The Hope QuotientSample

I heard a speech about keeping “five balls” juggled in the air—work, family, health, friends, and spirit. Think of work as a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four are made of glass. The glass balls are more fragile than rubber balls, and also more valuable.

Relationships are like the fragile glass balls. Nothing takes the place of relationships. Fame doesn’t. Wealth can’t. Success won’t.

Taking care of your spiritual life, your health, your relationships, and your spirit is not a selfish act. It’s a sustaining one.

To juggle well, everyone has to learn to say no. A friend put it this way, “Every time somebody asks me to add something to my schedule, I ask myself, ‘Do I want to rob that time from my family to do it?’”

Another friend just lost his elderly father. Right after his dad’s death, he started converting old family slides into electronic files. He watched with keen interest as, slide by slide, images of his family’s history went by. Pictures of parades and cars and landscapes and fun trips to the zoo flashed by. Then he’d stop to stare because there before him were the images of people—boys and girls and men and women he knew and loved and the dad his heart ached over. Giraffes are fun to see at the zoo, but fifty years later, it’s the father gazing at the animal that captures a son’s attention. Paying attention to the most important stuff now creates the unfading images later.

Carol and I watched each of our children leave for college. When our twins were the last to leave, I cried so hard I couldn’t see. Two days later, something dawned on me that I never saw coming. I realized I had no regrets. Then I realized one more thing. I will be forever grateful for the people in my life who were on my back to make sure I put first things first.

Think Up:

Put relationships first on your schedule, and those people will then be first in your heart. 

Are you putting first things first? You will have fewer regrets and much more gratitude. That’s hope where it matters. (Read on).