Chicken Soup for the Soul 20th Anniversary Edition (43 page)

~Mark Victor Hansen

Faith is the bird that sings when the dawn is still dark.

~Rabindranath Tagore

T
here’s a 19th-century English novel set in a small Welsh town in which every year for the past 500 years the people all gather in church on Christmas Eve and pray. Shortly before midnight, they light candle lanterns and, singing carols and hymns, they walk down a country path several miles to an old abandoned stone shack. There they set up a crèche scene, complete with manger. And in simple piety, they kneel and pray. Their hymns warm the chilly December air. Everyone in town capable of walking is there.

There is a myth in that town, a belief that if all citizens are present on Christmas Eve, and if all are praying with perfect faith, then and only then, at the stroke of midnight, the Second Coming will be at hand. And for 500 years they’ve come to that stone ruin and prayed. Yet the Second Coming has eluded them.

One of the main characters in this novel is asked, “Do you believe that He will come again on Christmas Eve in our town?”

“No,” he answers, shaking his head sadly, “no, I don’t.” “Then why do you go each year?” he asked.

“Ah,” he says smiling, “what if I were the only one who wasn’t there when it happened?”

Well, that’s very little faith he has, isn’t it? But it is some faith.

As it says in the New Testament, we need only have faith as small as a grain of mustard seed to get into the Kingdom of Heaven. And sometimes, when we work with disturbed children, at-risk youth, troubled teens, alcoholic or abusive or depressed and suicidal partners, friends or clients... it is at those moments that we need that small bit of faith that kept that man coming back to the stone ruin on Christmas Eve. Just one more time. Just this next time, perhaps I’ll make the breakthrough then.

We sometimes are called upon to work with people for whom others have abandoned all hope. Perhaps we have even come to the conclusion that there’s no possibility of change or growth. It’s at that time that, if we can find the tiniest scrap of hope, we may turn the corner, achieve a measurable gain, save someone worth saving. Please go back, my friend, just this one more time.

~Hanoch McCarty

Individual commitment to a group effort — that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.

~Vince Lombardi

T
here are many people who could be Olympic champions, All-Americans who have never tried. I’d estimate five million people could have beaten me in the pole vault the years I won it, at
least
five million. Men who were stronger, bigger and faster than I was could have done it, but they never picked up a pole, never made the feeble effort to pick their legs off the ground to try to get over the bar.

Greatness is all around us. It’s easy to be great because great people will help you. What is fantastic about all the conventions I go to is that the greatest in the business will come and share their ideas, their methods and their techniques with everyone else. I have seen the greatest salesmen open up and show young salesmen exactly how they did it. They don’t hold back. I have also found it true in the world of sports.

I’ll never forget the time I was trying to break Dutch Warmerdam’s record. I was about a foot below his record, so I called him on the phone. I said, “Dutch, can you help me? I seem to have leveled off. I can’t get any higher.”

He said, “Sure, Bob, come on up to visit me and I’ll give you all I got.” I spent three days with the master, the greatest pole vaulter in the world. For three days, Dutch gave me everything that he’d seen. There were things that I was doing wrong and he corrected them. To make a long story short, I went up eight inches. That great guy gave me the best that he had. I’ve found that sports champions and heroes willingly do this just to help you become great, too.

John Wooden, the great UCLA basketball coach, has a philosophy that every day he is supposed to help someone who can never reciprocate. That’s his obligation.

When in college working on his masters thesis on scouting and defensive football, George Allen wrote up a 30-page survey and sent it out to the great coaches in the country. Eighty-five percent answered it completely.

Great people will share, which is what made George Allen one of the greatest football coaches in the world. Great people will tell you their secrets. Look for them, call them on the phone or buy their books. Go where they are, get around them, talk to them. It is easy to be great when you get around great people.

~Bob Richards, Olympic Athlete

This life is a test.

It is only a test.

Had it been

an actual life

You would have received

Further instructions on

Where to go and what to do!

~
Found on a bulletin board

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

~Friedrich von Schiller

I
swore I would never play golf. The game is the direct opposite of everything I’m wired to do. I’m blessed with many things, but one of them isn’t patience. Patience I have to work at. What I love is speed — fast boats, fast cars, fast results. During the three decades I’ve been helping transform the quality of people’s lives, my message has always been the same: You can change in a heartbeat. How? You can change your focus. If you change the stories you tell yourself, you can change the meaning of what happens to you.

The story I always told myself about golf was that it was slow and boring. But my boys started to play golf, and I wanted to do things with them, so I took up golf. Even though I hated it. But then I thought: “Why spend the time if you’re not going to enjoy the game?”

I focused on what I liked about the sport. Golf courses are built in some of the most beautiful places in the world, so I could enjoy the view. Then a buddy pointed out that I could play by my own rules. If I didn’t want to play all eighteen holes, I could play six. I could play only the best, most scenic holes. Pretty soon I was thinking, “Hey, this sport is great!”

When you learn to change your focus, it helps you feel gratitude for what you already have — and that is truly the key to happiness.

What I am most grateful for in my life is my beautiful wife, Sage. She has given me more joy than everything else combined. And the only people I love as much as my wife and my children are my father-in-law and mother-in-law. I had four fathers, all of them dead, and my mother has passed, too. So Sage’s parents are my mother and father.

So once I learned to love golf, I wanted to share it with my Pops. He’s a very strong man, a good, honorable man who spent his life in the lumber business and never had time for something like golf. But I got him playing and before long he was hooked.

One day he said to me, “Tony, let’s go play golf!” Then he named a golf course that was a two-hour drive away, and not a particularly great course. I had to catch a flight to London first thing the next morning, but I could see how much he wanted to go, and I loved him so much I didn’t want to let him down. So off we went.