DAILY DEVOTIONAL    📖 

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Approximately 30 years ago now, a young sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University sent his class into the city's worst slums and told them to locate 200 boys. The students were to study the boys' environment, their homes, and their educational opportunities.  They were to estimate how many of the 200 would ultimately become criminals due to their poor environment.  The students pooled their data and predicted that 180 of the 200 boys would end up in trouble with the law.  The report was filed away at the university.

 

 Twenty-five years later the same professor assigned another class of his the task of locating those 200 boys and finding how they had turned out.  Only four of the 200 had a prison record!  The others were decent, substantial citizens. 

 

The sociology class set itself to the task of finding out why these boys had turned out so well when apparently everything was against them.  There was a common denominator: a teacher.  They found her in a nursing home and asked her what she had done to help make those boys into fine men.  "Why, all in the world I ever did was to love them," she said.

 

But she really had done more.  By loving them, she had helped them get a better image of themselves.  She had inspired them.  She made them understand who they were and what they could become.

 

God loves you.  He understands who you are and what you can become.  He doesn't want you thinking too highly of yourself and walking on others.  "Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment" (Rom 12:3).  On the other hand, he doesn't want you selling yourself short either.  He wants you to live by faith in his promises to bless, lift, and empower you.  "God has not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind" (2 Tim. 1:7).~ Glenn Hitchcock

 

THOUGHT OF THE DAY🤔  

  Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson