Posts Tagged ‘emotional’
Little Changes, Big Effects
Thursday, August 14th, 2008I was just talking to a friend of mine; he has been having an issue with getting to work on time.
I asked him, how long does it take for you to get to work? The answer, about 15 minutes unless there is a train.
I asked, and you have to be at work at 9:00am? So what time do you usually leave?
His answer: I have been leaving about 8:50.
So God has convicted him of being late for work, habitually. That’s wonderful! What is his solution? He decided to leave 20-30 minutes earlier and have his devotions at work instead of at home. That’s not a bad solution… it just seems like a bigger change than may be easily affected.
I have to wonder why not simply get up 10 minutes earlier so you can leave 10 minutes earlier and get to work on time.
Now my friend will probably read this, I hope that he doesn’t feel badly about this, he can do whatever he wants… it just made me start thinking is all.
We so often try to make BIG changes in our life, with an overall net effect that is very little, when more often than not, we could make tiny changes and the overall net effect would be huge!
This applies to all areas of life, work, play, relationships, church, school, wherever we find ourselves. At work, for example, I work in a call center, we have “tickets or trouble cases” from people calling in to get assistance with anything from something very simple to something very difficult. (Some problems can be resolved on the phone and some take hours of concerted effort to find a solution for.)
However if each person at my work would resolve to work just one more case once they are ready to leave for the day, it net result would be astounding. I work 3rd shift, so when I come in there are anywhere from 30-120 cases left that still haven’t been touched, usually by the time the second shift guys leave for the night, it’s down to 15 to 50. There are about 50 techs who work in the call-center throughout the day… if each one of them worked just one more ticket… then there wouldn’t be any left over.
That’s how it is in life, little changes make the biggest differences, If I start acting like a completely different person to people who have known me to be one way then the net effect is that they grow suspicious of why I have changed, however if I start smiling, and just that, then people start wondering what I know that they don’t.. They start wondering why I’m such a happy guy… in short I change more in their eyes from a simple change than if I try to change my whole being.
Spiritually it’s the same… We can’t accomplish much in our selves anyhow. If we try we usually end up way over correcting, spiritual life, and life in general, is a lot like driving an older rack and pinion steering car down the hi-way. If you get distracted and your tires go off to the right side, one of three things is going to happen. 1. You won’t notice till the tires are so far off the road that you can’t fix it and you end up in the ditch, 2. You yank the wheel hard to the left and end up in the oncoming traffic lane. Or 3, you give a little pull o the left, slightly, just a tiny correction and your wheels are back where they are supposed to be without so much as a swerve being felt inside the car.
When we drive we constantly make these tiny corrections that keep us on the course we have set. So in life it should be the same, spiritual life, or emotional, wherever you find yourself… make tiny corrections for bigger effects!
