I came across a guest speaker sermon from my home church's website (www.erchog.org) by Sterling Gatling, who happens to be one of my father's coworkers when Dad was still at Dow and a family friend of ours. He always gives great messages, and I just wanted to share one anecdote from his most recent one (this is paraphrased because it was an audio recording):

A woman was going through some tough times in her life, and was sharing these experiences during a visit to her mother's home. Her mother listened to her as she expressed her frustrations, and then said, "Let's go into the kitchen. I want to show you something."

The woman complied, and watched as her mother crossed over to the stove with three pots. She boiled some water in each of the pots, and then turned to her daughter with some food items in her hand. "Now, look at each one of these items," she told her daughter.

The woman looked at her mother's hand. There was a carrot, an egg, and some coffee beans. Her mother then placed each food item into its own pot. Several minutes later, her mother instructed her to look at each of the items again and then told her to eat the carrots, peel the egg, and taste the coffee.

"What does this have to do with anything?" the woman asked after she had done what her mother told her to do.

Her mother smiled. "The boiling water is like the adversity in your life," she said. "Each of the food items represents a person. The carrot goes into the boiling water very solid but comes out soft and mushy inside and out. The egg goes into the boiling water with a liquidy inside and hard outer shell, but when it comes out and you peel the shell, you find that its insides have become hard. The coffee beans enter the boiling water and transform the water into a tasty liquid with a pleasant aroma.

"You see, you can choose to be like the carrot or the egg and allow the adversity you face to completely change who you are. Or you could choose to be like the coffee and completely change the adversity into something good."

I know I'm not quite doing the story justice by paraphrasing it - I may come back and edit this when I get the chance to review Sterling's audio file again. But it's a story that came at the right moment for me with the encouragement and reminders that I needed. I think this story suggests a great way to approach life's issues. As my father would say, life is all about your attitude.