Recently the Jack’s Winning Words blog featured this quote from Sam Worthington – “It’s just a journey I’m on, discovering what my connection to and relationship with God is.”
For those who may not know who Sam Worthington is (and I admit that I was among that group before I looked this up), here is a snippet from WikipediA about him.
Samuel Henry John “Sam” Worthington[1] (born 2 August 1976) is an Australian actor. He played the main character role of Alex Mason in the Call of Duty: Black Ops series. He portrayed the protagonist Jake Sully in the 2009 film Avatar; Marcus Wright in Terminator Salvation; and Perseus in Clash of the Titans and its sequel, Wrath of the Titans; before transitioning to more dramatic roles, in Everest (2015) and Hacksaw Ridge (2016).
To read the whole WikipediA entry on Sam click here.
It always causes somewhat of a stir when someone famous, especially one of our modern media stars, even mentions their faith, hints that they may believe in God, or goes do far as to say that they may be a Christian. Yet, the journey that Sam admits to being on is one on which many of us are fellow travelers. Some search all their lives without realizing that the God that they were seeking was standing right there with them the whole time. Some get confused and become disillusioned by the rules and requirements that many organized religious groups have created for their own purposes. Some of them are never able to look past the trappings of the church to find God in their lives. Fortunately, most who start the journey eventually find the peace and understanding of having God in their lives; although for too many it is not until the final moments of their lives.
For those who need the help there is a GPS for this journey. It is called the Bible and it provides a great road map for those seeking a relationship with God. For those who prefer,
or really need, a guide for the journey, God provided that centuries ago when He sent His Son Jesus to live among men. In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” So we all have our GPS and our guide to help use get to God. All that might be lacking is the will to make the journey.
I think taking a little time to think about what the alternatives are may help some decide that the destination is worth the journey. Deciding not to take the journey or trying to take an alternative path in life always leads to the same thing – a dead end. Literally, all other paths end in death and then nothing else. Only the path that leads you to Jesus and on to God has no dead end; in fact, only it has no end at all, because only that path promises eternal life.
It’s comforting to know also that you may begin that journey at any time in your life, or perhaps continue the journey you were on before you got sidetracked by life. Many may start out in life being taken to church and Sunday School, without really understanding 
why r what it was all about. If they stick with it long enough their intellect catches up with what the Sunday School teachers were try to tell them and they begin to understand and may even begin to believe. Somewhere around high school age that same intellect is joined by a growing ego and the first tastes of freedom and many wander off from their faith, convinced at the time that they know better than to believe what they are being told. For some that loss of faith is just an extension of the rebellion against all things that can set in at that age. Eventually self-control and intellect again gain the upper hand and the adult mind begins to look for the meaning of life and wondering about what comes next. Faith provides the only reasonable answer to those questions. All other answers still lead to dead-ends. And so, the journey is taken up again.
Where are you on your journey to understanding your connections to and r
elationship with God? Are you still unsure and wandering about looking for signs from God; or, have you settled into a comfortable relationship that brings you peace and assurance that everything will be alright? Remember that, wherever you are on the journey, you can find directions in your Bible and you can turn to your guide, Jesus Christ, and ask for help. You will not be turned down and you will not get lost on the journey if you just do those things. If your journey hits a few bumps along the way, don’t get discouraged; just keep in mind what the final destination is – your place in heaven that Jesus has prepared for you – and keep on keeping on. The destination is worth the journey. Maybe I’ll see you along the way.
Posted by Norm Werner 
hard look at it yourself. Are you where you want to be in life? Are you surrounded by those that you really want to be with in life? Are you doing the things that you really want to do in life? Take a good hard look at your life-selfie and ask yourself those questions and more. As Socrates said – “The unexamined life is not worth living.” A life-selfie may give you a way to examine your own life.
