Doing what is good for You May Be Harder than You Think
Ed, my neighbor next door, thought that it wouldn’t take much to bring his painful shoulder back to normal. Getting his shoulder healed has been a lot harder than he imagined. Ed wanted a quick, easy recovery, which is what we all hope to experience with an injury.
When Ed’s shoulder remained continually sore after taking Tylenol, and rubbing it with Voltaren, Ice Gel and Rub.A535 he was forced to see his doctor. X-rays confirmed that Ed needed to take physical therapy to get it as good as new again. Two weeks of physical therapy were prescribed which left him saying that fate had dealt him a lousy hand.
I told Ed that he just needed to complete the therapy prescribed. I asked him if I could share with him from a book I was reading, and he was okay with it, as long as, it wasn’t the Bible. I referred to a book by Marshall Goldsmith, which offers six reasons why we tend to give up doing what we need to do. I used my own words because Ed has a ten second attention span. I told him that what we need to do, takes longer to do than we thought it would take. It is harder to do than we first thought. Other things distract us. We get frustrated because we cannot see the results we want. When we see we are making progress we decide that we have done enough. When we get the results we want, we don’t want to do anything to maintain them. “Isn’t that just the way it is?†I asked Ed.
“I didn’t hear all of it. I stopped listening after frustrated. I’m frustrated. I didn’t need a stupid book to tell me that,†Ed said. We stopped talking there and then. I hope Ed has finished his shoulder therapy.
It seems to me that many folks don’t follow through praying the Lord’s Prayer. Yes, they say it at church but tend to leave it there. It is so much easier to pray personal or homemade prayers, when praying at home because they are made up of our own words. The Lord’s Prayer is the words of Jesus.
Jesus’ prayer or the Lord’s Prayer is found both in the book of Matthew and in the book of Luke. In the Matthew account, Jesus warns against showing off in public with long prayers to get the attention of people. Jesus also directs there, that prayer should be done privately or in secret.
Most who pray know that is more difficult to pray than it might seem. There will always be distractions to keep us from praying, and praying is meant to be maintained each day. The Lord’s Prayer focuses on God, and His will and power to bless our lives. The Lord’s Prayer stresses our need to receive forgiveness for our sins from God and extend our own forgiveness to others who sin against us. God delivers us from temptation and evil. Begin your prayers at home: “Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation.†(Luke 11)
