Can I Really CHANGE?

Here is a paradox:

One of the most difficult things for people to do is to CHANGE; the one thing God WANTS to assist us to do is CHANGE.

So why don’t we change? It is a painful process. And we will go out of our way to avoid pain.

There was a hound on a porch that would howl every so often.

I asked his master “Why does your hound howl?”

The master replied “He is sittin’ on a nail.”

“Why doesn’t he move?” I asked.

“It doesn’t hurt that bad!”

Our lives, our relationships, many things in life are irritants. We often know how to CHANGE them. But they don’t hurt enough to make the necessary CHANGES to fix the problems.

In the Gospels, we have many examples of people with problems who saw that Jesus was the answer to their difficulty. They generally have to do with serious illness. So we often believe that our difficulties must be serious to merit God’s assistance. We can handle the small stuff.

But like the hound in the story above, it doesn’t hurt bad enough to get us to CHANGE. We don’t bother to handle the small stuff.

We have all heard “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” This statement and many like it shape our lives. We have them as core beliefs.

So what is necessary to begin to CHANGE is to begin to change these core beliefs. “We become what we think about.” so to CHANGE what we do, we have to CHANGE what we think about. If we continue to dwell on the errors of the past, it will continue to rule our future.

We can, however, shape our future. We have all planned vacations. Vacations are a change to our norm. We spend time to review the information available to us about our destination to ensure we get the most out of our trip. We determine what we want to see, the priorities we have for various activities that are available to us. Once we have departed and started to execute the plan, we continue to have a choice of what to do. Each decision will impact future events as we use the available time.

That is how we can CHANGE. Establish a new plan. Then take the simple steps necessary to achieve this CHANGE.