I WILL DO MORE THAN LIVE!

Ron Bainbridge

TODAY’S MESSAGE OF

FROM

Discovering a BETTER LIFE MINISTRIES

https://abl-alb.wixsite.com/discoverabetterlife

(Stories of Real People, Real Events, Real Places)

Are dedicated to HELPING

PEOPLE FIND PEACE and HOPE

(John 10:10)

(April 18th, 2020)

I WILL DO MORE THAN LIVE!

Friend, it would appear that some people just insist on being on the whining side rather than the winning side. For such people, every time they open their mouths, it’s a bleating session. And after listening to them, you’d think the Bible had said, “Blessed are the moaners.”

Well, thankfully most of us don’t really complain about people complaining. We all know life can be tough. But it’s the constant whining of some people that sets us on edge.

However, I must be careful here today not to confuse genuine and prolonged suffering with once-in-a-while pain, but I also must trust you who are reading this message, to know when you have met up with one or the other.

I think it would be true to say, that in every city of the world, in every age, you come across or read about people who have looked suffering right in the eye and refused to buckle under. Such people are indeed an inspiration to others!

I think of people like Yvonne and Yvette who are thirty-two years old and permanently joined at the head. They have two independent brains, but they share one bloodstream. Yet they get on with living.

Then, there’s Mark Hicks, who can turn his head only thirty degrees. That’s all the control he had over his body. But he became a brilliant painter, and the movie about his life, titled “Gravity Is My Enemy,” won an Oscar in 1981.

We can also be inspired by Terry Fox, a twenty-two-year-old Canadian who had suffered bone cancer, yet ran the three thousand kilometers between Saint John’s and Thunder Bay with one artificial leg to raise money for cancer research.

Then there was Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan.

And there was David Livingstone, the famous explorer of Africa, who at ten-years-of-age, studied from six in the morning to eight at night. By the time he was eighteen, he had so mastered Latin that he could read Horace and Virgil with ease.

The atheist Sigmund Freud lived in constant pain the last sixteen years of his life and endured thirty three operations. But he stuck to his work to the very end.

I have also read of a friend of the American Senate Chaplain Lloyd Ogilvie who had lost all vitality and enthusiasm and had become boringly negative. Lloyd Ogilvie confronted his friend about his despondency and assured him that he now had a choice between degenerating into the grave or living life to the full. Weeks later he received a letter of six words, which stated: “Dear Lloyd, I’ve decided to live!”

Friend what I’m sharing with you today enters into a tricky area. So before we crush anyone with a verbal backhander, we need to know the facts. If it’s a friend, we need to search the matter out. If plain talk is what is needed, we need to speak it.

However, sometimes we just have to make up our minds to live. In regard to this, I believe that William Ward sounded a call that stirs the blood, when he wrote the following words:

“I will do more than belong---I will participate.

I will do more than care---I will help.

I will do more than believe---I will practice.

I will do more than be fair---I will be kind.

I will do more than forgive----I will forget.

I will do more than dream---I will work.

I will do more than teach---I will inspire.

I will do more than earn---I will enrich.

I will do more than give---I will serve.

I will do more than live---I will grow

I will do more than be friendly---I will be a friend.”

What a marvelous philosophy that is to live by! And what a wonderful world this would be if each of us would make the effort to put into practice the sentiments expressed by William Ward.

Friend, there are times when we all need to be alone. But for most of us the times of greatest happiness and meaning are shared moments, moments when we feel someone’s heart beats with ours.

Nothing is much worse than the empty feeling of “not having a friend in the world,” and nothing much better than the joy of having a real friend.

Friend, if you would like to know more about having a real friend. Write and ask for our FREE booklet titled: “Need a Friend?” Our mailing address is:

Discovering A BETTER LIFE P.O. Box 1540, Albany, Western Australia 6331

Phone your request on: (08) 98 418 418 or Email us at: abl-alb@omninet.net.au