THE BREAD BASKET

Few have ever endured the frustration, the pain, the setbacks and the heartaches that Paul the Apostle did. Yet he writes confidently: "We've been surrounded and battered by troubles, but we're not demoralized; we're not sure what to do, but we know that God knows what to do; we've been spiritually terrorized, but God hasn't left our side; we've been thrown down, but we haven't broken" (2 Corinthians 4:8-9/The Message). I'm challenged by the choice of Paul's positive attitudes in spite of life's crushing experiences.
Thomas A. Edison was known as a creative genius, and yet his positive attitude is what made him the success he was. History tells us that it took him ten thousand attempts at finding the right materials for the incandescent lightbulb. But with each failure, he gained valuable knowledge about what didn't work.
In 1914, when Edison was in his late sixties, the massive lab he had built in West Orange, New Jersey caught fire. (The lab was a fourteen building complex, with its main building larger in size than three football fields.) Was he overcome by the ponderous destruction? Not really. In fact, as he stood outside and watched the conflagration, he is reported to have said, "Children, go get your mother. She'll never see another fire like this one!"
As Edison chose to remain positive in spite of his painful setback, he said: "I'm now sixty-seven, but not too old to make a fresh start. I've been through a lot of things like this!" And so began the awesome task of rebuilding the lab. After it was completed, Edison kept right on working until the time of his death at the age of eighty-four. In her thought provoking poem, "The Set of the Sails," Edna Wheeler Wilcox addresses the power of choice when it comes to our attitudes. She writes:

The question becomes, Which way have you and I set OUR sails? Let's choose attitudes that are both positive and Christ honoring!