Doom and Gloom
The Great Depression was one of the most discouraging economic
times in world history. From 1929 throughout the 1930s, it was the
most widespread and devastating period of time for the entire world.
People were unemployed in the U.S. to the tune of 25 percent, and
some countries had 33 percent unemployment.
There were soup kitchens with long lines of people just happy to
have a little bread and a bowl of soup. People were very capable of
working, but unable to earn a living because jobs weren’t available. As
the world eventually started rebounding from the Great Depression,
it wasn’t long before World War II threatened. Tough times? You bet
they were. World War II was the deadliest military conflict in history.
It is estimated that the worldwide death toll from that war was around
seventy million—both from fighting and from war-related diseases.
So, we have always been affected by doom and gloom. Still, people
thrive, even in the face of disasters. Keep it all in perspective.
Some Things Never Change
In a very old book I picked up while on vacation in Ireland,
The
Recreations of a Country Parson
, published around 1863 in Scotland, a
pastor in a small Scottish community discusses his life and times. I am
very impressed by the simplicity of things and by the appreciation of
little things such as “. . . a sunshiny day, a mossy green carefully mown
lawn, lilacs, oak, horse-chestnut and hawthorn trees, a horse, a stable
and a pig.”
This religious man appreciates all of the little things while preparing
text for his Sunday sermons at his little parish church. He talks about
horse carriage rides of some distance to catch a train that will carry
think about our cell phones that allow us to speak across the globe in
a split-second from anywhere we may be. I think about our Internet
that allows us to conduct in mere seconds vast amounts of research that
would otherwise take us weeks to uncover. I realize that now we can
prepare foods in minutes that would have taken all day to prepare in
the 1860s. Still, the parson’s life holds an attraction we may never know,
a simplicity we have totally lost in our 300-mile-per-hour world that
appears to be going even faster every day.
In the book, the author explains some of the principles the people
held dear in 1860—principles we should still hold dear today, even
though their lives differed so much from ours. As I read, I thought
about life with no radio, television, cars, planes, ATMs, or Starbucks.
And once again, I ask: Do we really appreciate the life with which we’ve
been blessed?
A passage of the book reads:
"I have been writing down some thoughts, as I have said, for the sermon
of next Sunday. Tomorrow morning I shall begin to write it fully out. Some
individuals, I am aware, have maintained that listening to a sermon is
irksome work; but to a man whose tastes lie in that way, the writing of
sermons is most pleasant occupation. It does you good. Unless you are a
mere false pretender, you cannot try to impress any truth forcibly upon the
hearts of others without impressing it forcibly upon your own. All that you
will ever make other men feel will be only a subdued reflection of what you
yourself have felt. And sermon-writing is a task that is divided into many
stages. You begin afresh every week; you come to an end every week. If you
are writing a book, the end appears very far away. If you find that although
you do your best, you yet treat some part of your subject badly, you know
that the bad passage remains as a permanent blot: and you work on under
the cross-influence of that recollection. But if, with all your pains, this week’s
Do We Really Appreciate Each New Day?
21
sermon is poor, why, you hope to do better next week. You seek a fresh field:
you try again."
—Andrew Kennedy Hutchison Boyd(FROM THE NEW BOOK BY JOHN PAUL CARINCI: AN ALL-CONSUMING DESIRE TO SUCCEED
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