The answer to all of those selfie reflections is no; we don’t have to just continue down the current path. We have been given a free will and the ability to change our direction at any time. The momentum of life may try to carry us along the old path, but we can break free and chose a different path. The key to making that decision probably starts with that life selfie and a critical evaluation of what we see in that picture of our life. That review doesn’t mean that you have to beat yourself up for past life decisions; but it does mean that you need to be brutally honest with yourself about where you are in life and where you really want to be.
your life. Some things might be easy to fix immediately; perhaps stopping a bad habit or stopping your association with bad people who may lead you astray. Other things, like making a job change to find something that will both provide the necessary income and make you happier, could take a while and require careful planning. At least you will know that you have made that choice, based on your life selfie and you may start feeling better about the future right away.
Local life coach and author, Norma Nicholson, has published a book called Living a Balanced Life which might give you some perspective, in addition to your life selfie, on the things that you might need to consider doing to change the direction of your life and get it back in balance. You can find out more about Norma at 
yourself. If you see things that need to be changed in your life, make a plan and start those changes. You don’t have to continue down a path that you don’t really like. Making changes, bused upon this evaluation of your life-selfie is not selfish; however, it is self-serving and that’s a good thing. The next time that you take a life-selfie, after you make those changes, I think you’ll find a different person smiling back at you.
might have shifted down to a lower gear when you were going up a hill and pumped a little bit harder and faster; but for the most part you settled into a comfortable gear for the flat portions and just pedaled along. Life can be like that. We all hit tougher (uphill) stretches during which we must shift gears and pedal harder and faster; but for the most part we just settle into a comfortable gear and pedal along through life.
decision to volunteer at a local charity means switching gears. Making the decision to work with special needs children or adults requires a switch in your gears. Deciding to volunteer at your church or maybe at your child’s school will require choosing a new gear. Even the decision to just try to be a better partner in your life-relationship or a better parent to your children means choosing a new gear and pedaling harder. Doing those things means raising your life to a new, higher level and requires a new, uphill gear and that you pedal faster and harder.
mething out of the ordinary to help someone else? Can you put more effort into your relationships with your family members? Can you show the world your faith in actions, rather than just talking about it? Can you do better? Can’t we all?
article upon the tendency in business to recommend (even demand) that women act more like the men in the business, in order to be successful and to be taken seriously. She makes a good case that diversity of thoughts and opinions, in this case letting women be women in business, makes more sense and leads to better decision making.
people like themselves. Many social clubs and churches are good examples of that tendency in practice. The same stagnation and self-serving, if wrongheaded, decision making that Krawcheck says can occur in businesses because of a lack of diversity also sets in at those more or less homogeneous clubs and churches over time. Due to the changing demographics in the general population, these insular organizations eventually wither and die, due to the inability to attract enough people “just like us” to sustain the organization. More successful organizations embrace diversity and thrive because of the wider pool of potential members that comes along with diversity.
can be perceived as threats to our own view of things. We see the admission that someone else’s’ opinion about something being accepted as “right” must mean that our opinion is “wrong”. A more correct way to look at things is that both opinions or points of view have merit and should both be taken into account when making decisions. In business, to do any less is potentially to immediately discount an entire segment of the population and possibly to lose them as customers. In life, to do so is to ignore some solutions or answers and to limit the possible solutions to a problem. You may even discover that having the insight of another person’s point of view (especially someone not like you) will lead you to the conclusion that something that you saw as a threat or problem was not a problem at all, but rather an opportunity for you to grow as a person.
building a good team (at work) or support group (in life) can be thought of like building a good basketball team. In her words – “it’s hard to build a national championship team if your players are all point guards.” The same is true of the teams that you might be on at work. You need different skills and different points of view in order to make good decisions. I life you need a diverse set of friends around you as a support group for your life decisions and crises.
So, the take-away for work and life is to encourage and embrace diversity and to understand how to leverage that diversity in order to make better decisions. After you stop being amazed that anyone would see things that way that a person “different” from you might see them; you then need to make the effort to understand why and to let that understanding help you take that wider view of the decisions that you need to make. You’ll make better decisions at work and in life.
