Hello friends,
I always love to read what Dr. Robert Anthony writes because it is so down to earth and it always speaks to something most people experience... and it always help me and others to be BETTER. Hope you enjoy it too!
NO SLAP-DASH LIFE
- by Dr. Robert Anthony
http://ManifestingSecrets.com
Are you looking forward to the jobs that you have to do and the tasks that have to be accomplished by you? Or, are you going to get through them as well as you can, just to get them done?
I was thinking about this as I walked along the street one day. I saw a man on a ladder painting and this man flopped his brush backwards and forwards, slap-dash, slap-dash. It seemed as if every stroke was an endeavor. He wasn’t watching what he was doing, his eyes were somewhere else, he was simply slapping away with his brush and I thought, “oh my, what a terribly dull and boring existence.”
Then a few minutes later, I walked into an office where a lady sat banging away on an old addressing machine, the one you crank and bang up and down. She was singing quietly to the banging of the machine and the machine was acting rather like a metronome, beating time to her song. I realized that it wasn’t the metronome that was setting the pace of the work, it was the pace in her heart that was setting the pace of the machine and I immediately went back in my mind to a few seconds ago when I watched the slapdash painter and, I thought, gee, I wish that man could come in here and see this woman doing this, with just the same sort of ordinary, tedious task. She was getting some real joy out of it.
It seems to me that we only get out of a task what we put into it and if we’re going to do anything at all we ought to do it with zest, particularly if we are going to try to do something good or helpful. If we are going to do a good or helpful deed, we ought to do it with enthusiasm and zest.
If it is done merely as a duty, those people that we’re seeking to benefit must feel the blight of our hard-heartedness. I thought of that painter, probably working lovingly to feed a wife and children, but I’m sure that the slap-dash nature of his endeavors had to penetrate into their whole lives.
If any one of us is going to do anything to help anybody, we have to do it with ourselves, to put some zeal, and some zest, a little bit of ourselves into it.
There are many people, particularly in churches, who spend a lot of time and money on organized benevolence; on giving money or paying and thereby more or less absolving themselves from spontaneous acts of love and goodness.
Whatever you are going to do, do it zealously, thoroughly and lovingly even if you are polishing the silver. Polish your silver until it’s fit for kings. Do your daily work, willingly, gratefully and happily.
When you give a gift, give it with zeal, give it with love. When you pray, don’t just mumble prayers that have long lost their meaning. Pray with zeal. Your prayer should be vital and dynamic. It should be a piece of you.
We’ll never get out of this rut of futility until we get back to a faith in something beyond ourselves. It seems to me that the sense of helplessness that hangs around over this old world or ours today, is like a fog that comes from a sense of our feebleness, comes from a slap-dash approach to life and to the world.
Whether your life is going to be a slap-dash life or whether it’s going to tick and sing to the metronome of an inner joy, depends on you. Because you see, the slap-dash or the joy is within you and you determine which one will out-picture in your life and affairs.
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This is from the ebook - 50 Ideas That Can Change Your Life - by Dr. Robert Anthony. Get his fr..ee 6 day e-course, "The Million Dollar Secret That Can Change Your Life" at: http://ManifestingSecrets.com
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So are you ticking and singing with inner joy?