Unlock your chains…

October 23, 2023

From the best of Jack’s Winning Words comes this post to the Jack Freed’s blog back in 2020…

“So often times it happens, that we live our lives in chains, and we never even know we have the key.”  (The Eagles)  It’s said that the Eagles’ song, Already Gone, has some of the greatest lyrics of all time. It expresses a thought that I’ve found to be true: “Things always work out for the best in the end.” And there’s another truism: “Chains” sometimes keep us from having a better life. The lyrics say that we have the key to a happier life. We don’t have to live in chains. 😉  Jack

What are the “Chains” that keep us from a better life? They are the chains of ignorance, fear, hatred, prejudice and bigotry. While many of them may be handed to us by others – parents or friends – they are things that we wrap around ourselves and allow them to control our actions.

It may not be easy to unlock those chains. Some are deeply ingrained in us. Yet each is a chain that holds us back; that prevents us from really enjoying a happy life. None of them is positive or additive to our lives. They are all negative and serve only to bring us down.

Perhaps the “key” that the song alludes to, which will unlock those chains and set us free is love. Love opens the way to understanding, to acceptance and to forgiveness. But, before you can love others, you must love yourself.  I have posted here in the past about the need to love yourself before you can love others (see https://normsmilfordblog.com/2023/01/18/love-yourself-first/)

Loving yourself allows you to forgive yourself and that loosens many chains and allows them to fall away. You have the key to getting rid of your chains. Use it. Free yourself. Allow yourself to love and to be loved.

If you need a little help using the key, there is a locksmith named Jesus whom you can call upon, no matter how many chains weigh you down. Call upon Him for help and you will feel the weight of those chains slipping away.

Unlock your chains…

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Posted by Norm Werner

Just keep learning…      

October 16, 2023

 From a previous post to the Jack’s Winning  Words blog comes this advice –

“When I was young my teachers were the old. Now when I am old my teachers are the young.”  (Robert Frost) Maybe the point of Frost’s quote is that we can learn from people of any age…as long as we’re willing to keep learning. 😉  Jack  

Jack was a life-long learner and I try to be, too. Learning come from being interested in things and people – how things work and what makes people tick. Learning comes out of questions – How did that happen? What makes it run? Why did you say that? What do you think of this? Just keep learning.

The enemy of learning is not ignorance; rather, it is apathy. Not caring or being interested in what is going on around you and in the people that you encounter may well lead to ignorance, but it almost surely leads to isolation and loneliness. Apathy is also a slippery slope leading to depression in some. Just keep learning.

In journalism one is taught to look for the Who, What, When, Where and How of the story that one might be covering. The more of those answers that you can get the better your story will be. Those are good questions to keep in mind for our daily lives. The more that we can explore those questions and get answers the richer our lives will be, especially as we apply them to the people that we meet. Just keep learning.

Challenge yourself to be better able to later answer those questions about the people you encounter during the day. You will find yourself asking more questions and listening more intently to the answers that they give you. Just imagine that you will be challenged to write a story about that person later. What do you know about them? How are you going to find out something interesting about them to write about? Just keep learning.

Another fun way to look at life’s encounters with others is to challenge yourself to learn something new from them. Just remember that they have seen, and still see, life from a different perspective than yours. Rather than rush to judgement on someone who has a different ethnic,  political, or religious view on life; why not accept the challenge of understand what their view is and seeing if there is anything to be learned from that perspective. Just keep learning.

If you accept some of these challenges to yourself, you will keep on learning. Your life will not be boring because you will always be discovering something new about others and about yourself. Eventually you will put the bits and pieces of knowledge that you have collected over the years together and they will coalesce into what we call wisdom. For most it takes quite a long time to collect enough new bits of knowledge to allow for wisdom to develop. That is why most of the wide people that we know are older. Just keep learning.

So, start out today and every day with the challenge of learning new things and meeting new people. Just keep learning.

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Posted by Norm Werner

Revisit your plan…

October 13, 2023

Today’s graphic is a good reminder that we all need to revisit the plans that we have to achieve our goals. Stubborn persistence to a failing plan is just a waste of time and many times just gets you further away from achieving your goals by taking you down a rat-hole.

It is not second-guessing yourself to pause and take a hard and honest look at whether the plan that you have is working. What you may discover is that the plan was not detailed enough – you did not break down the tasks needed to achieve your goal into small enough steps, or perhaps you missed some steps that are critical to success. It’s time to adjust your plan when you come to that conclusion.

It may feel like you are going sideways as you recover and complete the steps that you had missed, but they may be required to really make any further progress. Sometimes you may conclude that the path that you were on is a dead-end, like going down the dead-end leg of a maze. The challenge then is to understand how far you may have to back-track before taking a different approach (path). It is frustrating to discover that you‘ve been wasting time pursuing a dead-end path; however, you must treat it as a learning experience and rededicate yourself to the goals and to finding a new path.

Sometimes, especially in life, you may find that your goals change over time. You realize with the wisdom of age that some of your “goals” were superficial. Perhaps you finally understand that pursuing ownership of things is much less rewarding and important than forgoing meaningful relationships.  Maybe you finally see that a bright and warm day brings you more happiness than more money in your paycheck.

If you are really introspective you will find that your relationship with God is far more important than anything here on earth. In the back of every person’s mind is the goal of something beyond death. There is only one plan that you can pursue to make that goal happen – belief in the salvation and everlasting life made possible through Jesus Christ. If that hasn’t been your plan, it’s time for you to change your plan.

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Posted by Norm Werner

Remember to forget…

October 11, 2023

From a post to the Blog, Jack’s Winning Words, originally made on January 17,  2020 –

“Not the power to remember, but the very opposite…the power to forget…is a necessary condition for our existence.”  (Sholem Asch) I’ve read that the average computer has from 4 to 32 gigabytes of memory compared to the brain’s 1 million gigabytes. Unbelievable! (but I read it on the internet). In order to function in society, we have to forget certain words or actions and move on. Even the best of us, at times, can be the worst of us. Did God say “Forgive and forget?” 😉  Jack

Jack’s words fit nicely with this graphic that I recently got in a daily email.

Forgetting is a way of letting go. Perhaps the advice is not aimed so much as forgetting altogether something that has happened, but rather forgetting our reaction to the event, especially if that reaction was driven by fear or anger or prejudice. Sometimes what you need to forget is blaming yourself for that event. Let go today…

Time spent reliving the past is not time spent in the present or in planning for the future; it is just time wasted. The only thing that past failures or hardships hold of any value is perhaps a lesson for the future on what not to do again. Let go today…

Beating yourself up for a poor decision yesterday just wastes time that you could be spending on making a better decision today. Let go today…

Wasting time trying to find someone else to blame means moving sideways or backwards, but not making progress forward. Let go today…

So, remember to forget. Feel those moments of disappointment, pain or sorrow and then move on. Find a place to put that memory and then close the door on it. Let go today…

It may help you, as it so often helps me, to say this little prayer – “Not my will but thy will be done.” Yo will be amazed at the power that this short prayer has to set you free. Let go today…

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Posted by Norm Werner