I didn’t realize it at the time, because I hadn’t gone back and liked for a common thread, but there was a theme that ran through all of articles and posts that I had read and referenced in those posts. The theme is the request from all of the people who may be living in any of those groups that they just be accepted.
be like us or would somehow be better off if they were more like us. That belief is based upon the rather egotistical viewpoint that we represent “normal” and be definition those who are not like us mus be sick or somehow are abnormal. So, we jump in to try to “help”; but that help carries demands for change and conformity to what we see and define as the norms of our group, for which we have usurped the title “society”. Behavior that is not like ours is defined as somehow being anti-social and wrong. We feel that we must do something about that. While all the while, the person that we are trying to “help” is saying:
appeals to religion or the Bible, sometimes it is just ignorance manifesting itself in fears of catching whatever it is that they find offensive. Many times parental concerns about the influence of these different people on children are sited as the justification for the bad behavior that we call prejudice. Yet that different person is not going to steal the minds of our children or infect the world with their difference; rather they are just standing there and asking you to accept them as they are.
someone different from you today and maybe you will find that it will allow you to 
Failures are a part of life and a key to learning and the building of knowledge and eventually the accumulation of wisdom. Some people experience fewer failures than others, sometimes because they are too afraid of failure to even try. Others may work extra hard at planning to avoid failures, thus limiting themselves to the number of things that they try. Still others go through life blissfully failing at almost everything they try, yet learning nothing from those experiences. Failures happen – move quickly beyond it
that you can never be friends or that you will never get that date. Learn from that failure and move quickly beyond it.
failures is dealing with dead ends and learning to move quickly beyond it.
however, a man or women that others might describe as a beautiful human being will remain a beautiful person in the eyes of the beholder, as long as they never stop being a good person.
coaches or scout leaders or others who had impact in their formative years. For many, their church life – their Sunday School teachers and pastors – help them become good people.
difficult it would be to be a good person, if your life is ruled by prejudices and hate. How easy is it in the rush for material success to just ignore others; rather than being polite and caring and kind? In the back of our minds most of us know what is right, but the demands of our world often overwhelm us and the temptations are often too great for us to take the time to look back there, in the back of our minds, and see what is right.
today may hold, being there to experience it is certainly better than the alternative.
things than to be sitting back and waiting for things to happen to you. It’s also better advice than just being ready to react when something happens to you or in your life. I’ve written a few times about handling problems or crises in our lives, but that is still a reactive thing and not a pro-active thing as is suggested by today’s quote from da Vinci. Are you happening to things?
When you are comfortable with those issues and plans and know where you are going you can swing into action. Are you happening to things?
react to them; but truly successful people seldom let themselves get bogged down in over analyzing the situation at hand. Rather than expending much energy on planning for failure, successful people put their efforts into making success happen. Are you happening to things?
personal nature; and those relationships start by something happening – a chance meeting or a planned introduction. In either case, successful people always take the initiative; they don’t sit back and wait for it to happen; they thrust out their hands first and introduce themselves; they happen to the other parties in the meeting. Are you happening to things?
some those benign looking masks hide the ugly truths of hate or bigotry behind them; for some the masks are displays happiness or loud self-confidence that really hides the fears and insecurities of the wearers. What mask do you have on?
up, so those are the masks that they wear. Some times that pleasant demeanor hides the pain of an abusive relationship or a loveless marriage. What mask do you have on?
applying their makeup. My wife every now and then will say to our dog Skippy, “Help mommy put on a face”, to which (if I have overheard that) I will chime in with, “Choose a happy one.” You could certainly assure that you would have a happy face on if you choose each morning to put on the mask of Christ for the world to see – a caring, compassionate, loving, giving and helping face. What mask do you have on?
have no idea what our own faces look like when they are at rest – when you aren’t trying to smile or show any emotions at all. Our faces have a natural tendency to droop into a frown or to assume and unfriendly continence. The mask that comes over our faces is not inviting to others and we aren’t even aware of it. Perhaps if we did put on the mask of Christ in the morning, we would have enough to smile about all day long not to let our faces droop into that unfriendly mien. So, before you go out every morning this week, ask yourself – What mask do you have on?
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