The Tool of Recognizing There’s a Tool
In living out our lives, I think we need to recognize that whatever we come up against, “there’s a tool for that.” Sometimes we don’t think there is any tool; that there’s no resource to deal with or engage whatever’s facing us. We assume that our only recourse is to grab whatever tool that’s lying around us and get to work. Sadly, we’re sometimes not astute enough to effectively discern the challenges around us and then carefully find the tool to deal with it. Rather, we often assume that no such tool exists; that the real challenge of it all is to take what we have and have at it. We think that it’s really all about being creative and innovative; of pulling together our assorted array of mismatched tools and figuring out how to apply them to something that none of them are really designed for.
The Tool of Creativity
Sometimes life is like that. Indeed, sometimes life demands the fullest exercise of our creativity. At times circumstances will leave us with monumental challenges and only a handful of the most primitive tools to deal with them. We will all stand in places and have events transpire that are immeasurably bigger than the handful of sordid and banged up tools we’ve got to deal with them. In these instances the tool that we use is our creativity. One of the greatest tools that we have is the ability to take our personal resources and use them in a manner that makes the sum total of them much greater than what any of them could achieve or be individually. Our creativity allows us to see not what our resources are, but what they could be if used creatively and in unique combination with each other. Creativity is the ability to expand on those tools which by themselves are limited by their own designs. Creativity means that nothing needs to be only what it is, but that things can be much more if they are used in a manner that’s not quite as obvious as the obvious.
The Tool of Determination
Harriett Beecher Stowe wrote, “When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.” Determination is not stubbornness. Rather it is the belief that something is going to happen if we push it and press it far enough. Determination is a tool that causes us to drive our situation beyond what appears to be a conclusion or a failure or a dead-end. The tool of determination is exercised understanding that stubbornness is simply bullheadedness for the sake of being bullheaded. Determination is much more strategic than that. The tool of determination recognizes that persistence is the not exercise of futility, but an understanding that additional pressure rightly exerted can move what seems to be immovable.
The Tool of Faith
Patrick Overton wrote that when pushed to the brink, “faith is knowing one of two things will happen: there will be something solid to stand on or you will be taught to fly.” Faith is believing in something that you can’t see and standing in the belief that something exists despite your inability to perceive it. With the whole concept of faith, we can rest in the fact that our challenges are not bound by whatever limits them or whatever limits us. We can engage our challenges with an eye set firmly on what we’re facing while concurrently realizing that what we see is not all that there is. Faith recognizes that there’s more than what we perceive and that we have the ability to engage whatever that is. Faith then is a tool that dramatically expands the scope of what we can do and enlarges the possibilities.
The Tool of Wisdom
Wisdom is often defined as the application of knowledge. Many people have knowledge, but they’re not knowledgeable in the application of it. We can be book-smart and street-smart and just plain smart.
(continued on pg 26)
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