Very often there is little difference between a lot of people, but that little difference is a big difference; for that difference is not in their skills but in their attitude, whether it is faith-driven positive attitude or negative.

    I love this story of one army housewife.  She was a young bride from the East who during wartime, followed her husband to a US army camp on the edge of a desert in California.  The living conditions were primitive, at best.  Her husband had advised her against coming but she wanted to be with her husband.  The only housing they could find was a rundown shack right near an Indian village. 

     The heat was unbearable in the daytime, often reaching 115 degrees in the shade.  The wind blew constantly, spreading dust and sand everywhere.  The days were long, hot and boring.  Her only neighbors were the Indians and none of them spoke English.  When her husband was ordered farther into the desert for 2 weeks of training, loneliness and the harsh living conditions got the best of her.  She wrote to her mother that she was coming home.  She couldn’t take it anymore.

   In a short time, she received a reply which included these two lines: ‘two men looked through prison bars, one saw mud, the other saw stars.’  She read the lines over and over and began to feel ashamed of herself.  She didn’t really want to leave her husband.  All right, she decided, she would look for the stars. 

      In the following days she set out to make friends with the Indians, asking them to teach her weaving and pottery. At first, they were distant, but as soon as they sensed her genuine interest, they returned her friendship.  She became friendly with their culture and history, in fact, everything about them.  As she began to study the desert, it too changed from a desolate, forbidding place to a marvelous thing of beauty. 

   She had her mother send her books.  She studied the forms of cacti, the yuccas and the Joshua trees. She collected sea shells that had been left there when the sands had been an ocean floor.   Later, she became such an expert on the area that she wrote a book about it.

  So, what had changed?  Not the desert.  Not her neighbors. Not her location.  Simply by changing her attitude she transformed a miserable experience into a highly rewarding experience. 

   The importance of a good, healthy, biblical attitude cannot be overemphasized. 

 What kind of attitude are you going to have today, on this day that you have never lived before?    Choose a good one.   

 What kind of attitude are you going to have tomorrow?   

      Are you going to wait and see what the weather’s like or how you feel?                   Did you know you can choose tomorrow’s attitude today? 

     By faith, by looking to Jesus, we can have the same kind of attitude that Jesus had.     

    And we can have the same kind of attitude Paul learned to have as shown in Phil. 4 when he said, even while in prison:  rejoice in the Lord always, again I say, rejoice, because he had learned contentment in whatever situation he found himself in.