Ecclesiastes 12:10

   Richard Nixion had already had one nominee for the Supreme Court shot down by the Senate and it was looking like his second choice Harold Carswell was about to go down as well. Since he was attacked as a mediocre choice, Republicans were asked to help bolster the candidate. Nebraska Senator Roman Hruska tired with the following statement,” Even if [Carswell] were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they? ”. Needless to say, this didn’t help the case and Carswell didn’t get the job.   Everybody needs a little encouragement every now and then. Yet we need to make sure that our attempts don’t do the opposite.  Consider three ways to make sure your words build up and not tear down Are they Considered?   Don’t just say something. Make sure your words have meaning and that meaning is good. Are they Timely?   You can say the right thing and still be ineffective ...

Auty always got away with it. Till He didn’t.   At West Point he set the record of 726 demerits (that still stands today as one of worst in the over two-hundred-year history of the academy), yet never got expelled. He put little effort into his studies yet still managed to graduate even if it was at the bottom of the class. He was a notorious practical joker, but everyone still liked him no matter what pranks he pulled. As a cavalry officer, he would brazenly charge into battle with “a hoop and a holler” exposing himself to enemy fire and having one horse after another shot out from under him, yet would emerge alive. People spoke of his “luck” because he always seemed to win and never suffered career-ending injuries   Maybe it was his good looks and his golden hair, his charm, or his bravado, but whatever it was it kept him moving up the ladder till he reached the rank of Major General. Auty, at least his family called him, never knew serious defeat until the age of 38. M...

    In the world, if you are trying to broker a deal you always want to do so from a position of power. You want them to know you will walk away, they need you more than you need them, you are in control so it is in their best interest to do what you say. It is a good way to get all you want.  But it is a terrible way to approach God.   First of all, we will never be able to match the power of God. He will always be in more control than we are. Yet we try it nonetheless. We bargain. Offer to stop doing something we shouldn’t be doing or start doing something we should. We bully. If you really loved me, if you are really there God you will do what I ask. We deal. If you will just give this to me, I give you something of value.  But does God need what we have? No, all things are already his. Should our love and obedience be terms? No, they are things we already owe him. Trying to leverage this way is an exercise in futility   We must consider t...

 Alonzo Decker was making hand drills for the US military during the Second World War. He noticed that the company kept receiving repeated replacement orders for more drills.  He could have been happy with the extra sales but he was worried that something was wrong with the drill causing it to fail with regularity. Rather than simply replace the drills, he asked why.   What he found wasn’t the drill were bad, but rather they were too good. It seems many of the women that were working in the factories were taking the drills home with them on the weekends to do home repairs and not bringing them back. Now he had a new potential market that might last longer than the war effort. His company Black & Decker started producing domestic power drills in 1946, in four years they were producing their millionth. This tool helped to set off the DIY trend that made his company billions. Had he replaced the drill for the military and not asked why he never would have found a potenti...

  Tensions in East Germany on November 9 th, 1989 were at an all-time high. With the collapsing Soviet Union, the puppet government in East Germany was having trouble controlling the population that was desperate to leave the communist country. Nowhere was the pressure building more than in East Berlin a city literally divided by a wall.   The ruling party, in order to dampen the fervor, agreed to a temporary arrangement to allow emigration. The idea was to bury the issue in legal hoops and red tape. A dense document was to be read by the media spokesman Guenter Schabowski at a press release. For an hour he read the stiltedly-worded regulations out in full, the first time he had ever seen them. At the end, he has surprised when a reporter asked when the regulation would go into effect. He didn’t know so he responded “as far as I know… this is immediate, without delay”.   That is all it took. Soon people were flooding to the border crossing. Attempt to convince t...