably combed and shaved perfectly, even though he is legally blind, moved to a nursing home today.
His wife of 70 years recently passed away, making the move necessary. After many hours of waiting patiently in the lobby of the nursing home, he smiled sweetly when told his room was ready.
As he maneuvered his walker to the elevator, I provided a visual description of his tiny room, including the eyelet curtains that had been hung on his window. ‘I love it,’ he stated with the enthusiasm of an eight-year-old having just been presented with a new puppy.
“Mr. Jones, you haven’t seen the room; just wait.”
‘That doesn’t have anything to do with it,’ he replied. “It is something you decide on ahead of time. Whether I like my room or not doesn’t depend on how the furniture is arranged but how I arrange my mind. I already decided to love it. It’s a decision I make every morning when I wake up. I have a choice; I can spend the day in bed recounting the difficulty I have with the parts of my body that no longer work, or get out of bed and be thankful for the ones that do.”
Mr. Jones is right. And it works with people just as with rooms and body aches. If we decide in the morning to be grateful for the people that God puts in our lives—no matter how much we approve of some things they do—we will find it much easier to live with them in peace and joy. We don’t have to let others determine the quality of our day or the tone of our disposition.
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